Tuesday, July 18, 2017

beauty underfoot

So this is what happens when you take the Nikon into the garden: you realize even the enslaved plants are...well... plants. Just like the wilder ones.  There are similarities. The corn, for instance, reminds me of grass. 


The same dangly bits. 

And I'm struck by a fractal: the little green and red...leafy bits enclosing the not-yet-exploded flowers (scales? sepals?) Whatever they're called, they're mini-me versions of the husks you strip off an ear of corn. The shape of the unopened flower is the same as that of the ultimate, eventual, ear. 

At this point, I am so clueless about corn that I'm not even sure what I'm looking at. It's a few flowers, I get that - although come to think of it, are the stamens inside these bell-shaped tubes? Are there male and female flowers...on the same plant? different plants? Dunno. Generally speaking, I think that's just a few eventual kernels I'm looking at (assuming they're fertilized), and that the whole long thing itself (most of it out of frame) is the whole ear of corn. I dunno. 

It feels kinda good to be clueless. It means there's some more discovering to do - always a good thing. 

Here's another one - ear? - it's on the same stalk as the more horizontally-oriented one from the picture above. Which makes me think it is, in fact, an ear. I DO know there are multiple ears on a stalk; I've seen that. This is so like plantain (a common lawn weed; where we park our cars is loaded with it) it makes me wonder how closely related they are.


Whoever first domesticated/bred plants really figured some shit out. 

Now here's something adorable, from the other end of the garden bed:


Wee baby peppers.


Lots of them.




Is that not the cutest? I'm kinda fascinated by the striations in the wall of the pepper; they kind of echo the veins in the (sepals?) (the hugging bits). More fractally stuff. I know they'll fade; I don't recall ever seeing a bell pepper with little speckled lines...

Meanwhile, Kevin planted a couple of echinaceas at my request, so's I could have ready access to hallucinogens. 



Oh yeah, baby.



Ah, not even opened up yet. Let's go backwards in time, shall we...




Maybe I should get out in the garden more often. 

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