Most of the time I have to devote to creative things like photography or blogging is Friday, Saturday and Sunday so I can be a little slow catching up to what’s happened during the week. Here are a few of the dishes I have standing in the sink:

Greg was wondering about a plant I’d generically called a thistle earlier, and how it looked unlike what he was calling a thistle in his own garden. Thanks to a chain of weird coincidences of the sort that some might interpreted as miraculous enough to have founded a modern religion, I learned that my thistle is actually Dipsacus fullonum, a teasel. Both are in the asterid group of plants and unplesantly spiny, but this is a distant relative.

Fun facts about teasel (from Wikipedia):

• The individual florets that make up this larger flowering head start blooming about half-way up, then move both up and down, as you see in this picture.
• The dried flowers were used to comb impurities out of wool.

Thanks to Greg (again!) this blog has been awarded the prestigious 2008 Brillante Award. If I don’t end up having to hock it to pay for fuel for my Lear jet, you’ll see it on my side panel at some point in the future.


One of my recent posts had a quote that within it held another quote, one by Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and a few other volumes. Mary Ann had a post with a link to a video of him presenting some of his ideas. He’s an engaging speaker and has things to say. I worry that some of them work towards validating a human-centric world view that I try not to hold, but he’ll get you thinking.