Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???

So I thought to myself

Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan

And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat

And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China

And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.

The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:

KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.

In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!

THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH

and in turn

HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS

*AND*

in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu

"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."

Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.

WHAT

YALL

This means

That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans

The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.

Wait, you can spin kudzu? Why aren't we harvesting and marketing this as the newest eco friendly fiber for hand spinners in the US? The market may be small, but I guarantee you with the "spin" that you can use your hobby to fight invasive plants and save the earth that people would pay money to have it sent to them.

Someone send me a sample of kudzu bark and I'll do some research on how they got the spinnable fiber out of it.

Of *course* someone has figured it out already:

http://fiberhousecollective.com/invasive-fiber-study-group/2021/12/5/meeting-1-weaving-with-kudzu-amp-bast-fiber-processing

If you live in areas with kudzu, go get some and spin it!

Hell yeah

…Well whaddaya know. !!!

Driving through Norway’s Fjords

Credit to Slartibartfast, who worked so hard on these fjords.

☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼 there’s a frood who knows where their towel is at.

Well someone displeased the sky gods didn’t they

My first thought was someone pleased the sky gods, because this is a SHOW. 

That’s the problem with gods; their pleasure and their wrath often look the same.

why is this fire quote from a tumblr post

"She will take it back some day." -Pink Floyd

Beautiful purple peonies.

🌿🌳🌿 secret garden 🌿🌳🌿

Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together.  Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.  You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits. Frankentrees.

As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.

On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.

But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:

[source]

I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be

I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.

I need to be more like tree

I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.

what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?

Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).

As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “ including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”

It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.

Shit’s tight yo.

Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.

Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.

HOLY SHIT

THE LAST ONE

Solarpunk as fuck!!

Reblogging for “I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.”

Prehnite with Amethyst - Goboboseb Mountains, Erongo Region, Namibia

Just a gentle message to everyone, please stay on the official trails only! Visitors stepping off trails have killed many plants already, resulting in dirt side paths. Please do not walk on these side paths; further compaction of the soil creates scars that will take many years to recover. (source)

My parents live in this town and the city legally can’t tear the tree down to build or anything because the tree has its own legal rights and they can’t do anything about it.

how does. how does this happen. how DID this happen

I love this story because this guy in the early 1800’s had so many great childhood memories of this tree and wanted to make sure it was protected no matter what. So he deeded the ownership of the tree to itself and everyone just went with it.

Then in 1942 this intense windstorm came and knocked the tree over. And people were bummed. But someone had saved an acorn from the original tree, so they planted that and now Son of the Tree That Owns Itself is over 50 feet tall.

And since this new tree is technically the offspring of the original tree it’s considered to have legally inherited the plot of land it’s inhabiting.

Two generations of trees owning land is amazing and if you don’t think this is the coolest thing get right out of my face.

the waitomo limestone caves on new zealand’s northern island are home to an endemic species of bioluminescent fungus gnat (arachnocampa luminosa, or glow worm fly) who in their larval stage produce silk threads from which to hang and, using a blue light emitted from a modified excretory organ in their tails, lure in prey who then become ensnared in sticky droplets of mucus. (click link for credit x, x, x, x)

Lavender in Bulgaria by  krasi matarov