Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.
It is an hundred years hence now. Go open your doors.
will byers stan first human second
KIROKAZE
Claire Keane

#extradirty
Peter Solarz
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cherry valley forever

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tumblr dot com
dirt enthusiast

@theartofmadeline
sheepfilms

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
almost home
Cosimo Galluzzi
styofa doing anything
art blog(derogatory)
ojovivo
h

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@glimpsesofgardens
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.
It is an hundred years hence now. Go open your doors.
Rosemary? You mean spicy pine needles?
Are you insinuating that regular pine needles aren’t spicy???
Regular pine needles are regular
Not by rosemary standards
…Have you eaten pine needles?
We’ve been friends for like four years, do you seriously have to ask if I’ve eaten pine needles or not
I mean I’m pretty sure you have but I don’t want to assume
Of course I’ve eaten pine needles. Various kinds. Singleleaf pinyon is weirdly the best
Are they…
spicy?
You know, I’d love to tell you but I’m pretty unclear about what marks the difference between “spice” and “strong-tasting plant that isn’t considered a spice”
I’ll have to eat some pine needles myself then to find out
Ok but it only counts if they’re PINE needles and not just any old needle-like leaf off a tree
I’m going to eat every needle-like leaf I see
Please Don’t Do That
Needle-Like Leaf Roulette
…I’ll accept this plan as long as you promise not to eat any yew leaves.
I can try very hard not to
Pine needles are distinguished by the presence of a sheath-like structure at the base of the leaf, almost always holding bundles of two or more leaves. Yews don’t have the sheath thing
It’s time for me to go out into the woods and stare at needle leaves
Finally you can gain real insight into my average daily life
this conversation reads like two shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief and then are never heard from again
god fucking dammit gimme a minute
Enter AERUH and MALUS SYL-VESTRIS, a pair of JESTERS.
AERUH I tell thee, rosemary is like a pine but with a spicy taste.
MALUS Art thou to claim that needles base of pine have not a spice?
AERUH A needle base of pine is merely base.
MALUS ‘Tis not when held, comparing, to anthos.
AERUH My dearest Malus, needles thou'st eaten?
MALUS How many moons have we as friends seen rise? How many suns have we as friends seen set? Thou sixteen seasons in my heart I’ve held, and hope that I in thine hast been the same. With brotherhood as rich and old as this, thou needst not ask me such frivolities.
AERUH I know thou likely has, to tell the truth, but I would not assume.
MALUS Well, yes, I have. A multitude of types I’ve eaten too. I’ll tell thee now: the best (though it is strange) is single-leaf pinyon.
AERUH And it has spice?
MALUS I truly wish that I could tell thee this, but now, i'faith, I cannot fully tell, the difference in classifying thus: to say “has spice” or merely “herbal strength”.
AERUH To tell this tale most clearly it would seem that eating needles from a pine’s required.
MALUS Aye, it would seem that that’s the task at hand, but caution tells that this is what’s to do: eat only needles of the honest pine, and none of lying leaf with pinelike shape.
AERUH I’ll eat them all.
MALUS I prithee, stay thyself.
AERUH Roulette with leaves.
MALUS At least restrain from yew.
AERUH I’ll do my best.
MALUS That is all can we do. The scholars tell that needles true of pine can be distinguished from the lying yew by sheathlike clothing all along the base; the yew has no such guard.
AERUH With this new truth I now will venture out into the wood and seek the pines and pinelike fakes alike to stare them down and learn their secret truths.
MALUS With this thou canst at long and weary last Discover for thyself my life’s own path.
Exeunt.
Enter MACDUFF.
MACDUFF. Yo dudes that king there’s dead. Like dead as FUCK.
get this shit in angsty emotional moodboards NOW
aye aye capn
PLEASE THIS ROCKS
my name is aeruh and plants i like whether herbs or leafs so brite and wen i go to woods so fine i test the spice i eat the pine
Begonia ‘Fragrant Falls Peach’ on the front porch today. I wish I could post the fragrance too.
Year after year the prettiest flowers I grow. They winter over in the basement without watering and then start up again in spring.
Muğla Province of Turkey
Plant of the Day
Tuesday 9 June 2026
The marginal aquatic perennial Orontium aquaticum (golden club, floating arum, never-wets, tawkin) was creating a display of flowers by this pond.
Jill Raggett
A Blind Man in His Garden
Homer, Alaska, from the series “American Prospects”
July 1984, Joel Sternfeld
ID: a bearded man stands in a lush garden, with tall purple flowers towering high above his head. The man wears a yellow buttoned shirt snd dark denim trousers (pants), and beyond the garden there are dark hills in the background. End of ID.
suddenly thinking about the courtroom scene, of Stratt being accused of pirating literally everything, and Grace later having everything in the various computers aboard his ship that he gave a copy to Rocky without issue, and the beetles having such a massive memory capacity and...
Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.
Just.... she pirated everything, and put it all on the Hail Mary.
A honeybee, fly and bumblebee making for some chaotic pollination of a Paeonie obovata flower.
The bottom photo is what will result in a few months. The dark seeds are fertile and the red ones are infertile.
Paeonia obovata (Woodland Peony) is a versatile and beautiful peony species, offering subtle beauty, low maintenance, and ecological benefit
y'all ever reach the end of google
I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.
It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research
There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."
The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
@motherfucking-dragons
it's called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.
in general i'm feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!
Protect the wetlands. Protect the canebrakes because the canebrakes protect the wetlands.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
I know about reproducing plants from cuttings, rhizome cuttings have proven doable with this species.
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
A lot of people are asking how to distinguish Rivercane from invasive bamboo species. This link should help you!
Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:
River cane has a really full, bushy, leafy look that makes it really hard to recognize as bamboo from a distance, because the stems are harder to see. The shape of the individual cane with its branches and leaves is narrow, because the branches spread out very little, but the foliage is DENSE. It's like a plume.
River cane is stronger, denser and heavier than invasive bamboos I've seen.
River cane stems are always green all the way around, no yellow (unless the plant's been dead for a good long time)
River cane stems feel smooth like plastic to the touch. The common invasive bamboo I've seen here, when you run your hand upwards along it, the stem feels awful like sandpaper.
The biggest way to distinguish them: River cane grows 6-4 feet tall when it's in little patches, and up to 10-12 feet when it's in a large size patch (like, the size of a backyard) It is known to reach up to 15 feet tall nowadays and historical records claim heights of 30 feet or more in fertile river valleys. I really want to stress that it's RARE for it to get big. A canebrake will almost always be many times wider than it is tall (sometimes they grow in very long strips along fence rows)
The best time to look for it is in winter before things leaf out, because it's evergreen and grows in dense masses, making it easy to spot.
Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.
European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?
In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.
Books that talk about Rivercane:
Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry by Sarah H. Hill talks about rivercane a LOT and gives tons of details of its uses and history.
Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter about Rivercane.
Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass is a book about Kentucky, but it talks about rivercane's importance including its relationship with bison. It's only a couple pages out of the whole book but it's still great information.
By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.
On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.
i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.
Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman
She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.
I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!
Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.
Someone research the material properties of this stuff ASAP. It's insanely strong.
Hi everyone, it's the river cane post again!
Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!
Roger Cain of Keetoowah/Western Band Cherokee shows and talks about Rivercane. This video has a BIG canebrake, the mature canes look as if they could be 15ft tall, but he says it's only a fragment of what they used to be!
Stan the River Man visits a Canebrake in Northern Kentucky. This channel only has 22 subscribers, I feel like I've discovered a rare and priceless treasure
River Cane Renaissance, Episode 1. This guy has devoted a large part of his life to studying Rivercane and now works with the eastern band Cherokee to try and bring it back.
Chattooga river conservancy video on Rivercane, haven't watched the whole thing myself but it looks really good and detailed
These videos barely have any views or comments, but y'all can help! We can spread the knowledge.
Hi everyone.
This is exactly what you think it is.
So i'm in contact with a couple of plant nurseries.
Visiting some of my baby canes in the site where they were planted! They're looking good!
Big things are happening.
For privacy reasons, I share details online of my real world activities only reluctantly, and not very often. But don't be bamboozled into thinking I have forgotten the Canebrakes. It's exactly the opposite.
I have done a lot of networking and made a lot of contacts. I am not alone. There are other people with a story exactly like mine: first, they heard an offhanded mention of forests of American bamboo, which shattered everything they thought they knew about their environment. Next, they became crazed with fascination, searching for knowledge with insane ferocity. Then, they realized that river cane is not only a plant, it is a keystone species symbiotic with indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and it was almost destroyed due to the subjugation of its habitat and the genocide of its caretakers.
The canebrakes' devotees have been working tirelessly to compile every single scrap of information on canebrakes that exists in writing. Every record, every primary source, every historical mention, every comment and conjecture. I have been given access to some of this priceless treasure trove. The wealth of information is amazing, but even more amazing is how much is still unknown.
The history, properties, and ecological importance of the canebrakes is so much more than I imagined.
For example, the massive amounts of seeds produced by huge canebrakes in flowering events fed the passenger pigeon flocks. Likewise the Carolina parakeet was also dependent on canebrakes, and the extinct Bachman's warbler was a canebrake specialist. The destruction of canebrakes could be responsible for why these birds went extinct.
Canebrakes were absolutely fundamental to the indigenous peoples of the Southeast, providing for their every need. Food, shelter, containers, tools, music and art. The settlers foolishly thought the indigenous peoples were not "advanced" enough for metal tools, but in truth, they already had a material superior to metal. River cane by weight is stronger than steel. You can make knives and blades out of it.
I am excited for the future. It seems like momentum is building to save the river cane and bring back the canebrakes, and I am hoping to join together with all the other like-minded people to accomplish this task.
A new organization has just started in Alabama to bring back the river cane. Here is a blog post to read from a few months ago.
[ID: Three photos of rivercane. It is tall, and dark green striped with brown. This is followedby a photo of the alabama picher plant. It has leaves shaped like jugs, in yellow and orange, with green veins. This is followed by another photo of a rivercane patch, then a pile of ripe seeds, that are still slightly green but brown on the tips, then a germinating seed, a seedling in soil, many seedlings in various improvised plant pots, and an older seedling in the ground surrounded by dried leaves. End ID.]
excuse the block of text ID it's hot outsid.e
Please for the love of all that's sacred tell someone who knows this stuff to get to Savannah Georgia, there are so many patches here that experts online cannot identify and think are an undescribed species.
Here's a petition to protect at least one of the canebrakes here
Please signal boost if you can.
since it's January now, that means it will soon be February and March, so River Cane including the other species should start flowering soon! Keep an eye out for dark purple spikes, either coming from the stalk itself, or the ground around it!
The entire plant does not need to flower at the same time, so you might need to look. Also size does not matter. The plant can be 8 ft tall or less than a foot, it can still flower.
Start looking in February. Especially keep an eye out in March!
Hi everyone. It's February. Guess what's happening right now?
[image description start. Four photos of native bamboo flower buds, each a dark purple color, emerging from tan stems. Image description end.]
And some of them, are flowering literally three times in a row! One tiny plant we found, less than 4 ft tall, flowered and produced seed in February of 2025, then again in September 2025, and now again in February 2026!
Other taller stocks like the ones shown above, for sure flowered in February 2025, and from the seeds still clinging to the plants, they probably did it again in fall as well, but unfortunately I wasn't able to check on them because a storm knocked a bunch of tree branches into my path to get to them. And now they are flowering again, for at least the second year in a row!
Get out there and look for flowers and flower buds! If you are further south or towards the coast, you will likely find Arundinaria tecta, which is what I have picture of! (You know, unless it turns out to be another species that has not been described yet, which is possible)
Also for my friends in Mexico, there are multiple species of native bamboo that you can find, and you should all definitely show me pictures because it looks delightful!
Whoops I haven't visited this post in a little while but someone just sent an ask about Rivercane and made me think to look for it.
Very fascinating that it flowered again in the fall and then the next year. I have observed it to do that in a couple of canebrakes, I'm not sure if the plant just keeps going until it dies, or what.
When the pollen is produced, maybe you could save some to test and see if they can be hand-pollinated? (and how long the pollen lasts in storage). Im not sure if anyone has tried hand pollination.
The further north you are, the later the flowering will happen- here in Kentucky, you should look in April-May and if there are seeds they will be ready in June
Also, really cool to hear about the possible undescribed species near Savannah, it was just recently that Tallapoosa Cane was identified as its own species
I do wonder what this tree is.
Richard Nadler
How do you get your quail eggs to hatch at a weekly cadence? Id imagine they'd all kind of hatch randomly depending on the hen that lays them. Or can you control that with temperature/incubating?
Oh the hens don't sit. Coturnix hens almost never sit on their own eggs, and even the ones that do are usually terrible mothers and even if they're good moms, the chicks often have no interest in being mommed. So all the eggs that I want to hatch go into the incubator. Since the eggs are good for 7-10ish days (for incubation viability, they're fine much longer for eating) and don't grow at all until incubated, I just collect two trays worth (160 eggs) and set them all at once at least 4 days apart (usually 5-7, sometimes up to 10 in the winter when I lose a lot of eggs to freezing). That means all 160 start growing at the same time and should hatch at the same time.
Coturnix eggs take 16-18 days to hatch, and my rules are that keeper birds get 24-36 hours from the first hatched chick to get out. So once I see the first chick out of the egg in the incubator (which could be up to 12 hours after it actually hatches if it hatches when I go to bed and I don't get to check until after chores in the morning), I wait 24 hours and then remove the hatch. I sort the chicks to make sure I'm keeping the best, and anything that doesn't make the cut gets culled for feeders. Anytime that hatches after the first 24 hours also gets culled as feeders. This helps to standardize the hatch over time, and prevents me from keeping any chicks that are slower to develop or weaker. Typically 85-95% of the hatch gets out of the eggs in that grace period, and I rarely have anything that looks actually good make it out after that period, so it works well and keeps my hatches pretty predictable.
old gods are waking
idea:
https://mymodernmet.com/scientists-revived-32000-year-old-plant-dna/
Quinta da Regaleira
Sintra, Portugal
Feb. 3, 2026
Riad Dar El Malaika in El Jadida, Morocco