AW #63: Plants and Rocks, or Rocks and Plants

Photos courtesy Arthur Kruckeberg and Dan Poelma.

I’m hosting December’s Berry Go Round, a carnival for plant bloggers.  In my solicitation for posts I tried to encourage geo-bloggers to participate, as botany and geology often interact or are linked in some way.  Then I noticed that the Accretionary Wedge #63 geo-carnival was host-less.  I thought ... why not both?  My topic, Plants and Rocks or vice versa, was accepted making this the Bargain of the Year!  You can submit your AW contribution to the December BGR too.

To submit a post to the Accretionary Wedge, provide a link in a Comment below or tweet to @plantsandrocks.  UPDATE:  Deadline is the end of the month.  To join the December BGR, see the solicitation post for details.

Plants on Rocks 1

Cary's beardtongue grows only on calcareous sites in the Bighorn Mountains.  Photo by Andrew Kratz.

Plants on Rocks 2

Grassland - forest mosaic determined by bedrock; Devils Tower, Wyoming.

Rocks from Plants 1

Petrified Miocene logs, eastern Washington.

Rocks from Plants 2

Mining the remains of sub-tropical trees in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming.

Plants and rocks make lovely photos ...

Laramie columbine on Laramie granite.

... as do rocks and plants.

Precambrian stromatolites decorated with alpine wildflowers.

What do you know about plants?

Photos courtesy Arthur Kruckeberg and Dan Poelma.

It's time for December’s Berry Go Round, a carnival for bloggers who write about plants.  You don't have to be a botanist to participate!  Poets write about plants, photographers take photos of plants, most us eat plants (favorite recipe?), and plants and rocks often are inextricably linked (hint, hint ... I hope some geo-bloggers contribute).

There are several ways to submit posts:

• use the online submission form
• tweet a link with the hashtag #berrygoround
• provide a link in a Comment on this post (below)
• tweet a link to @plantsandrocks
• if you don’t blog yourself, you can email a guest post (text and/or photos) to In the Company of Plants and Rocks, by December 22

The submission deadline is December 26.  I'll post a summary with links to contributions at the end of the month.

Plants on rocks: 

Forest-grassland mosaic dictated by bedrock, Devils Tower, Wyoming.

Plants to rocks:

Petrified Miocene trees, eastern Washington.

Plants in rocks:

Digging up remains of semitropical trees at a Wyoming coal mine.  Source.

Plants in food:

Yucca petals are yummy in salads.

Plants in poetry:

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.

From Aspens by Edward Thomas,

shared by Anne Buchanan of the mermaid’s tale.

Blog Crawl Gems

This Week's Treasures

If you’ve recovered sufficiently from the New Year’s carousing, you might enjoy the Botany and Spirits series that finished up last week at Botany Photo of the Day, including juniper (gin), sugar cane (rum), agave (tequila), hawthorne (a vodka flavoring) and especially interesting:  Baudoinia compniacensis, the angels' share fungus, which lives on the “angels’ share” of whiskey and other distilled products -- the part that is lost to evaporation during aging in wooden barrels.  Though common and widespread, angels’ share fungus was properly named only recently, following detective work to explain the black mold that was coating neighborhoods near Hiram Walker warehouses.  The story is told in detail in The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus.

Thanks to Ron Schott of Geology Home Companion for pointing me to What are the roots of geobotany? and the Utah Geological Survey blog.  He correctly guessed that a post on plants and rocks would interest me :)

Next, an article from Scientific American on some of the neat things to watch for in the sky in the year to come.  Joe Rao presents “The top 12 "skylights" for this coming year including a "double planet" in May and a Venus transit of the sun in June.”  This is a handy list for someone who loves to see cool astronomy things but is never able to keep track of what’s happening on a regular basis.  But I already slept through the first one -- Quadrantid meteor shower Wednesday morning before dawn.

Another great Earth Picture of the Day:  Brocken Spectre and Glory from Northern Italy.  Brocken is where the phenomenon supposedly was first reported -- the high point of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany.  This peak seems to have lots of mystical properties and phenomena associated with it, so it's not surprising that spectres were found there.  As Goethe wrote in 1808:

Now to the Brocken the witches ride;
The stubble is gold and the corn is green;
There is the carnival crew to be seen,

And Squire Urianus will come to preside.
So over the valleys our company floats,

With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

Click to see witches flying around the Brocken in this illustration
by draftsman L. S. von Bestehorn (1732; public domain).

There are more EPODs of Brocken Spectre and Glory here and here.  Many different optical effects are explained at Atmospheric Optics, a pretty neat web site that I stumbled upon.  Maybe one day I will encounter my shadow as a Brocken Spectre with a halo of Glory, that would be so cool!

Finally another tip for aging baby boomers to stay ahead of the grim reaper -- get up from that computer, sitting is killing you! followed by No Really - Sitting is Killing You (some readers were skeptical).

GR courtesy FBNY.