Tag: Leu Gardens

Leaf of the Day: The Curiously Beautiful Silky Hakea Pod and Some Firechasers

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In my work room I have a long table that houses my paints and my ever growing collection of twigs, pods, bits of branches, bark, seeds and the like. They generally sit there until I get round to drawing them and I tend to assume there won’t be much activity in that direction apart from the odd displaced ant wandering around. However, while I was away a few things were not so dormant as I had thought. Three seed pods have changed. The beautiful big green cone I had found has turned brown and is springing open from the bottom up and the little ginger seed head which I drew last week has split open to reveal pale green seeds and is now possibly even more lovely. But the biggest surprise is the woody pod of the Silky Hakea, Hakea sericea which has split in two, to reveal what is probably the most beautiful seed pod I have seen to date.
They are, of course, just doing what comes naturally, drying out and getting ready to shed their seeds.

I had seen these woody pods some time ago and thought they were some sort of gall, this one above looking like some strange perching bird. Last week I gathered one from the tree at Leu and taken a photo of the name tag. The Hakea is not a plant I am familiar with at all and, not having had time to look it up before we went away, I was totally unprepared for such an unprepossessing thing to open up and reveal something so beautiful. It has split along a sort of beaked ridge which runs down one side of this inch and a half long pod revealing two black winged seeds set into the sheer surfaces of two solid halves. When I say ‘set in’, it looks just as though the finest craftsman has set silky ebony shapes into a setting of two-tone creamy ivory. It is quite exquisite. The surface of each half is as smooth as smooth, a sharp contrast with the pods outer surface which is so rough and pitted. The pods are heavy and knobbly and, it would appear, impenetrable, but having read a bit about them now I realised why. This is one of those extraordinary plants that needs fire.

The whole subject of the ecology of the burnt landscape is fascinating. What we view with dismay as complete and utter devastation, will immediately be readjusting even before the last drifts of smoke have blown away and although it may seem an impossibility, some species of plants and animals are dependent on fire and do not thrive without it. Australian species of plants are particularly well adapted to fires, cypress cones and banksia seed pods open up with fire and so do the Hakea pods. Mallee eucalyptus trees have large underground roots known as lignotubers which enable them to regenerate after fires and many are able to grow new leaves and branches from burnt trunks.
There was not, mercifully, a fire in my work room but the Hakea also responds to ” damage” by going onto emergency regeneration mode and opening up its seed pods.
Fires then can be very useful, releasing seeds, removing competing plants, open up areas to more light, enriching the soil with ash and creating ideal growing conditions for some plants.

There is also a curious wood boring beetle, the black fire beetle, Melanophila acuminata that actually flies to the fires. Like some little heat seeking missile, they are able to detect fires from many miles away either by smell or by infrared heat sensitive areas located under their wings.


Great photo from German site here

Alerted and hot to trot they zoom off to the charcoal forest to meet and mate. Researcher Nathan Schiff who has been studying these pyrophillic insects describes the smoking remains of the fire as a heady “nightclub for bugs”.

They then lay their eggs under the bark of the burnt trees followed in hot pursuit by the little black backed woodpecker, another fire following creature, who will eat the beetles and grubs, camouflaged beautifully by its “charred” feathers.

Photo, bird call and head banging from the Cornell bird site here

My drawing has not really done this beautiful thing justice, and I will maybe try a colour version. You need to hold it in your hand to really appreciate the different surfaces textures and the subtle colours, in my eyes no jewellery designer could make anything more beautiful, give me a super Silky Hakea Pod over those gaudy Faberge eggs anyday.

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Silky Hakea Pod

Leaf of the Day: Shampoo Ginger and a Hill

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This will be a brief post today. We have decided to go away for a couple of days to the coast, so a quick(ish) drawing of the inflorescence of the Shampoo Ginger Zingiber zerumbet which grows just outside the apartment here.

The flower cone sits on top of a long stem, this one is about 2ft. The little cream flowers grow from in between the “scales” or bracts of the cone. As I was drawing it, some drops of liquid appeared ..so I have drawn one of them. This may be the shampoo. I have yet to try it, but it is true that if you squeeze the cone gently you will be rewarded with a liquid which was used by the Polynesians for bathing both skin and hair. I can’t imagine anything nicer than a natural, ginger scented face wash. This then, and the soapberry are two handy additions to the bath and laundry departments.
In my case a few ants appeared too, which I didn’t think would add very much to the drawing today so I took them outside. Ants seem to cover most the blossoms of the gingers. I have had to shake some of them vigorously to get an ant free photo. Gingers are another example of ant friendly plants, offering nectar and shelter in the bracts in exchange for protection against malign insects.
At the moment this cone is green but, as the flowering phase begins to finish, it will turn red. I will probably return to it then for a colour sketch.

So I will not be posting any drawings until next week now unless torrential rain and the odd hurricane sweep the Gulf coast. We are going to Tarpon Springs a small Greek community north of Tampa, (I am so looking forward to some Greek food!) Here they used to dive for sponges and I am told there is still a small sponge industry.
We will go via Bok Tower gardens which will be a real treat! There we will see the beautiful gardens, the wonderful Gothic /Deco “singing tower” with a 60 bell carillon, and … a hill!


The view from the top of Sugarloaf Mountain Florida

Sugar Loaf Mountain nearby rises to a magnificent 312 ft above sea level. The second highest spot in Florida. My information is from a necessarily brief web page entitled “General Florida Climbing Information” here . I am looking forward to the view.
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Shampoo Ginger Cone.

Leaf of the Day: Indian Ginger Flower

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I have been thinking that Leu Gardens really needs several small booklets as a guide to the more exotic plants to be found in the 50 acres with several different titles, one being “Eat your way round the Garden”. I suppose health and safety issues here, in the land of the very affluent fat cat litigation lawyers, would prohibit such a publication and it could all go horribly wrong. To my very certain knowledge there are some potentially deadly things in the bushes as well as very edible herbs, fruits, leaves and roots. Just on Friday Pedro showed me the delicious bright red cherry like fruits of the Malpighia emarginata, the Barbados Cherry which grows happily untouched in the Demonstration Garden.

This sketch today is of one little floret from the inflorescence of the Alpina calcarata the Indian ginger. This is not the ginger root which we see in the supermarkets which comes from Zingiber officinale but is from the same aromatic family.

One of the “shell” gingers (so called because of the pretty shell like flowers), it is a native plant of India and is also known as the cardamon ginger or false cardamon. This is a lovely, tall and elegant plant with long slender leaves and can reach a good 5 foot. The little flowers, which somewhat resemble snapdragons (it’s also called Snap ginger) are held upright in spikes, and are a pretty bluey white with yellow and reddish-maroon stripes. The ‘edible’ parts are the leaves, which can be used to flavour steamed rice, for tea like infusions or as wraps for fish and, as I am holding them in my hands the flowers smell faintly of ginger…lovely.
It is also used in medical preparations in India in Ayurvedic medicine and ginger in general is well known to help control nausea and as a powerful digestive aid.

From the strange ‘beehive’ gingers to ‘dancing ladies’ and the heliconias, this family of plants is both beautiful and useful. If I had a garden here (and it would have to be acres and acres) I would definitely plant gingers and become a ginger expert.

There is an old Sanskrit saying “Adrakam sarva kandanaam” which means “Every good quality is found in the ginger.”
This is another useful phrase for the boring dinner party which will no doubt impress and alienate the other guests in equal measure. I am becoming the nightmare dinner party guest who can waffle on ad nauseam (better have that ginger dessert ready!) about things that probably only a handful of people in the whole world are interested in. Pedro politely describes me as very nice, if a little eccentric, (but then it won’t be long before the mother ship comes to collect me so I shouldn’t worry).

This little flower is a candidate for the next submission for the course, if I can find one in bloom in a couple of weeks time when I am due to start the finished work.
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Indian Ginger Flower

Leaf of the Day: Heliconia Clinophila, First Sketch

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Today I spent most of my time in the jungly shade garden at Leu Gardens where Pedro showed me the absolutely stunning Heliconias which hide away in this quiet part of the garden. You have to brave some extensive spiders webs and ten million mosquitoes but what you see makes up for the hardship.

They are truly wonderful plants with a variety of structurally superb flowers that either hang in pendants or are held erect in a variety of showy spikes properly known as panciles. (A pancile is a branched cluster of flowers.)
They are part of the most fascinating order, the Zingiberaceae, or the Ginger family, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The definition from Wiki is:
“A family of flowering plants consisting of aromatic perennial herbs with creeping horizontal or tuberous rhizomes, comprising of 52 genera and more than 1300 species, distributed throughout tropical Africa, Asia and the Americas.”
Many species are important ornamental plants, spices, or medicinal plants including shell gingers, ginger lily, turmeric and cardamom.
The name Helicona, after the Mt Helicon fits well with the exotic and strange appearance of these plants. Mount Helicon was the home of the muses forever beautiful and inspirational and the mountain itself wreathed in the mysteries of the gods.

The heliconia’s bracts are large and colorful and hide the sometimes inconspicuous flowers The fruits also develop within the bracts which are often filled with water and house a distinctive aquatic micro-ecosystem much like the bromeliad tank plants which I wrote about before.


In the tropics, the natural home of the heliconias, many rely solely on hummingbirds for their pollination which accounts for their bright red yellow and orange colouring, and the long tubelike shape of the flowers, which ensures that only hummingbirds with their long curved bills and and even longer tongues can access the rich nectar.

It is another example of a mutually exclusive relationship between animal and plant, with some heliconias relying on one specific humming bird for pollination. The different species also “use” the birds in different ways, making sure that the design of the flowers deposits pollen on different parts of the hummingbird’s body so avoiding the contamination of another nearby species.


This beautiful image from gonetoamerica blog here

According to the page on heliconias here from the Cloudbridge project in Costa Rica, the big leaves also provide a home
“for disk-wing bats (bats with suction-cups on their wings) and several species of tent-making bats. These bats construct shelters for themselves by chewing along both sides of the midrib of Heliconia leaves, so that the sides fold down, making temporary “tents.”

Some very cute tent bats from Costa Rica, from a fab site of images of Costa Rica here , one of the many things we didn’t see there and all the more reason to go back.
And I wish I had taken a bit more notice of the flowers, but writing this has reminded me of the very frightened tourist who came on a tour of the Monteverde reserve with us. She was wearing a red t shirt and to her terror was constantly surrounded by little humming birds who according to the guide thought she was a flower. Lucky her I thought. Here in Florida there are not many hummingbirds, but if you are lucky enough, you would be most likely to see the redthroated variety.


Sweet pic from a hummingbird migration site here

I have never seen one at Leu yet but I am not there at dawn and dusk (yet ! ) which is the best time to see them. They are gorgeous little things.

I found an old rather broken piece of the Heliconia clinophia but love its strong rhythmical zig zag profile and the seed pods which spray out of the bracts. I will certainly try some of the other flowers soon too. It is a big piece, 16 inches across, so it will have to be painted on a half sheet piece of watercolour paper. Today I only had time to do these initial sketches, one small study of the bract and as you can see, the larger sketch across two sides of the sketchbook.

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Heliconia Clinophila

Leaf of the Day: Magnolia, an Ancient Beauty and a Ghost town

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The Magnolia, Queen of the South. How could I take so long to get round to making some studies from this beautiful tree which grows everywhere here, big and small, in Malls, in gardens, round offices, and in the parks. There are approximately 80 different species and many of them seem happy to grow in and around Orlando.

I had no idea that the magnolia family was so ancient, but fossil remains have been found dating between 36 and 58 million years and I like to think of them growing side by side with the cycads and ferns, the ginkgos and the dinosaurs. The huge and beautiful flowers we see here on the Magnolia grandiflora are also considered a simple, primitive flower. It does not have petals as such, but tepals, a neat little anagram. Tepals are a tricky concept as they look like petals but are sepals and petals joined together. (Some well known flowers which you think have lovely petals actually have lovely tepals ie: tulips and lilies.) Another throwback to their ancient past is that magnolias evolved before there were bees so are pollinated by beetles. There is no nectar in these flowers but a rich protein filled pollen which the beetles seek out for food.

Magnolias are named after Pierre Magnol, a 17th century French botanist who was Professor of Botany and Director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Montpellier ( important as one of the innovators of the current botanical scheme of classification.) It is rather ironic, I think, that these beautiful ancient trees known for centuries by other cultures and by other names would be named after a European.
England had no native magnolias, but in 1687 the sweet bay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) was sent to the Bishop of London by one of his American missionaries. More species arrived from America and later Asia and now the magnolia is one of the most popular flowering trees gracing gardens all across the world.

The blooms here are amazing and I will, I am sure, get round to painting one of them one day but today here are 2 little furry “burrs” which you can find scattered around the base of magnolia trees after a storm. They are the centre part of the flower that remains after the tepals and the stamens have fallen away. You can see in my photo above that this flower has already lost its stamens. The dots below on the middle section of the receptacle are where stamens were and, below that, the tepal scars. The little black curls are the remains of the stigmas which were once yellow, each one leading down to its own carpel which in due course will produce the beautiful red seeds in the twisty seed pods which I, like so many other artists before me, will be drawing and painting over and over again.

Curiously, as a footnote, here in Orlando as we are following the progress of hurricane Bertha, listening for news of impending storms and severe weather warnings, considering our evacuation route and essential supplies list, I came across an account of the ghost town of Magnolia. It was once a thriving little cotton port in North Florida until, due to economic factors and a severe hurricane in 1843, it became one of Florida’s ghost towns. It seems this particular hurricane was very thorough in its devastation of the Gulf coast. The New York Herald called it “ one of the most dreadful hurricanes we have ever remembered to have occurred on this continent” . The 10 ft storm surge badly destroyed the Ports of St Leon, and St Marks, and the once thriving port of St Joseph, already in decline due to yellow fever was washed away. Once you start reading about the history of hurricanes in Florida you do wonder why anyone ever stayed to battle the weather, the mosquitoes and the tropical fevers..however Orlando’s 220,000 inhabitants are stirring, the sun is up, the lake is as calm as a mill pond, and Dan the weather man is smiling. I am going to Leu Gardens to make the most of this hurricane free day.
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Magnolia Burrs

Leaf of the Day: The Glory Lily and Faffing and Footling about

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There are some days that never quite get going, until it seems too late to do anything at all. Today was one of those days. I spent the morning faffing about. “Faffing”.. I thought about this word as I was starting to write this post and realised that I may have to explain it, as here in America it is not necessarily understood. And there really is no substitute for it either.
“Faffing about” is a phrasal verb which means doing all those horrible, time consuming things that have no real impact on the quality of your life but have to be done to avoid bringing the wrath of the law, your partner, the bank, and public decency on your head. In short, doing anything that interferes with what you really want to do that day. It’s those itty bitty things that should take 5 minutes and all take at least half an hour and suddenly your day has disappeared leaving you dissatisfied and with nothing in your life, or anyone else’s for that matter, significantly improved.

I wanted to go to the Gardens today but I had to wait in for the telephone man who was due to come between 10 and 1. I had to bring some washing in, put some washing out, change the dressing on my foot where the iron (luckily cold) had embedded itself in my foot yesterday. Yes…pointed-end first, excruciatingly painful and a 2 inch gash with an interesting talking- point-scar to look forward to. The irony ( sorry !) of this stupid accident is that I hardly ever use the iron. Ironing, along with cleaning, falls into the category of things that only need to be done if visitors are arriving or as severe displacement activity when creative procrastination is at its crippling height! Then I had to ring the bank, 30 mins and 7 phone numbers later.

That was my whole morning, faffing about, doing this, doing that, achieving nothing. There is also a noun. A” faff ” is something you do that doesn’t give you the reward you would like, for the effort involved. Faffing however should not be confused with footling. Footling is mooching for pleasure, because you want to, with no particular plan in mind.
One nice part of the faffing was the arrival of the telephone man who not only fixed the phone, but, having heard the cricket score on my BBC Radio 4 news told me how very much he missed cricket. He is from Jamaica and a real cricket fan so we had a chat about why they don’t play cricket here. No conclusion drawn. His sister had lived in London since 1972 and married a Londoner. Her husband fell in love with Jamaica and they returned there 4 years ago buying a huge house once owned by some British celebrities. He talked about the beauty of the Blue Mountains and the beaches. I was convinced.

At 1.30, faffing eventually over, it seemed I could get started on the day so for some fresh air I cycled to Kraft Gardens for a change. All was serene and lovely there on a hot still Florida afternoon. Anhingas drying their wings, egrets roosting, lizards basking and squirrels tirelessly bouncing. I definitely footled about there for a while, took some photos, got some inspiration and cycled home, encountering not only the usual traffic hazards, but also a man dressed as a yellow plastic traffic cone who was advertising smoothies.

I started drawing at 3.30 and did eventually get going, mostly thanks to Harlee who had pointed me in the direction of Radio 4’s excellent programme about Judith Kerr’s classic book “The Tiger who came to Tea” It was a delightful programme of warm childhood memories from both grateful readers and new mums plus an interview with Judith Kerr who says she is a very messy artist who rubs out more than she draws. That’s familiar!

Finally then, this is the flower of Glory Lily Vine, Gloriosa superba which climbs or scrambles over other plants with the aid of tendrils. The flowers are very distinctive because of their reflexed petals, like a Turk’s cap lily. I have seen other varieties whose petals stand up straighter and look like little bright flames in colours ranging from orange red to deep magenta. This is another potentially poisonous plant. All parts of the plant contain colchicine as found in the equally toxic autumn crocus and is used by herbalists particularly as a remedy for gout.
It is a very complicated structure so the only thing to do, is sketch it over and over again, in order to get the rhythm of the shapes but today time was short. Here is a sketch book page and a rushed study of the flower head.

It is very pretty indeed and certainly a challenge and I shouldn’t condemn a flower for its associations but when I discovered it is the national flower of Zimbabwe my enthusiasm and concentration faltered and I found my thoughts sliding away to that desperate country where my preoccupation with my day seem trivial and inconsequential and the gentle and delighted reminiscences of Judith Kerr’s readers more poignant. Her family had to flee Germany in 1933 in the face of another unspeakable tyrant. Hitler was about to take away their passports as her father had written satirical articles about the Fuhrer before he was in power. She speaks about a risky early morning escape with her mother and brother, crossing the border on little milk trains in order to avoid detection.
The interviewer, and one of the commentators, trying to find a hidden subtext to the story of some related post traumatic stress, are disarmingly rebuffed by her simple comment that no, there is no other meaning, the story arrived by itself. Sitting in their flat after a day out, all the games played, and without the dubious benefit of television, what could be nicer than a tiger coming to tea. What indeed?

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Glory Lily Vine

Leaf of the Day: Winged Beauty

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If any vine belongs in fairyland it’s this one, the enchanting Winged Beauty Dalechampia dioscoraefolia, Bow tie plant,or Costa Rican Butterfly Vine. These beautiful purple/ lilac structures are of course not leaves or petals but bracts which can reach as much as 5″ across. The “flower” is set above these two bracts. It is one of the euphorbia family which I looked at in more detail with Liz Leech at West Dean. It has slender stems, with very lovely heart-shaped leaves.There seems to be a white version too and, as I have been researching this, I find there are other varieties with even more fascinating flower structures.

Dalechampias are pollinated by the equally pretty little iridescent Euglossia orchid bees and when I get round to painting an orchid (it won’t be long as I am here in Florida) I will find out more about them. They are interesting little bees who spend much of their busy lives collecting fragrance as opposed to nectar and tucking it into their outsize trousers which make them look as though they are wearing jodhpurs.That won’t win any prizes in the apiology description class but you see what I mean in this excellent photograph from orchidspecies.com

The flowers structure in this vine is very odd but quite beautiful and I can see I have to go back and revise some more to understand exactly what is what here.I was interested in the front and side view of the “flower”. There are 3 bright red somethings attached to a round something which has a split covering revealing something very sticky ( I didn’t include the remains of an ant which were stuck onto this bit) with 3 small yellow flowery things on the top. Liz…I need your help. I had a problem with the instant shrivelling up of the leaves on this one too and they darkened as they dried out so I think the true colour is lighter blue. I just have to get quicker.

With the onset of a new month I am trying to make a rule to make at least 5 colour sketches each week no matter if they are finished or not. The next SBA assignment is to paint flower heads so I have to get some practice in.I want it to become as easy to pick up the paintbrushes and colours as it now is to pick up a pencil.
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Winged Beauty

Leaf of the Day: Luna Moth Ginger

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The Luna Moth Ginger , Hedychium. What a gorgeous flower this is. It’s big, 4 inches across, white, delicately scented and with beautifully shaped fragile petals and the bright orange anther. I had taken a photo of this lovely thing a couple of weeks ago and last time I was down in the gardens I saw that it had almost finished flowering so I grabbed one little blossom to draw. Today I just had to get this drawing done before it expired. It has been sitting in the fridge for a couple of days and lasted for an hour before collapsing in a limp heap on the drawing table. I have painted just one blossom as the leaves are too big to tackle at this stage.
The flowers themselves are held in informal groups on curving individual stems, forming very pretty untidy bunches. They are the sort of flowers I like.

The Ginger family is a great discovery for me here. Every week I am seeing more and more interesting and beautiful flowers only to discover they are from the ginger family. Who would have guessed! Here is my photo of the Luna Moth Ginger from a a couple of weeks ago.

And why is it called the “Lunar Moth Ginger? Well probably this
stunning image from Dale Jamiesons photo album at Pbase here will explain. This most beautiful creature is the Luna Moth (Actius luna) a silkmoth with a wing span of 3 to 8 inches and which apparently has a natural pale green fluorescence making it glow in the dark.

… and last and most important, today is the last day of six whole months of this blog and I want to say a very special thank you to all my friends old and new who are these days scattered all over the world. You email, send me comments and photos, put me right, give me encouragement, share knowledge, make me laugh and keep my nose to this particularly demanding grindstone. It all helps so much, believe me. For someone who kept a diary for all of three days when I was seven this has been an effort, is slowly becoming a habit and will be an achievement if I do manage to stay the whole 27 months of the course…only 21 to go…oh surely not… Thankyou all..don’t stop!
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Luna Moth Ginger

Leaf of the Day: Spiky Chinkapin Oak Burs, and an early life in Missouri.

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A couple of studies of the spiky, very sharp burs of the Chinkapin Oak Quercus muehlenbergii
The curious name really applies to the chestnut tree which is known as the Chincapin, Chinkapin or Chinquapin. According to the dictionaries it is probably a modification of the Algonquian word “chechinquamin“ meaning chinquapin nut ? Hmm that seems to take me round in circles.
The muehlenbergii part of its Latin name comes from Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg 1753-1815 who was an American clergyman and botanist, and while being, no doubt a worthy pastor, he is best-known as a botanist. A genus of well known ornamental grasses the Muhlenbergia, was named in his honor.

The studies, one in watercolour and one in gouache show what remains of the flower spike and the young burs. The flowers which were small and yellowish, clustered into the spike-like catkin have shrivelled up and the fruit, coated with slender, hairy, 1/2-inch spines forms the protective nut bur. It is quite a deterrent. When ripe the burs split to release a brown, single, solitary, round, glossy delicious nut.
These are very palatable to a variety of animals, including us and are useful as a friendly food source for urban wildlife.

In the archives of Springfield Library Archives, Missouri, I came across this touching account of the life of a country man Jim Chastain, he is recalling his early life. and eating chinkapin nuts amongst many other things. I make no apology for quoting this long passage.

” I was never was born. The buzzards laid me on a stump and the sun hatched me! I’m eighty-three years old and I spent the most of my life in Laclede County. I was born in 1897 on December 15 in the Hazel-dell District. They told me that there was five or six inches of snow, ice and sleet on the ground that morning. Our family made a living by going out to the fields with a double shovel and a single shovel and plowing the ground up with a turning plow. We planted corn, oats, wheat, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, parsnips and all of that kind of stuff.
We had peach, apple and pear trees, and we took the fruit off them. We also had seedless peaches in every corner of the fence. My mother made peach butter, apple butter and wild blackberry preserves. We dried the peaches and apples out on the slope of the house or on two trestles. We picked persimmons and my mother cooked them, took the seeds out of them and mashed them through a culler, took the peeling off of them and made persimmon preserves. We went out in the woods and gathered grapes and made grape butter, jelly and canned grapes.
We got our water from a spring. It never even once dried up. You couldn’t take a scoop shovel and dry it up, either. Now they don’t even want to drink out of a spring or anything. That’s the purest water on earth. We kept lard, milk and butter in a spring branch in a box, the water running through that spring.
We butchered our own hogs so we had meat. We had meat in the smokehouse smoked with hickory wood and a little sassafras.
We had always put out a cane patch and my daddy made molasses every fall for other people. We had a fifty gallon barrel of sorghum, or molasses, whichever one you wanted to call it. We had a fifty gallon barrel of kraut and a fifty gallon barrel of cucumber pickles.
We ate hickory nuts and walnuts, black walnuts. A lot of people calls them butternuts and then the black walnuts. We ate them and then we got chinquapin acorns. We got that and parched it on the stove hearth and eat it like popcorn. You put a little bit of ashes in the bottom of a stove hearth, and you put them acorns in there and a little bit of ashes over them just enough to cover them. Then you rake live coals out on them and let them cook. You take that outer burr off, but let the shell stay on. After they’re roasted, they tasted awful good to a kid in them days. Might not want to eat one of them now.
Also, you could take that burr acorn, and if you knew how, you would take a knife and you could make the most beautiful basket that you ever saw in your life. You turn the acorn upside down and leave that fuzzy hull down here. It has a little hull around the top of it. Cut down on each side and cull it out and dig that out of there, and you’ve got one of the most beautiful baskets you ever saw in your life. “

The article is fascinating. Go and read more here

These lovely trees are also host to the Gray Hairstreak butterfly, a really beautiful low key butterfly .


a great picture and more from Duke University here

Sometimes botanical language makes me laugh. I read somewhere it is regarded as a “precocious” tree.. meaning it produces nuts early in its life cycle, somehow the idea of a tree being precocious is endearing. I made the first sketch 2 days ago and in that time the colour changed and it started to dry out, so the second sketch is different and in gouache just for a change!
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Chinquapin Oak Burs

Leaf of the Day: Frog disturbed nights and the Acalypha Fire Dragon

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I have been to Leu today and to my delight have found a Ginkgo tree… leaf to follow soon. Also I took a photo of a beautiful large green/brown frog which was by the pond in the Arid Garden, one of many, whose friends and relations are disturbing the gentile peace of Winter Park these hot and humid nights.

My photo from this am, variety not known yet.

Because, with the now daily and torrential rain, has come the astonishingly loud nightly croaking of the local frogs. There are 32 species of frogs and toads in Florida and I think they are all right here at our apartment block. There must have been a My Space invitation for some midnight revelries at Killarney Bay. Even Florida locals, tired of the raucous partying ring up the council to see if anything can be done.

Gary Morse, spokesman for the Lakeland office of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission explains;

“The nocturnal symphony,” he said, “is one of the many quirky aspects of living in a state that has alligators, urban coyotes, sharks, hurricanes, lightning and sinkholes. The rain will pass before too long, he said, and so too, will the frog noise. Until then, try to endure”, he counseled.
“The more damp it is at night, the happier they are and the louder they croak,” Morse said. “Loud frogs are part of the price you pay to live in a place like Florida.”
More from the Tampa Bay Chronicle here

But frogs are delightful, and here they are extremely useful as they eat mosquito lava. The ones that make the noise are most likely to be various species of tree frogs.The Cuban variety probably the main culprit .. big latino party animal this. They are the biggest and noisiest with voracious appetites, hoovering up almost anything they can overpower and according to Wiki, they are also believed to cause power outages by sitting on transformers on electrical poles.

image from http://www.allaboutfrogs.org/ here
I miss my small froggy UK pond, I hope my frogs are thriving..

My leaf today is a gorgeous leaf, blousey and ruffled like a harlequin’s collar, and is one of the many varieties of Acalypha wilkesiana whose leaves are decorative and multicoloured. They vary widely in leaf shape, size and colour and are known by many different names, Joesph’s coat, Match me if you can, and Copperleaf. They are from the extensive spurge family Euphorbiaceae . To me, like the croton, its leaf is more interesting in isolation and away from the colourful muddle of the whole plant. To see the real beauty of the structure you need to see the leaves in isolation.

The drawing is actually of 1 leaf and 1 flower spike. The flowers are tiny and are held protected by the curl of the smaller part of the leaf, which itself nestles close into the larger leaf blade. The little leaf is a lopsided shape as well and curves in the opposite direction to the larger leaf. The veins are red.
I made a few scans of the drawing as I went along. It’s interesting to see how it develops. I had to keep the leaf in the fridge overnight which it seemed to enjoy, but if I continue on to a colour version I will have to get another one. But I have so many other things to do ..

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Acalypha Fire dragon