All of the summaries of the books we have read include (many) links. Links evaporate. I check them when I post the summary and randomly go back in over time to check. If you find a broken link, please let me know via a comment or a direct email. Let me know which link was broken and I will fix it, replace it, or remove it.
On Monday 11 January 2021 we discussed The Plant Messiah by Carlos Magdalena
As we were waiting to get started, someone mentioned that they enjoy MIgardener.com/blog/. I looked at it and it’s really inspiring and fun. It makes me smile to see the energy and enthusiasm of the young couple who developed the blog and a “brick and mortar” garden shop. A word to the wise – MI does stand for Michigan so the advice on the blog is not necessarily appropriate for NM, although the enthusiasm is! As the person who brought it up mentioned, one fun part is that we can already be out gardening when the folks in Michigan are still buried in the snow and darkness of winter.
I had sent out two links prior to the zoom meeting:
The first link was seven nature resolutions for 2021 that Kew Gardens suggests. I thought it provided some good ideas if your new year resolutions include nature. And, of course, this page is filled to links of Kew resources. At the discussion on Monday, one participant reported that she has included one of the nature resolutions for her own yard. Now is the time to do it!
The second was a link to an interview with Carlos Magdalena in 2015. This 6-minute interview captures his passion and excitement … and his Spanish accent that, if you’re like me, might require a couple listens to understand the words of his enthusiasm.
As background information, I showed some information about Herbarium specimens – how they’re collected, processed, and stored – and some details about what a type specimen is and why it matters (it’s sort of equivalent to your birth certificate – it’s the final/ultimate/definitive record of your birth name, the date you were born, and the location where you were born.)
Kew Garden Herbarium: This clip has rather odd colors but is pretty cool because you can turn the view around and see different things. It’s a bit hard to see but the bit I showed is at 1:51 and is a herbarium specimen collected by Charles Darwin on his trip to the Galapagos. This clip provides an example of one way the herbarium plants can be used for research – developing seed collecting guides. I showed the first minute or so because it’s a much more appealing view of the Herbarium than the other clip!
Kew is, of course, only one of many herbaria around the world.
The Western New Mexico University has a page with links to herbaria and assorted botanical identification/information websites.
One of the WNMU links is to SEINet but it goes to an image page. Here is the home page link. SEINet is a pretty amazing resource for identification of plants in the southwest.
There’s a lot to preparing a specimen to go in an herbarium, as we discussed. Here’s a link to written instructions on collection and preparation. This video covers all the basic steps from plant collection to final specimen sheet. There are only two substantial differences from what I was taught: 1) we used blotting sheets to sandwich each newspaper-encased sample. So, the stack would be: corrugated cardboard, blotting paper, newspaper-encased sample, blotting paper, corrugated cardboard, blotting paper, newspaper-encased sample … etc ending with a corrugated cardboard piece. Doing this removes the step of changing the newspaper daily. Plus, of course, this video is for an herbarium in Taiwan which is significantly more humid than Albuquerque. Just saying…. And, 2) we wouldn’t use masking tape to secure a specimen to the sheet – either an acid-free, generally linen, tape (like those used for book binding, photography, and other art projects) or an acid-free glue like a rice glue used in printmaking.
What is a type specimen? This is the part that’s like your birth certificate. The sheets in the herbaria will have one sample that was the first collected and identified as a “new” plant. This is the holotype. If that actual plant collection has been lost, then the illustration when the “new” identification was published can become the holotype. If all original information is somehow lost, a neotype specimen becomes the type specimen. While it might seem a bit esoteric and over the top, there are exciting fights about naming plants (and unnaming them in the case of a divorce or professional falling out) and identifying the first professional documentation (publication in the peer-reviewed literature these days) of the plant.
One other useful bit about this link about type specimens is that on this page, there’s a link to the full University of Florida Herbarium and for those who wish to learn more about the international code on nomenclature.
One other bit here. I mentioned the publication of a new species and that UNM’s Tim Lowrey had discovered and named a plant. I couldn’t remember the details but here’s a link to the researchgate page with a link to download the pdf. The importance of articles like this is that this is where the taxonomy community agrees that the plant is new and should be named as proposed by the ‘discoverer.’
Seed storage
Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank
Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway
A different use of stored seeds is proposed in the “Resurrection Experiment.” This Scientific American article is about 4 years old now. Inside that article is a link to a 2016 peer-reviewed article by the lead scientist and colleagues on the study with more details about the plants, the strategies, and the process of gaining access to the seeds. According to that article, the first call for proposals to use the seeds went out in 2018 so it’s possible studies will begin to appear in the peer-reviewed literature.
Early in the book the author writes about how the Spanish television series “El hombre y la Tierra” was so influential for him. I looked it up online and a number of the programs are available. Here’s one to start. If you want to find more, I just did a search on “1975 El hombre y la Tierra” and found 5 or 6 of the programs. They’re each about 30 minutes long.
I had shown a map of Mauritius but the link includes the search engine I use so I don’t think it’s helpful. You can always type in Mauritius in your favorite browser and click on maps. Meanwhile, here’s the wikipedia link.
This is a link to some plant preservation work being done by the Missouri Botanical Garden in Mauritius. There are some spectacular photographs and some drone video in addition to a lot of information about the state of plants in Mauritius. For this particular trip, the scientists also include reporting on travelling back to the US just as all the travel bans related to covid were going into effect.
There were probably about a billion plants I could have included here but I did show one link to Kew that demonstrates the extent of information that can be freely accessed.
Kew Gardens has a web page on propagation but it’s a pretty broad overview. For those who are Albuquerque Master Gardeners, Mary Voldahl’s annual propagation class provides hand’s-on experience with the basics for some of the techniques described on this page.
Another Kew Garden web page has a bit about growing plants up from their Millenium Seed Bank. The bottom of this page includes links to some other information on propagation and cryopreservation of recalcitrant seeds. Talk about “time out”! I regret to say that none of these pages provides really in-depth information for those who want to learn more. And, you just know that they have a lot more information because I also found the link to their Specialist Certificate in Propagation.
I did find this blog with an article on micropropagation at Kew. There are a handful of additional blog posts in 2012 and 2013. It seems he was a student at Kew.
Waterlilies featured prominantly in the book and it was remiss of me not to have any video or images of them. So, here’s one link from Kew on propagating and growing the Victoria amazonica.
And, finally, the things one finds when poking around on the internet… A public domain book by Nehemiah Grew: The Anatomy of Plants, 1680. This link is a review/essay. I clicked on a “Source” link under one of the images and went off to archive.org (the source for the Attenborough series we watched in December) where I could read a copy of the original 561 page tome. No, I won’t suggest it for the book club but I will stop writing here!