garden in the void

Official nature post

learning about plants in ur area is wild. like you also learn about the histories of the plants. Like oh! Thats garlic mustard! That was brought over from europe as a crop! it smells just like garlic and you can cook with it!  And thats yarrow!  Its been used for tons of stuff and pollinators love it! Oh hey! Thats hemlock! They killed Socrates with that! 

Botany is basically making millions of outdoor friends.

Walked past this guy on the side of a busy street in New York City and everyone’s casually brushing past it while I’m like 😳

Foxgloves! Gloves for foxes!

Also used to murder various people in Agatha Christie books.

Hydnellum Peckii (also known as Strawberries and Cream, Devil’s Tooth, Bleeding Tooth Fungus), photographed by Kevin Moldenhauer

Because this is apparently stick up for wolves day.

Wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone has changed the ecosystem *significantly*.

One remarkable thing that was not predicted that demonstrates how interlinked these things are:

Wolf eat elk.

Elk eat fewer willows.

Willows become healthier.

Number of beavers increase.

Number of songbirds increase.

Overall health of streams increases.

Number of fish increases.

Water table stabilizes.

This is called a “trophic cascade” and we normally see them as bad things. But a positive trophic cascade is an amazing thing, and apparently nobody predicted this one.

What they didn’t predict was that wolf predation would keep elk on the move so they wouldn’t overgraze a specific area.

When the elk overgrazed the willows, they removed the best source of food for beavers during the winter.

Once that stopped happening, the beaver population rebounded and it turns out beavers are pretty good for the entire ecosystem.

A quiet summer afternoon.

The sun is shining through the foliage, touching the grass, making angel’s hair look like a halo.

Being by your side is the only heaven I ever dreamed of ❤️‍🩹

New summertime artwork for Good Omens Artbook 😇

You can already find it on Kofi! ✨

Hemimycena tortuosa (dewdrop bonnet mushroom) 💧

"There's no such thing as a fish because you can't define it phylogenetically without also including things that aren't fish"

Man I have bad news for you about lizards. And reptiles in general. And wasps, but I guess that depends on your opinion on wasps. And I don't think you're ready for trees.

I'm defineiely not prepared for trees but if you want an excuse to make tumblr suffer i will be the sacrifice

Trees aren't a phylum or an order or anything like that, being a tree is just a thing some plants do

It's been described as a biological strategy - you want light, an efficient way to do that is put all the bits of you that want light (that is, leaves) high up so they're not in the shadow of other things, spread out both to cover a wide area and so they're not in their own shade, because that would be a waste of leaf

So the same shape of doing this has evolved independently dozens of times - crabs have nothing on trees. But this also leads to disagreement as to what a tree even is

For example, is a palm a tree? They don't have branches, but they do have a canopy - what about how a lot of conifers don't have a canopy? Just a cone of green that comes down to the ground! If that's a tree, what's the difference between a tree and a bush?

But we can agree they're centred around a single woody trunk right, so there's a starting point - except no, in comes the quaking aspen, which is one huge organism below the surface that shoots up trunks wherever the hell it feels like it, each of which is by any casual observer's reckoning obviously a tree.

The last thing we want to do is answer any of these questions, because that's how we end up with the whole berry situation, where a tomato is a berry but a strawberry is a "fleshy receptacle"

The most common definition i've seen is something like "large perennial plant with a woody stem, which expands outward over time by growing a new layer of vascular tissue every year."

This is a pretty good strict definition of a tree, though it excludes tree ferns and palm trees. The problem is woody vines. Grape vines and poison ivy are trees now. It also includes a lot of plants usually considered bushes or shrubs. No one agrees on the difference between a tree and a shrub. It's a mess.

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Sunlit dew in Finland (Photo: Tiina Törmänen) [OS] [1280x1280] - earthmoonsun

Me and the bad bitch I pulled by failing to properly defend myself against parasitic organisms.

Polkowice, Poland ( via )

Mossy cathedral

neon spring

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