Tag: Nature

Sandwiched In

Eight Photographs of Five Flowers

MichaelStephenWills7 Comments

After spreading 15,000 square feet of crabcrass/fertilizer and before attending a frigid first baseball game of a grandson, I capture eight photographs of five different flowers from our home.

More about the Magnolia, from Wikipedia: The name Magnolia first appeared in 1703 in the Genera of Charles Plumier (1646–1704), for a flowering tree from the island of Martinique (talauma). It was named after the French botanist Pierre Magnol.

More about the Hydrangea, from Wikipedia: Hydrangea is derived from Greek and means ‘water vessel’ (from ὕδωρ húdōr “water” + ἄγγος ángos or αγγεῖον angeîon “vessel”), in reference to the shape of its seed capsules.

More about these Quince, from Wikipedia: Although all quince species have flowers, gardeners in the West often refer to these species as “flowering quince”, since Chaenomeles are grown ornamentally for their flowers, not for their fruits.

More about Forsythia, from Wikipedia: The genus is named after William Forsyth (1737–1804), a Scottish botanist who was a royal head gardener and a founding member of the Royal Horticultural Society.

More about Forsythia, from Wikipedia: Narcissus is a genus of predominantly spring flowering perennial plants of the amaryllis family, Amaryllidaceae. Various common names including daffodil, narcissus, and jonquil are used to describe all or some members of the genus. Narcissus has conspicuous flowers with six petal-like tepals surmounted by a cup- or trumpet-shaped corona. The flowers are generally white and yellow (also orange or pink in garden varieties), with either uniform or contrasting colored tepals and corona.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Fair Weather View

Cumulus Clouds and Forsythia

MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

I read the New York Times on our porch on a spring Sunday afternoon, taking a moment to capture these fair weather cumulus clouds. Visible are Ithaca’s East Hill, downtown, and a forsythia bush in flower.

More about the flowers, from Wikipedia: Forsythias are popular early spring flowering shrubs in gardens and parks, especially during Eastertide; Forsythias are nicknamed the “Easter Tree”, the symbol of the coming spring.

More about this view, from Wikipedia: Cumulus clouds can form in lines stretching over 480 kilometers (300 mi) long called cloud streets. These cloud streets cover vast areas and may be broken or continuous. They form when wind shear causes horizontal circulation in the atmosphere, producing the long, tubular cloud streets. They generally form during high-pressure systems, such as after a cold front.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Thunderhead Sunset 3

the rest of the story

MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Here are the rest of the images captured in that August 2014 sunset.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Thunderhead Sunset 2

a highly idealized fantasy world

MichaelStephenWills5 Comments

The combination of water vapor in all its forms and the sun dipping below the horizon combined to form these magical images.

Maxfield Parrish refined his art to duplicate these effects in oil.

Parrish’s art is characterized by vibrant colors; the color Parrish blue was named after him. He achieved such luminous color through glazing. This process involves applying layers of translucent paint and oil medium (glazes) over a base rendering. Parrish usually used a blue and white monochromatic underpainting.

His paintings/illustrations were unique in that they depicted a highly idealized fantasy world that was accessible to the public. Although you will rarely see a glimpse of that color in reality, he was and still is linked with a particularly bright shade of blue that coated the skies of his landscapes. And it was not an easy task for him to complete. He invented a time-consuming process that involved a cobalt blue base and white undercoating, which he then coated with a series of thin alternating coatings of oil and varnish. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the resins he employed, known as Damar, fluoresce a shade of yellow-green, giving the painted sky its distinctive turquoise tint.

Reference: “Maxfield Parrish” from Wikipedia

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Thunderhead Sunset 1

Just the Facts

MichaelStephenWills4 Comments

Cumulonimbus (from Latin cumulus ‘heaped’, and nimbus ‘rainstorm’) is a dense, towering vertical cloud, typically forming from water vapor condensing in the lower troposphere that builds upward carried by powerful buoyant air currents.

Above the lower portions of the cumulonimbus the water vapor becomes ice crystals, such as snow and graupel, the interaction of which can lead to hail and to lightning formation, respectively. When occurring as a thunderstorm these clouds may be referred to as thunderheads. Cumulonimbus can form alone, in clusters, or along squall lines.

Graupel also called soft hail, hominy snow, or snow pellets, is precipitation that forms when supercooled water droplets in air are collected and freeze on falling snowflakes, forming 2–5 mm (0.08–0.20 in) balls of crisp, opaque rime.

Graupel is distinct from hail and ice pellets in both formation and appearance. However, both hail and graupel are common in thunderstorms with cumulonimbus clouds, though graupel also falls in winter storms, and at higher elevations as well.

These clouds can produce lightning and other dangerous severe weather, such as tornadoes, hazardous winds, and large hailstones. Cumulonimbus progresses from overdeveloped cumulus congestus clouds and may further develop as part of a supercell. Cumulonimbus is abbreviated Cb.

Reference: “Cumulonumbus Cloud” and “Graupel” from Wikipedia

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

A large and varied genus

“Water Banana”

MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. We discovered this seeming lily growing from the muck along the Treman Woodland Walk. Scientific Name: Lysichiton camtschatcensis. Common names: Asian skunk cabbage, white skunk cabbage, Far Eastern swamp lantern or Japanese swamp lantern.

This is a plant found in swamps and wet woods, along streams and in other wet areas of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and northern Japan. The common name “skunk cabbage” is used for the genus Lysichiton, which includes Lysichiton americanus, the western skunk cabbage, noted for its unpleasant smell. The Asian skunk cabbage is more variable: plants have been reported in different cases to smell disgusting, not at all, and sweet.

Click Me for “Finger Lakes Memories” my online gallery.

All photography using the IPhone 14 ProMax triple camera, raw format, edited on the phone.

In Japanese it is known as mizubashō (lit. “water-banana”) from a supposed similarity to the Japanese banana, a name with poetic rather than malodorous associations. It is not closely related to the true cabbage.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Stone Bench Memorial

Old Testament

MichaelStephenWills

Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. We found a path new to us, with this memorial stone bench, a biblical quote engraved on the seats. Biblical Quote on bench: “What doth the lord require of thee / but to do justly and to love mercy / and to walk with thy god.” Micah 6:8

The Book of Micah is the sixth of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, it records the sayings of Micah, whose name is Mikayahu (Hebrew: מִיכָיָ֫הוּ), meaning “Who is like Yahweh?”, an 8th-century BCE prophet from the village of Moresheth in Judah (Hebrew name from the opening verse: מיכה המרשתי). The book has three major divisions, chapters 1–2, 3–5 and 6–7, each introduced by the word “Hear,” with a pattern of alternating announcements of doom and expressions of hope within each division. Micah reproaches unjust leaders, defends the rights of the poor against the rich and powerful;[ while looking forward to a world at peace centered on Zion under the leadership of a new Davidic monarch. While the book is relatively short, it includes lament (1.8–16; 7.8–10), theophany (1.3–4), hymnic prayer of petition and confidence (7.14–20), and the “covenant lawsuit” (6.1–8), a distinct genre in which Yahweh (God) sues Israel for breach of contract of the Mosaic covenant.

Click Me for “Finger Lakes Memories” my online gallery.

All photography using the IPhone 14 ProMax triple camera, raw format, edited on the phone.

In the quote tract, (6:6–8), Micah speaks on behalf of the community asking what they should do in order to get back on God’s good side. Micah then responds by saying that God requires only “to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Thus declaring that the burnt offering of both animals and humans (which may have been practiced in Judah under Kings Ahaz and Manasseh) is not necessary for God.

Reference: “Micah” Wikipedia

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

A Personable Tree

Gifts from the past

MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. Found here growing outside native range, being the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to southern Pennsylvania, the Table Mountain Pine is named after the landform, not a particular mountain.

Click Me for “Finger Lakes Memories” my online gallery.

All photography using the IPhone 14 ProMax triple camera, raw format, edited on the phone.

Its pinecones drew me to this scraggly, ungainly, poorly formed tree. All general mankind finds useful in the, scientific name, Pinus pungens, otherwise known as Hickory Pine, Prickly Pine and Mountain Pine, is to grind it up for pulp or chop it for tinder.

Last of the Mohicans

That said, the final scene of the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans takes place in a nice Pinus pungens stand on a rocky mountaintop in North Carolina.

Personality

The tree has personality. Pinus pungens is the Lonesome Pine of the 1908 novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox, and popularized in the Laurel and Hardy film Way out West: “On the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine” Several “Lonesome Pine” hiking trails have been waymarked in the Blue Ridge Mountains and elsewhere in the Appalachians.

Pinecone Bud

Pinus pungens prefers dry conditions and is mostly found on rocky slopes, favoring higher elevations, from 300–1,760 meters (980–5,770 ft) altitude. It commonly grows as single scattered trees or small groves, not in large forests like most other pines, and needs periodic disturbances for seedling establishment. The three tallest known ones are in Paris Mountain State Park, South Carolina; they are 26.85 to 29.96 meters (88 ft 1 in to 98 ft 4 in) tall.

Reference: “Pinus pungens” Wikipedia.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Bluestone Monuments

Gifts from the past

MichaelStephenWills

Pam and I ambled around the Arboretum for our Easter 2023 outing. A type of sandstone popular with Cornell monument builders, called “Lenroc” after a mansion build by Cornell’s founder, was used for these benches built into the hillside of the FR Newman Arboretum. The views are more interesting than the bench, the arch of stone in midground in one photo.

Click Me for “Finger Lakes Memories” my online gallery.

All photography using the IPhone 14 ProMax triple camera, raw format, edited on the phone.

The stone is mined locally from surrounding hills. Calling it “Lenroc” (Cornell spelled backward) is a misnomer as the stone is mined widely throughout the region.

Feldspathic Greywacke

“Bluestone from Pennsylvania and New York is a sandstone defined as feldspathic greywacke. The sand-sized grains from which bluestone is constituted were deposited in the Catskill Delta during the Middle to Upper Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, approximately 370 to 345 million years ago…..

Glacial Landscape on an early spring day, Easter 2023

Textures

…The Catskill Delta was created from runoff from the Acadian Mountains (“Ancestral Appalachians”). This delta ran in a narrow band from southwest to northeast and today provides the bluestone quarried from the Catskill Mountains and Northeastern Pennsylvania. The term “bluestone” is derived from a deep-blue-colored sandstone first found in Ulster County, New York.”

You can feel the origin of this bluestone from these macros of two pavers from a monument bench.

Reference: “Bluestone” Wikipedia.

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved

Golden Gift

White on White

MichaelStephenWills

We mistook this magnolia tree for a “pussy willow” from its flower bud texture and shape.

Click Me for “Finger Lakes Memories” my online gallery.

All photography using the IPhone 14 ProMax triple camera, raw format, edited on the phone.

The signage attached to a branch disabused us of this impression, incorrect all for being true until the flowers burst forth.

Magnolia “Golden Gift” Magnoliaceae

Description

A visually beautiful magnolia whose golden flowers bloom in abundance and persist well; a small tree or large shrub with a loosely pyramidal form and large relatively coarse leaves; flowers appear before the foliage; an ideal landscape or garden accent

Ornamental Features

Golden Gift Magnolia is covered in stunning fragrant gold cup-shaped flowers held atop the branches in early spring before the leaves. It has dark green deciduous foliage. The large pointy leaves turn coppery bronze in fall.

Landscape Attributes

Golden Gift Magnolia is a deciduous tree with a distinctive and refined pyramidal form. Its relatively coarse texture can be used to stand it apart from other landscape plants with finer foliage. This is a relatively low maintenance tree and should only be pruned after flowering to avoid removing any of the current season’s flowers. It has no significant negative characteristics.

Ancient

Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees evolved, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles. To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the carpels of Magnolia flowers are extremely tough. Fossilized specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and fossils of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae date to 95 million years ago. Another aspect of Magnolia considered to represent an ancestral state is that the flower bud is enclosed in a bract rather than in sepals; the perianth parts are undifferentiated and called tepals rather than distinct sepals and petals. Magnolia shares the tepal characteristic with several other flowering plants near the base of the flowering plant lineage such as Amborella and Nymphaea (as well as with many more recently derived plants such as Lilium).

With a neighbor, Sycamore or “Buttonwood”

Copyright 2023 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved