curiousbotanicals

[curiousbotanicals]

[curiousbotanicals]

Legs

[curiousbotanicals]

i'm having a Depression Episode so pay my hysterics no mind but my heart hurts because lawn culture and land development and destruction of habitats have taken away people's memory of plants outside of the standard ornamental flower bed plants and a handful of wildflowers.

People live and work and socialize confined to areas where hundreds and hundreds of plant species have been extirpated, along with the thousands of animals that depend upon them, and its viewed as a niche hobby to even visit places where 95% of life hasn't been eradicated

So they buy hostas and knock out roses and arrange them in flower beds of shitty black mulch and don't think about what is "native" because they have no experience with living things just existing and not being sold to them as products

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Nepenthes lowii

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alfonso maseda varela

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Silene stenophylla. A once forgotten flower blooms once more.

old gods are waking

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dark science beyond belief

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I don't think it really hits for most people how much topsoil is an incredibly depleted resource that is virtually nonrenewable under current land management practices.

Topsoil you buy at a garden center most likely is not real topsoil, but rather simply compost mixed with sand. Many people have never touched topsoil. In vast swathes of inhabited land, topsoil simply does not exist anymore.

On the lawn care subreddit, people will occasionally be alarmed that their soil feels "mushy" and "soft" after the addition of lots of organic matter, or post something greatly alarmed about the area of "soft" soil in their yard.

These people would shit their pants in awe if they felt the soil in a forest. Their frame of reference for "soil" is so completely, sadly spoiled by compacted, concrete-like lawn dirt. This is a big reason I'm "anti-lawn." Lawns consistently have some of the worst, most devastated soil imaginable.

Topsoil is a LIVING community of microbes, plant roots, decaying organic matter, and perhaps most importantly of all, fungal mycelium. You cannot buy it. You cannot synthesize it. No amount of fertilizer will turn compacted lawn dirt into topsoil. It takes a hundred years to build one inch of topsoil.

In the USA, prairie soil was plowed up to make fields, and we all learned about the Dust Bowl in school, but we don't talk enough about the fact that plowing up the prairies engulfed half the country in devastating dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people choking and coughing up dirt all the time and sweeping deep drifts of dirt out of their houses. Like that happened. Damn.

What we did was something utterly devastating, the near total destruction of hundreds and hundreds of years' worth of an irreplaceable natural resource. And it's happened all over the country. We will never comprehend how much we lost when we lost the topsoil.

[curiousbotanicals]

Meconopsis balangensis var. balangensis is a newly described poppy from the Balang Pass of Sichuan, China.

photograph by Ed Shaw | Flickr CC

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I would like to live in a greenhouse.

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Yulan magnolia flowers looking like birds

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Boophone haemanthoides

(via)

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Blooming bottle tree in Socotra, Yemen

[x]

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荷花hehua, lotus flower in summer by 梁木辛_