Skip to main content

Garden party

Curator J...hosted an outdoor tea party to thank volunteers. The party was located in the outdoor Botanical Garden, across the street from the GH. It was fairly well attended, but only one other volunteer was able to attend, volunteer K, who has been assisting with IT data management and cataloging. A few others attended the tea including undergrad and grad students. Curator J made scones (herbs and cheese I think), B... brought fruit, and someone made poppy seed shortbread wafers.

For the final hour after the tea I did the following activities: vine maintenance, and scrubbing soot and scale from a small plant (?name) in 3c, on bench 2E

Here is a term I learned from Curator J...: “Fabaceous,” referring to the plant family Fabaceae or Leguminosae plants (bean or legume plants). In room 3c, bench 1E, with a very sooty fabaceous plant: Glycyrrhiza glabra.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thrip control: peppermint and clove

Here's a question: how many natural plant scents do you find repellent? The one that comes to the top of my mind is the scent of the newly blossomed corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum . It smells very much like the name implies. If I could produce a scratch-and-sniff blog post, I would be tempted. The odor is horrible to humans, but sweet to some flying insects which are also attracted to rotting flesh. But perhaps you cannot tolerate the scent of clove, or eucalyptus? Insect pests are like us in this respect. Pests in the garden and greenhouse Insects, arachnids, fungi, and viruses. Their numbers are legion. The battle is constant. The most effective weapon is vigilance. In addition to vigilance, there are biological controls made from natural compounds which are generally non-toxic to humans. Included in this category are essential oils. For example cinnamon, rosemary, sage, neem, clove, peppermint and many others. These oils are repellent, and even toxic, to many of the pests...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remembering my former city garden

This post is more of a journal entry than a public blog post. It is interesting to me, but won't be too interesting to almost any other reader - except perhaps my partner who was there as a co-conspirator. I want to document my thoughts about the past, my backyard garden, and what we put in it. The size of our city lot was not large. At 100 x 50 ft, there was just enough room for the house, a small garage, and back yard. The driveway was shared with our neighbor. The style of the house was standard American Foursquare, built in 1903. We bought the place in the early 1990's and slowly, over the next 25 years, renovated almost every inch the house and garden. A dry stone wall was built, with terrace bed to break up the height of the wall Caladiums and dragon-wing begonias line the steps of the front porch Well-earned sit-down on the front porch after a busy day Front wall terrace with blue phlox, hostas, astilbe, snap dragons, and coral bells. Front wall terrace, brunnera "J...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dorset Coast, UK, 2024

I've had the privilege of visiting the United Kingdom a few times, but I had never visited the English Channel or the south coast. On a recent backpacking trip up the Thames River with friends in the county of Oxfordshire, my partner and I took the opportunity to explore a small bit the coastal county of Dorset.  Route to the Dorset Coast We had ended our hiking trip up the source of the Thames River in the town of Cirencester, in Gloucestershire. From there, we took a train south to Bristol, then continued south on a train to Dorchester, in Dorset. From there, we caught a double-decker bus to Bridport. In Bridport we hiked with our meager backpacks a short distance down to the connected harbor village of West Bay. Bridport and West Bay, Dorset Since we didn't have a rented car, public transportation was our only option to get around. We chose the town of Bridport and the connected harbor of West Bay as our base for exploring the coastal trails. We chose this location because:...
Post a Comment
Read more