Our July book club discussion was Dunmire’s Gardens of New Spain. Out of print for a while, it is once again available from UT Press as a print on demand. Dunmire’s classic work describes how food plants traveled from Central America north and south and ulitmately, with Spanish contact, west to Europe.

For August AND September we will be discussing Spengler’s Fruit from the Sands: the Silk Road origins of the foods we eat. In the first half of the book, he describes the travel and trade throughout Eurasia over several millenia (all heavily referenced – that must be the academic in him) and then ventures on to assorted plants and how they traveled along the routes. Although as a paleoethnobotanist, aka archaeobotanist, Spengler’s style is more academic than, say, that of the author of the Food Explorer, the topic is quite interesting.

The plants in the first half of the book are the grains. Personally, I’m looking forward to the fruits and nuts but I think he’s operating on the principle of – you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner. Just a thought.

This morning I came across a 196-day time lapse of growing an acorn from seed. I think the most cool part of it all was learning that the youtube channel is for someone or something named boxlapse. Although there IS a boxlapse website. it simply sends you off to youtube, twitter, etc.

I didn’t watch all the videos, however I did watch the one for a mango tree. I’m rather partial to growing mangos from seed since my sister used to have a mango tree and would send me mangos. When I finally figured out how to grow the trees from seeds, she moved and I lost access to the seeds (oh, well, and the mango fruit as well). Of that last batch, I planted 6 seeds. Two years later only one has survived but it seems healthy. Fingers crossed!

Not good comes to mind. As I read a National Geographic article posted through the MSN news links, one of the Yosemite ecologists apparently had something stronger to say. Here in New Mexico, particularly at the moment, we don’t look kindly on prescribed burns but it seems that the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park, one of the giant sequoia last safe havens, may be the beneficiary of the positive effects of prescribed burns. As I write this, the fire is about 27% contained and the sequoias remain at risk. The long-term use of prescribed burns, since 1971, appears to have dampened the severity of the fire in the grove. Low winds and the ability to keep the trees protected with supplemental water and wraps are also helping. While the damage to all the plants in this and the many other wildfires is heart-rending, this famous grove has caught the attention of the public and the fire is receiving lots of coverage. I hope that it will serve to raise awareness of the critical need we all have to work to reduce the effects of the shifting climate.