a scary day

Posted on May 7, 2013 by paridevita

Hi again. It’s me, the dog, Chess. You may remember me from such posts as “Dear County Assessor” and “May Day”. They were truly excellent, as I am a purebred border collie who knows excellence when he sees it. This post is going to start out like it’s not about me, so in other words not so interesting, but then it will be about me, and get a lot more interesting, because we made a movie.

I’m supposed to post this picture of Allium cardiostemon because the guy I live with said to. That’s hardly a good reason if you ask me, but here it is. It isn’t even blooming yet.

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So anyway, the guy I live with spent most of the day planting things, some in the side yard where I couldn’t see him working unless I got up and walked outside and stared through the gate, which seemed like a lot of trouble to me.

He planted and planted. The reason he can do this is because he digs up plants and puts new ones in their place. If you ask me, this is silly. But as I’ve said before, the guy I live with is kind of a nut, and when he says that he’s entered his declining years I can believe it.

He was talking about watering tomorrow, which is the day he can water, since the plants he put in are dryland plants and not annuals or vegetables, and can only be watered on certain days, which I think is called irony. We were contemplating this irony when the day got really, really scary, and that’s why there’s a movie.

Now, the guy I live with, though he cuddles me a lot during times like this, and gives me Rescue Remedy, which helps, also says that I could have been sold to a family who herded sheep out in the middle of nowhere some place in eastern Colorado and might only have a lean-to with straw to lie in when it thundered, and what would I do then? Of course the answer is that I could tell when the guy I live with and my mommy showed up at the farm where I lived, that they would take me to a nice home where I could sleep in a bed and get cuddled when it thundered. He says I was lucky, and I guess so.

After it stopped raining I went out to eat some dirt. The guy I live with says purebred border collies shouldn’t be eating dirt, and he’s right; it’s potting soil, which is different. He took this really out-of-focus picture to try to embarrass me, but it’s not going to work, since I’m not the one who can’t focus. He says I look like a dirt-eating maniac but I prefer the term casual geophagist.

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That was my day. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, hopefully without thundering, and I can hardly wait to go on my walks and track lots of mud in the house.

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truth in common names

Posted on May 6, 2013 by paridevita

This is mildly boring. I can’t help it. I had to make an emergency trip to Harlequin’s this morning because I was at a loss as to what to do, and usually buying a bunch of plants gives me something to do. Yes, I know there’s weeding to be done in the garden; the weeds will still be there tomorrow and even next week.

I picked up a few pots of Melampodium leucanthum, the “black foot daisy”, and now I have a couple of unbelievably fascinating things to relate. For one thing, it isn’t the same species as M. cinereum like some people say. For another, it is not named because its stems and roots are black.

Except for the pot, find the black here.

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Find the black roots here.

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I looked up the treatment of Melampodium in Flora of North America online and found a reference to a revision of the genus done by T. F. Stuessy in Rhodora in 1972, and looked that up, too. Quite a few journals are available online which is a wonderful resource, even if the information gleaned from them, which you plan to impart to your loyal readers, is in itself fairly uninteresting. It’s named the black foot daisy because apparently Asa Gray himself thought the name derived from the Greek melampodion, black foot.

In fact, Linnaeus named it for the mythological Melampus, “medicus graecus“.

I looked up Melampus. It turns out that he was the cousin of Bellerophon (not really, of course), and he talked to the animals, or at least listened to them; a kind of ancient Greek Doctor Doolittle. He introduced the worship of Dionysus to Greece, was also said to be the world’s first medical doctor, and a soothsayer who wrote a treatise on how to tell the future by the way people twitched.

It’s at this point that someone may wonder what all of this has to do with a plant name. Linnaeus, as we can probably tell from his dates, 1707-1778, is dead, so we can hardly ask him, and Melampus, well, I bet he didn’t have a clue.

This is where the story comes to a screeching halt. Melampodium is named for a mythological character named Melampus. For some reason.

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