Author: JLfromNH

Plant Galls

On investigating plants throughout the summer, it is not unusual to come across a bizarre looking growth on a plant, many times looking much like a tumor or a wart. These are galls and they are produced by a variety of parasitic organisms such as viruses, fungi, mites and insect grubs.

Galls come in an astonishing assortment of shapes, colors and sizes, depending on which organism created them and which plant is being parasitized. Gardeners may bemoan the appearance of these funky growths. But for the most part, they don’t really harm the plant unless it is already sickly or is heavily laden with galls, they only render it a bit unsightly to look at.

The invading organism releases a substance which irritates the surrounding plant cells which begin forming a microhabitat for the parasite to live in. Insect galls will often have nutritious starches and other materials which may insure that the grub remains in one spot and doesn’t entirely devour its host.

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The above picture shows a small clump of galls on a wild grape vine in my back yard. They are likely the product of grape midges that hatch from eggs laid by the mother inside the stem of the vine which then forms the gall. There are a variety of grape midges each with its own life cycle. The vine itself appears uninjured and as long as the damage remains minimal, I will leave it be.

This particular gall was found on a non spiny member of the thistle family (not sure of identity). The gall extends several inches along the stem, swelling it but not apparently interfering with the growth of the weed as it managed to produce flowers. Until I can firmly identify which plant it is, the identity of the gall maker will be uncertain.

This odd bulbous growth found on a jewelweed plant is also a gall. It is formed by the larva of the jewelweed gall midge. The egg producing the larva is planted by the mother into a forming flower bud which then creates this odd structure looking much like a Christmas ornament. Once it has matured enough, it will chew its way out, drop to the ground and winter over.

Galls can take many whimsical shapes, some looking so much like part of the plant that if you aren’t familiar with the species, you might not realize you are looking at a plant gall. One is the willow pinecone gall which resembles its namesake. It looks quite ordinary until you recall willow trees don’t have pine cones. Oak apple galls often look so much like apples, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an actual fruit. But a closer look reveals its true nature, an oddly structured home for the little grub inside.

It’s easy to pitch a hissy fit when you see these strange formations on prized plants in your garden. But for the most part they are harmless. Many of these larva and mites hide inside the plant to avoid predators such as birds and other insects who would gladly chow down on them if the opportunity presented itself. What looks like a nuisance to you is actually lunch to somebody else. If you really have to, just pinch off the leaf or odd growth and remember it’s merely another startling reminder of some of the astonishing adaptations to be found in Nature.

Vintage Art

I have a fondness for vintage art work and own several clip art books from Dover Publications with a wide assortment of illustrations. They range from elegant to comical, all with their own special charm.

The above illustration is from one of the clip art books. I like to call it the amazing levitating mop for if you look closely, you will see the maid is not really holding onto it.

Recently on the blog site Ecosophia, the writer John Michael Greer complained about busybodies of every sort and put out a call to have the Order of Anti-Poke Noses revived. Apparently there actually was such an organization and one of its calling cards is shown above with a delightful vintage image of a ghastly harridan poking a long proboscis over a fence and sticking it into the business of a quietly courting couple.

Off and on over the years I also collected vintage postcards and advertising cards such as the following.

Balsam’s Hair Tonic promised you would not only gain a youthful appearance if you made use of their product but a happy family life as well.

The reverse of the card (a bit hard to read because it is shopworn) extols its virtues and also advertises an accompanying health tonic that will cure insomnia, dyspepsia, rheumatism, malaria (!), jaundice and a host of other ailments, all for a buck fifty. What a deal!

This is a postcard which doubles as a fortune telling card for single ladies. With lots of green color and four leaf clover images, how can you go wrong finding out who your future hubby might be? (Notice it assumes he will be a gentleman, though some of the choices of Circle III seem to be more for working class fellows.) Fortunately no one ever made use of it so it now occupies my collection.

I’m guessing this postcard falls under the humorous category, though the humor seems a bit dated to me, not surprising since it’s from the early twentieth century.

What lies behind the appeal of vintage images like these, or any vintage item for that matter? One line of thought seems to be that while some of it may be the inexpensiveness of second hand items, there may also be a psychological basis for it as well. It allows us to mentally connect with the past and serve as a source of comfort in unstable times. While I can’t say that is the reason I enjoy these images, they do harken back to a simpler time when things seemed a bit saner and much more human.

The little sketch I recently made of a ‘dippy hippie’ may not be quite vintage but does make me nostalgic for times now long gone. Will such times ever come again? I think so. Especially if you are willing make an effort to make it happen.

Peace.

The Perils Of Gardening

All of us dream of having a garden like this –

But wind up with something that looks like this –

Well, maybe not that bad. But with all the hungry critters and erratic weather, it’s not easy to produce something that’s even halfway between the above photos. So how does one ward off persistent fence crashers such as deer and woodchuck, the two large beasts that cause me the most trouble?

Put up fencing. Lots and lots of fencing.

Chicken wire is also a good defense. Here are some of my peas under a force field of chicken wire.

And some of my wax beans with fencing and wire mesh.

I found a wire mesh cage stashed up in the top of the garage when cleaning out the detritus of 50 plus years. It makes a nice wire cage for the bush squash I am trying out.

Will any of this be effective in making it possible to harvest some veggies later on in the summer? Only time will tell. Stay tuned.

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I am happy to report the sale of a third story to the quarterly magazine Into The Ruins.
Thank you Mr. Caris!

Old War Stories From The Hospital

My late mother worked for a number of years at the local hospital before rheumatoid arthritis finally side-lined her. Before that she often brought home tales of things she had encountered in the hospital, going into a fair amount of detail. The result of that has been my possessing a relative immunity to gross-out stories. Another result is a better appreciation of the difficulties of caring for patients and resolving to be a good one myself if and when the occasion arises. (Reality check: Well, I like to think so but probably not).

Her stories covered a wide range from the absurd to the tragic. She often recalled with amusement of the little boy (perhaps three or four), hospitalized for some ailment. He didn’t like where he was, didn’t like the nurses and especially didn’t like what they were doing to him. His favorite tactic (though probably not very effective) was to stand up in bed and threaten to pee on the nurses if they came near. Another story was the birth of a baby boy to a couple who had been long childless. It was generally agreed among the nurses that this was one of the homeliest babies they had ever seen. They nick-named him Mister Magoo because of his resemblance to the cartoon character. But as far as the delighted parents were concerned, he was absolutely beautiful.


Long ago our local hospital was the go-to place for mothers in labor from a number of the surrounding towns. One winter day a laboring mother was being driven frantically by her husband (this was before 911) when control of the car was lost and they wound up ejected into a snow bank. This saved them from being critically injured as this was in the days before seatbelts were mandated. The ambulance duly rescued them and brought the couple to the hospital. However it was then discovered the mother was no longer in labor for the simple reason that she had given birth. Where was the baby? This entailed an even more frantic drive back to the accident scene where the baby was found thankfully unharmed though a bit chilled in the snow bank. Delivery by auto-ejection.

One day my mother came onto her shift and noticed a new patient in one of the rooms, a man with his arm in a sling looking very, very glum. According to the other nurses, this particular gentleman had been partaking of the copious refreshments at the local Elks club which has a very well supplied bar. He became so intoxicated that he fell off his bar stool and in doing so, broke his wrist rather badly. He was immediately rushed up to the hospital. A problem arose after he arrived there, as he was convinced his injury was non-existent. He proceeded to demonstrate his wellness by flapping his hand back and forth, much to the horror of the nurses who could hear the broken bones in his wrist going *crunch*crunchety*crunch***! He was truly feeling no pain, a situation that corrected itself once he sobered up.

More bizarre was the patient who was brought in for frost-bite to his feet. He was an avid mountain climber who had over-estimated his endurance to cold. While he kept all his toes, his heavily callused feet soon showed the effect of the frost bite. The calluses began sloughing off in huge disgusting chunks, some quite thick. Apparently during the summer, this guy often walked barefoot, before it was fashionable to do so, building up quite a layer of calluses as a result. After this rather gruesome process had completed itself, it was discovered that underneath the skin was pink and healthy. It was theorized that because of their thickness the calluses had insulated his feet and kept the frostbite from being worse than it was. Nowadays we obsess about having soft smooth skin on our feet, fretting about the least little corn or callus we develop, forgetting that for countless ages we walked barefoot and got around just fine.

Because it was a hospital, tragedy was never far off. The most dramatic event that happened when my mother was still working was the derailment of one of the trains at the Cog Railroad back in 1967, when 8 people were killed and over 74 injured. The flood of patients that poured in severely tested the skills of the hospital staff. This was at a time before the modern day emergency medical training programs became a recognized specialty taken for granted today. Still the doctors and nurses rose to the challenge. My mother’s shift was usually 3:00 to 11:00 PM but because of the situation she worked straight through until the morning. It was something she always remembered for a long time afterwards with a sense of accomplishment.

It was in the late seventies (78 or 79) that she finally had to quit work due to her arthritis. In her later years there was one patient she helped care for just before she left who she always wondered about. A young man, a tourist up for the skiing, was brought in by a friend. He was very ill but the doctors were having difficulty diagnosing what was wrong with him. Although it wasn’t too openly talked about, it was understood by the nurses that both men were gay. Since the doctors were having no luck treating the young man, unable to even pin down what he was ill from, he was shipped down to a hospital in Boston, his eventual fate unknown. The question that was always on my mother’s mind was this a case of AIDS?

Since the first recognized cases of the disease in the gay population were noted in medical literature in June of 1981, it’s entirely possible AIDS was the source of this patient’s illness. Since 1981 was the year it was officially recognized, there were almost certainly early cases that came and went, the patients dying without it being suspected what was ailing them.

My mother had originally gone to nursing school before she was married but had to discontinue it, when her mother died suddenly and she returned home to assist her father in raising her other siblings. She subsequently returned to Littleton but met and married my father without picking up where she had left off in her nursing education. It wasn’t until after the stress of a hysterectomy and dealing with a mentally ill son that she finally went back to nursing as a way to cope and return to something that had been a dream of hers. She made many friends, both nurses and former patients and had many good memories about her nursing work. Oddly when I went looking for a picture of her in her nursing uniform (complete with little white hat) there was none to be found. She evidently never got around to posing for one. But I think the picture below captures her spirit well enough. Thanks Mom.

There’s No Place Like Home

Several months ago we were treated to what had to be one of the more bizarre publicity stunts I’ve seen in a while. Elon Musk, business magnate (think billionaire) and owner of Tesla Inc launched his enormous new rocket, the Falcon Heavy as part of his recent endeavor for SpaceX, a company he created, to usher in the future among the stars (Mars in particular) that we’ve all been dreaming of.

As the payload for the test launch of this mammoth creation, Elon placed a cherry-red Tesla roadster complete with a space-suited mannequin at the wheel inside the capsule of the payload rocket and blasted it off to a presumed rendezvous with the planet Mars (or at least show he could get it out that far). Pundits lost no time in speculating whether this was a legitimate scientific effort or just a weird art statement by Mr. Musk.

Elon is of an older world outlook which envisions a Star Trekky universe where humanity zooms about the cosmos pursuing whatever destiny has in store for us. Part of this vision includes human colonies on Mars. He’s already stated we should have had a moon base by now and has begun calling for one (I’m guessing he’s going to offer his services in its construction.)

There are some significant problems with the blithe assumption that it is somehow predestined that humanity will launch itself from Earth as easily as it did from the sea shores where it launched its ocean borne vessels. As some of you have already noticed, the promise of flying cars, floating cities, faithful robot servants and other Jetson-like gimmicks have not quite come to fruition despite after fifty years of promises.

Money is a big factor. It just costs a hellacious amount of money to finance any of these amazing creations. The second law of thermodynamics puts more than a few constraints on our ability to even produce these visions of the future. But the modern day fascination with the concept of progress blinds us to the reasons many of us are still chugging along in a gas powered auto instead of flitting about high above in our flying cars. Tom Wessels in his book The Myth of Progress, discusses the numerous problems with this world view and why it is having a devastating impact on the environment and on ourselves.

Planting a working colony on Mars is fraught with issues. Since Mars has a very thin atmosphere, there’s nothing to shield against dangerous radiation both solar and cosmic so initially the colonies would have to be underground. To understand how problematic that is, we only need to take a look at the science outposts located in Antarctica.

Here is about the closest we can get on Earth to the situation on Mars. Even with breathable air and water fresh enough to drink (once you melt it first), life at the bottom of the world is grueling. Since Antarctica is not the balmiest place, everything must be brought in; food, medicine, equipment etc. Brutal weather conditions can keep researchers trapped at the stations for weeks, even months and cabin fever can produce strange mental symptoms.

Alcoholism and drug use is not unusual as a means of combatting boredom but it’s not the sort of thing you want to see on a bright shiny space colony. If you have a medical issue, you are really in a pickle. A few years back the news reported the frightening ordeal of a doctor stationed in Antarctica who discovered she had breast cancer and had to self-treat her condition before it became possible to airlift her out. Space enthusiasts might make the case that the Martian colony will be well supplied with all the necessaries of life. But how long will that take? Will such a colony ever really be self-sufficient? What happens if there’s a war back on Earth and the supply lines get cut off?

I am all in favor of space exploration while it’s still feasible to do so. But we need to be realistic. We’re not gods and must perpetually struggle with the physical restraints that the universe imposes on us. Robot proxies in the forms of Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini and others have given us marvelous pictures of what lies out there and will continue to do so without putting human life and sanity at risk. Mars may be a fascinating place to visit but nobody really wants to live there. As the character Dorothy Gale said at the ending of the Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home!”