#shrubby five-finger

[thebotanicalarcade]

n260_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: North American wild flowers. Washington, D.C. :Smithsonian Institution,1925.. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/42602925

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Farming Destroyed Brazil’s Rain Forests. It Could Also Save Them

In a field of bare red dirt in São Paulo state, Paula Costa is trying to turn back the clock. Five hundred years ago, this land was part of the Mata Atlantica, a dense, diverse rain forest that covered 15% of Brazil. Its trees stretched more than 2,000 miles along the eastern Atlantic coast, and far inland. But today 93% of the forest has been stripped of trees, with much of it turned over to monoculture farming. Costa, a 36-year-old biologist, bangs the ground with her fist: it’s hard, the dry soil degraded by the tropical sun.

Yet on this sweltering morning in March 2022, a few green shoots have forced their way through the surface. The rain forest is making a comeback. “These will be jack beans. These are millet. These are radishes,” she says, fingering them lovingly. “They’re going to bring the soil back to life.”

This is not just a reforestation project. It’s also a farm. Soon, those green pioneers will be joined by shrubby coffee plants, big-leaved banana trees, and native trees, like sturdy hardwood jatobas, or towering guanandis. As they grow, some plants will pull underground nutrients to the topsoil with their roots, while others provide shade and draw moisture down from the atmosphere. Most of them will produce crops to sell. “Everything has its function,” Costa says.

She and her partner Valter Ziantoni, a 41-year-old forest engineer, are experts in agroforestry—a method of growing food and other things humans need by mimicking natural ecosystems. In 2021, the couple began planting agroforestry systems on parcels of degraded agricultural land around the town of Timburi. By 2025, they aim to to plant a flag for a new way of farming over 2,500 acres of the former Mata Atlantica.

Agroforestry closely resembles the way Indigenous peoples managed the lands that became Brazil for millennia. That was before the 20th century, when leaders of European descent began calling on citizens to “subdue the forest,” including both the Mata Atlantica and the larger Amazon rainforest, to the north of the country. The aim was to replace diverse landscapes with single crops that had more immediate profit potential, and it has become even more entrenched in recent years under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. From 2019 to 2022, he stopped enforcing policies meant to protect rain forests and Indigenous communities, resulting in a 60% surge in annual deforestation rates.

Continue reading.

[whatsbloomingnow]

Three-toothed Cinquefoil (Sibbaldia tridentata (Aiton) Paule & Soják)

Rosaceae (Rose Family) Synonym(s): Shrubby Five-fingers Base Flower Color: WhiteReproductive Phenology: May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sept For more information about this plant, Click Here.

[floweroftheday]

Potentilla & fly by tuvidaloca Via Flickr: golden hardhack (Dasiphora fruticosa) --- Fingerstrauch (DSC9751)

[katarascape]

A list of all the Australian plants I know of that are bush food just because:

Bunya Pine

[Image ID: Two large green, very round, pinecones against a white background. Shown in the foreground are some small very spiny-looking green twigs, the ‘leaves’ of a pine cone which are brown and green, and five pale pine nuts. End ID]

Bunya Pine cones. A lot like your American or European pine cones except they’re as big as your head. The nuts taste a bit like chestnuts, can be ground into paste to make bread, boiled, roasted, fermented, eaten raw etc. and have a bit of heft to them so like. Good food. They grow naturally in South East QLD and can be seen in some old gardens and parks.

The species itself is the only surviving member of an extinct prehistoric genus and traditionally the Wakka Wakka people (the custodians of the Bunya Mountains, named for obvious reasons) would host massive festivals with the ripening of the pine cones and people would come from miles around.

Macadamias

[Image ID: A close up picture of Macadamia nuts in their shells, which are warm brown and almost perfectly round. One is split open to show the white nut inside. End ID]

Macadamias are pretty well commercialised, to the point I grew up not even really realising they were a native plant. But my siblings and I have spent whole weekends picking macadamias from a tree in my aunt’s yard and cracking them open on the footpath to eat like possums so.

Lilly pillies

[Image ID: A close up photo of a large bundle of bright pink grape-sized fruits amongst light green, glossy leaves. End ID]

There’s a few varieties of lilly pilly but as far as I know they’re all safe to eat and the ones I’ve had are super tasty. They’re a shrubby kind of tree and are a staple of private gardens and parks alike in Southern QLD and, I can only guess, but probably the Southern states as well. They have a few little seeds inside them and are very attractive to native birds too.

Though I’ve confused them for cheese trees before (which taste like tomatoes, not my favourite) the ones I’ve had have a kind of sweet gingery taste.

Cheese Tree

[Image ID: A close up picture of small pinkish fruits clumped on twigs with dark green, glossy leaves. The fruits are much like a flat pumpkin in shape and texture. End ID]

Only seen one of these before, lived in the yard of one of my aunties. Tastes like tomatoes so I only had one. Also a shrubby kind of tree, large seeds.

Finger Lime

[Image ID: A picture of two elongated limes against a black cloth. One fruit has been split open and the pale green inside is spilling out. The inside is of a texture much like fish eggs, tapioca pearls etc. End ID]

Comes in a few different varieties and colours. The bush itself is kinda like a domestic lime tree but with smaller leaves and many, many spines. Tastes uhh...like limes. Obviously.

It’s common for gardening enthusiasts to have a few plants so you can buy these relatively easily (which is how I got them).

Winter Apple/Berry

[Image ID: A slightly grainy close up picture of round pink berries growing along a plant with long, narrow green leaves. End ID]

My most recent bush food ‘discovery’. I found it growing in my backyard and thought that it was obviously gonna be some introduced english weed or something and was delighted when one of my local museums had a planter box full of it with an information plaque and everything.

Anyway, there is a weed very similar in appearance I’m not game enough to try. But the berry itself, probably not much bigger than your standard garden pea. It’s got a tart kind of taste, I’d liken it a little to passionfruit, and has a very large seed. So like. It hasn’t got a lot of nutritional value but I eat it just because.

I’ve had no luck trying to reproduce it via seed (the internet says it has a funky inhibitor chemical in it? idk why) but it reproduces from cuttings beautifully, just like a succulent.

Anyway, there’s a couple more I know of that I haven’t added yet because this is way too long already but uh. Here :)

[nonbinary-nature-lover-jeri]

Scenes From My Walk - Shrubby Cinquefoil (other names are potentilla, golden hardhack, bush cinquefoil, shrubby five-finger, widdy, and kuril tea). #ScenesFromMyWalk #Potentilla #ShrubbyCinquefoil #YellowFlower #Plant #HighElevationFlower #Naturalist #PhotoByJeriRae (at Santa Fe, New Mexico) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdloGbcOVNI/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[shelleysackier]

There is a venerable phrase many of us have heard countless times in our lives:

Doveryai, no proveryai.

Or if your Russian is a little bit rusty, Trust, but verify.

It’s an old proverb American writer Suzanne Massie passed on to Ronald Reagan before he began traveling to Russia to discuss U.S. and Soviet relations during his presidency.

It became for him somewhat of a trademark phrase.

It became a lodestar for many of us, a crutch for a few, but sage advice for all.

A week ago, my hound, Haggis, had none of the typical skepticism that normally washes across his face unless spotting a jar of peanut butter, his leash, or the hind leg of a freshly shot deer in my hands. But this was because he could no longer spot anything.

Literally. His hair had grown to a length where it could serve as an emergency ladder should he be close to a second story window and we had a fire.

So, when he finally heard the hair-raising snippets of my hair-cutting scissors, that skepticism shifted straight into suspicion and finally parked itself at defiance.

I had never cut his locks before, and he believed it was best if we left it that way.

Today, we find a great swath of our population experiencing a crisis of trust.

And why is that? The reasons are many. Understanding them is paramount and will likely shift the way we think, plan, behave, and move forward.

Together, this globe is redefining what life upon this planet is like. We are forced to assess our work, our relationships, our lifestyles, and the unforeseen shape they will morph into down the road.

Over the next several days I employ great determination during my time of internationally urged self-isolation to convince myself and my great hairy hound that I can accomplish the Herculean task of carving through his shrubby mane in the same way most of my fellow humans try to muddle their way through the maze of subterfuge, pretext, and great gobs of misinformation clouding our sight of the truth.

Daily, I place him in an unnatural position and beg him to be still as I scissor away for the space of an hour. I listen to the news: the practitioners, pundits, the press, and the president—each one with a decreasing sense of belief.

I feel Haggis tremble beneath the sound of sharp shears, and I put the scissors down and soothe him with all the ridiculous cooing tones meant to bring forth some ease. But I echo his same tiny twitch of skin when I’ve nipped him with the tip, or when they broadcast some new tally.

Every day certain numbers shoot up, and others slide down. We are warned by some and encouraged by others. Who do we trust? Who should we trust?

With boastful reassurance, I tell Haggis that he’s going to look fine—don’t gaze in the mirror, don’t question my actions, don’t think about it too hard. Trust me.

Each afternoon I hear about people who have heeded and those who’ve just balked. About those who have saved lives and those who have risked them. I wonder if, when this is all over, and I’m face to face with strangers, will I look at them with a fresh question: can I trust you?

And each afternoon I stand from my work, look at the dog, take a deep breath, and exhale with despair.

Good lord, what a mess. I’ve never done this before. And clearly it shows.

I fill him with flattery and maudlin praise, hoping he can’t see through my bluster and swash. But he feels my inexperience. And he knows that whatever my actions, I’ll not feel them as keenly as he does. He discovers at some point—day four or day five—that I’m frustrated with this routine, I’m wishing it over, and I’m unhappy with the results.

But he also knows that there’s no turning back, and this is where his lack of trust in my skills begins to crystallize into disregard.

I am somewhat offended as each day he pulls away from me, refusing to hand me a hoof or his chin.

You’re going to slow.

You’ve made a right mess.

Look here, now I bleed.

I hear him.

I should have left this up to the professionals. Although this is not a choice. We work with what we have, and a large team of experts does not appear at my door.

Each day I scooch the hound outside, toward the mile-long stretch of road between us and the mailbox. I keep my fingers crossed, hoping no one sees as we walk along. Haggis is only mid-way through this pruning, sporting a thick Mohawk down the length of his back, a mop-head, and four legs that are shaved only three-quarters down, making it appear that he is a belligerent teen prancing about in dog-friendly Uggs.

A neighbor stops his truck and rolls his window down slowly. He eyes the two of us with suspicion.

Has he got the virus?

No, I answer. He’s in the middle of a haircut.

Looks like he’s got the virus.

It does my ego and my confidence no favors to receive yet more criticism, and I mope the rest of the way home.

But tomorrow comes, and after convincing Haggis to climb atop the coffee table/barber’s chair once more, I ask myself a critical self-esteem building question:

What would Vidal Sassoon do?

It’s true—it’s not particularly hashtag worthy, but it seemed relatively uplifting for the moment.

And when one is on one’s own, navigating uncharted waters and expecting choppy results, one will search for signs of inspiration, direction, and security wherever one may find it.

(I’m lookin’ at you Dr. Fauci …)

We muddle through and trudge along. We rise to the occasion and make a small difference.

We find places to put our faith: in facts, in evidence, in one another.

And until we emerge on the other side, knackered, shaggy, and injured, we offer kindness if not confidence.

A spoonful of peanut butter can go a long, long way.

Surely the Russians knew that.

~Shelley

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Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

On the Cutting Edge of Shear Madness There is a venerable phrase many of us have heard countless times in our lives: Doveryai, no proveryai…

[wanderlust-journal]

 An Essay on Home

Maybe thirty metres down from the gravel shoulder where your cousin Manuel transcribed an arc with his bristled arm and said in brisk Portuguese what was your land and what was not, you take a hard turn into the bush. What your metropolitan eyes took for a path turns out to be a track carved by the bodies of wild boar, or perhaps the feral cattle that too belong to you in theory. You fight through clumps of yellow lupin and rock-rose until a clearing opens up in the scrub and a dome of azulejo mountain sky unfurls above you. The sun dipped behind the horizon half an hour ago, but the last coals of sunset still smolder in the petals of the lavender. The call of the hoopoe and the electric hum of the katydid ring against the far mountains. Even the grass snaps underfoot, so parched the thought of fire seems spark enough. And your cork oaks, their grey skin ridged with sadness, cup the whole glade in their tangled fingers. Later, you realize that you have stood so long with these trees that mosquitos have their faces in your veins and you don’t care.You’ve never felt less human than you do now, arms outstretched, legs planted like saplings in your ancestral dirt.

What in this environment has resonated in your denatured soul? Why does this Portuguese meadowland you barely know enfold you while the Canadian wild, with its charms and terrors, never has? On your mother’s side, you are immigrants. Your grandparents fled Salazar in the sixties and for three generations, Canada has meant concrete, skyscraper, and bus. Your father traces his family back to those mysterious ‘Old Stock Canadians’ our former Prime Minister so loved, but despite offshoots in Cape Breton, Saint John’s, Saskatchewan, nowhere is home. Perhaps this landlessness defines the settler experience. To put it more kindly than truly, every plot a European occupies is ‘borrowed.’ Could your new joy in this old country be a repatriation?

But you forget your mission here, a sting out of a corporate espionage thriller, only slow and Portuguese. Your grandfather noticed discrepancies in the cork yields of his two properties. Convinced he was being cheated, he sent his immediate offspring to validate his claim. Earlier, while Manuel—your cousin, your family’s executor in the cork business, the smallest man you’ve ever seen—explains the lack of yield, you strain to follow his mumble-mouthed Portuguese. Still, you drop quotes about harvest periods and virgin product, and smile as Manuel sucks in air through his teeth. He didn’t expect you to understand anything.

Cork cultivation diverges from mainstream forestry in that the trees never fall. Instead, the timbermen, called tiradors,target living bark, a light, porous substance used most notably as a sophisticated stopper that allows wine to breathe and mature. The tiradorswork in pairs, one crooked in the branches, the other on the ground. Each blow of their steelhead axe must strike with perfect force—too much, and it may split the tender phellogen. Too little and it won’t penetrate the tough outer layer. Once a sheet is squared, the tirador wedges his axe-handle into the ‘ruler,’ or vertical cut, and pries the bark off with a sticky crack. The tree, now nude, flashes orange and angry, but in a few months its hide will thicken again. Since the whimsical branch patterns of the cork oak resist mechanization, fathers have entrusted the same crown cuts, necklace cuts, and rulers to their sons for three centuries.

Manuel certainly looks like a peasant out of another age, all isolation and sunburn and outhouse, but his explanation for the low yields smacks of the academy. Climate change bakes the dirt, and without subsistence farmers around to plant nitrogen fixers like favas among the roots, the cork oak can’t absorb its nutrients. And, he says, there are no more young men to clear the land.

Ah, you say to your mother. Your grandfather had sent money to buy into a government work program for this purpose. Manuel claims the paperwork got lost, but you smell a rat. The program also surveys the borders, and you suspect Manuel had moved a handful of property markers. It’s a bold trade on his part. Every few years, one had to stamp out infestations of rock-rose or compromise the crop. These shrubby flowers’ tissue-paper petals in pink and white conceal the brutality of their underground advance. They have an alliance with trufflesthat twist their hairy mycelium around the rock-rose’s extensive roots. These fungi burn the soil with toxins that kill any nearby plant, so the rock-rose has the lebensraumto drop their hard pointed seeds. As this brush spreads, it chokes the cork oaks and leads to bad stock. With nobody to keep it in check… Manuel shakes his head. Soon, he says, it’s finished.

Your average Canadian could not tell a maintained orchard from a feral one. No rigid lines of fruit-trees here; cork oaks spot over their meadows in random clumps. Animals both wild and domesticated graze on the grass and the acorns sprinkled beneath their canopies. This ecosystem, called the montado,is a created wilderness organized for the nourishment and aesthetic pleasure of its human users. It also supports a delicate spread of animal and plant residents. Consider Linaria ricardoi, an elegant purple toadflax with medicinal properties. It relies on low-intensity farming and control of shrub encroachment to find purchase in the nutrient-poor soil. As former farmers flocked to cities, Linaria ricardoi’s niche shrunk. It survives in a handful of populations around the city of Beja, including the glade you stand in. You register the hummingbird-shaped flowers only as dots of amethyst that hover by your feet. Close your eyes and you forget them. Soon, the world will too. Their loss heralds others. The montadoand the similar Spanish dehesa provide the last asylum for the Iberian Lynx and the Spanish Imperial Eagle, apex predators whose disappearance would further fragment the food chain. In the montado, humans act as a tentpole species that shelters biodiversity rather than curtails it.

Oddly enough, in the town where you have lived your entire life, on the obverse hemisphere, much the same type of human-nature interface existed for thousands of years. The Lekwungen and SENĆOŦEN speaking-peoples that hold deep claim to the island of your shallow roots monitored the indigenous Gary Oak meadow in much the same way the tiradors monitor the montado.In order to facilitate the growth of camas, a staple food, these peoples initiated campaigns of annual controlled burns and ritual husbandry. Just as in Portugal, this traditional knowledge has been eroded by the blast of modernity. Today, the Gary Oak meadow occupies only three percent of its former realms. Why, then, do you not feel a bond with the soggy oaks on the slopes of WMIEŦEN? Why does this joy live in parched trees you see yearly at most?

You think it comes down to a generational covenant with the land. The bark of the cork oak peels off with such ease as a natural defense against the wildfires that often lacerate the arid Portuguese meadows. Should the outer layer of bark burn, it drops off like the skin of a snake, and the tree underneath survives. Therefore, to shell the tree demands that humans becomethe shell to replace it. It’s a feudal pact: we get cork, and in turn protect against brush and brushfire. Abandoning this arrangement has fatal effects. In 2017, fires savaged Portugal, fueled by the masses of scrub that characterize untended orchards and the orderly rows of flammable Australian Eucalyptus planted for pulpwood by commercial timberers. In five months, over one hundred people burned or suffocated to death. Acres of farmland flaked away on the hot wind. Maybe this is your role here—unclog the montado and relink those chains from father to son that cracked generations ago in the shuffle of illegitimacy and immigration.

For a second, you think you have it. The flies, the wild onions, the purple flowers, the cork—they whisper to you. Much like the Portuguese language, you can understand what is being said, but you can’t speak. You can name crown and necklace cuts, but an axe in your hand is a dumb instrument. You know Linaria ricardoiby sight, but not which ailments it can salve. Dutiful you, you will lean on Manuel to get the land cleared, but you’ll suggest your mother turn a blind eye to the rest. You don’t talk montado, and you won’t learn. You have so little claim here.

You left your girlfriend at the rental car with Manuel. They must have cracked up at your desperate jog in no particular direction. You, the Great Indoorsman, in your Keens sandals and your khaki tee, crashing off the path, through a spider web, and out of sight. You laugh, finally, because what else can you do? From his dry cloister in the rock-rose, the hoopoe hoots its displeasure at your interruption.

BIO: This essay has previously been published online as the winner of the 2018 On the Verge Writing Contest at the University of Victoria.  Nicholas Guerreiro is a fifth year student in the departments of Theatre and Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. His plays Hidden People and O, Come All Ye Faithful were produced by the Student Alternative Theatre Company. Nicholas also wrote and directed Rural Ravaillac for SKAMpede, and remounted O, Come All Ye Faithful on the Victoria Fringe. Nicholas is the literary manager for small theatre company Vino Buono productions. His stories and poems won every round of the 2015 Times Colonist So You Think You Can Write contest and his essay Vassals of the Land won the 2017 On The Verge writing contest.

Vassals of the Land by Nicholas Guerreiro  An Essay on Home Maybe thirty metres down from the gravel shoulder where your cousin Manuel transcribed an arc with his bristled arm and said in brisk Portuguese what was your land and what was not, you take a hard turn into the bush.

[nonbinary-nature-lover-jeri]

Scenes From My Walk - Shrubby Cinquefoil ( other names are potentilla, golden hardhack, bush cinquefoil, shrubby five-finger, widdy, and kuril tea). #ScenesFromMyWalk #Potentilla #ShrubbyCinquefoil #YellowFlower #Plant #HighElevationFlower #Naturalist #PhotoByJeriRae (at Santa Fe, New Mexico) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdbUTOeuOQo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[nonbinary-nature-lover-jeri]

Scenes From My Walk - Shrubby Cinquefoil ( other names are golden hardhack, bush cinquefoil, shrubby five-finger, widdy, and kuril tea). #ScenesFromMyWalk #ShrubbyCinquefoil #YellowFlower #Plant #HighElevationFlower #Naturalist #PhotoByJeriRae (at Santa Fe, New Mexico) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdRpavrL7__/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[nonbinary-nature-lover-jeri]

Scenes From My Walk - Shrubby Cinquefoil ( other names are golden hardhack, bush cinquefoil, shrubby five-finger, widdy, and kuril tea). #ScenesFromMyWalk #ShrubbyCinquefoil #YellowFlower #Plant #HighElevationFlower #Naturalist #PhotoByJeriRae (at Santa Fe, New Mexico) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdJxNKrPTCl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=