an archive

For clarification ^-^

world heritage post

this is the saddest fucking thing. wheres that post about when you cant even write a poem about it because its just there already

[Image ID: A google search asking "why does rhubarb grow in the dark" answered with "It grows because it's looking for the light," with the "because it's looking for the light" highlighted. A caption reads "this is the saddest fucking thing. wheres that post about when you cant even write a poem about it because its just there already" End ID]

Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff

Generically vague settings are ruined for me forever. do y'all have any idea how specific the plant life in an area gets???

*Stares at the plants in novel set in fictional place with suspicion and criticism*

actually, i wanna talk about nature tropes in fantasy/otherwise "speculative" media because fiction has these stock tropes about nature that are so universal throughout everything from books to video games, and it turns out that they have nothing to do with reality

For starters, did y'all know that (with the exception of one species) cacti are ONLY native to the Americas, and deserts on all other continents have NO CACTI?

Does that mean that Africa, in similar situations, mostly has spiky shrubs (without those water-consuming green things called leaves) and yams-like storage roots?

Or are there further concepts?

What does Australia do?

I know about succulents, and that they're also fairly common in the Alps (I don't know if they're native there, but the local name, "Hauswurz" - literally "house root" or "home root" - indicates as much).

Which aren't deserts in the narrower sense, but also not exactly known for rich flora, due to the altitude, low amount of topsoil, and cold.

Have you reached a level that permits you to see patterns that shape plant life in an area? It sounds a bit like you're in an area of frequent enlightenment...

Well the thing about plants is that they are much, MUCH weirder than animals are about radically altering and reshuffling their basic body forms and plans over the course of evolution, even within the same genus.

If you saw this plant, what would you assume its closest relatives are?

If you answered "violets," good job! This is Viola atropurpurea, from the same genus as your common backyard violets.

This is weird. Can we talk about how weird this is? This is like if tigers and lions shared the genus Panthera with some kind of tiny aquatic salamander-like thing.

Cacti are a specific plant family. Succulent plants have convergently evolved approximately a billion times and come from (almost) every corner of the plant family tree. The universality of cacti as the iconic Desert Plant has much to do with the average person not knowing the great variety of desert adapted plants, and mentally categorizing unrelated succulent plants as cacti because "cactus" is the closest word they have.

Desert plants are weird y'all. A ton of them look like weird mushroom- or barrel-like bulges and tubes. Like, just look at this thing.

This is called "Sand Food" and it's edible

This is Yareta and there are no photos of it that are like "Yeah that is a normal, real thing." (It's not moss! It's a flowering plant!)

Top ten moments on this site

from grammatical context I feel it is more likely anon was implying that environmental racism is when plants are bigoted, which if anything is funnier

you walk into your local gardening center and a potted monstera calls you a slur

wheat is definitely bigoted against people with celiac, but I would not call that racism, no

the idea that the wheat is doing that on purpose

Peanuts are acting out of ignorance, but wheat knows what it’s doing.

Peanuts are acting

out of ignorance, but wheat

knows what it’s doing.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

love doing something I call ‘the big leaf test’ where I put my hand on a leaf and if the leaf is bigger than my hand I go damn that’s crazy

fractal found in nature

hmmm

Finally, someone who remembers the true purpose of Lego!

when I'm just walking around and something makes me screech to a halt and my eyeballs shoot out like binoculars and I gotta drop everything to take photos

ugh yeah that's the good shit

there’s an agronomy professor at my work who can take a common crop seed, let it soak in chemicals that dye living parts of the seed shades of red, and then can cut it open and tell you WHY it’s rotting instead of germinating AND can give an approximation of what stage of the growing/harvesting process might have gone wrong to kill it and honestly I’m just struck by how much of an incredibly powerful niche skillset this is. just incredibly valuable in any context, not just in dystopian monoculture corn reality where well-bred/treated/engineered crop seeds are incredibly expensive commodities to be bought and sold but also like, for most of human history? like is this not something kings and emperors and civilizations through human history would put you on courts and councils for. person who can tell you why the crops aren’t growing. remarkable

The more I learn about plant sentience, the more I realize that what seems like a very niche and controversial concept is actually a basic foundation of the work of so many botanists and ecologists.

Plant sentience is only really controversial and ridiculous to people whose coworkers aren't plants. Even the most doubtful botanists are willing to at least consider that plants have some form of consciousness because it's so hard argue that these living things, which work so hard to stay alive, don't display any signs of consciousness.

3:36 am…..thinkin about…..her (the weird stunted maize Zmgb1 mutants)

absolutely OBSESSED with her (the weird stunted maize Zmgb1 mutants)

I just want to say that planning out a vegetable garden for my backyard has put me in touch more with the natural environment already. Growing up as a kid in the North, my grandparents taught me how to identify all the plants and birds but, when we moved to the gulf coast of Florida, all of that knowledge wasn't helpful. I tried asking everyone from biology teachers to the elderly in town what these plants were called and no one-- not even my Bushcrafter of a brother-- could help.

Now I've identified tiny pink purslanes, delicate spiderworts and billowy wood sorrels. I've solved the mystery of the fern-like weed that decided to plant itself behind the air conditioning unit, that we've tried to relocate or cull for years only to find it growing back stronger and more determined every time.

... it's a silk tree, a mimosa. I never would have guessed.

These little puzzles and mysteries have proven fun to solve, and I'm waking up wondering what cool plants I'm going to find that day.

Gardening helps, even if your soil has been poisoned by decades of pristine lawns and you've never successfully kept a potted plant in your life.

Seeing what nature has to offer, even in the backyards of developed small towns, is amazing.