differing points of view

sometimes i need to turn to my son to help me out with a caption. i’ve seen a lot of water lilies, and tonight i felt out of ideas, as i tried to find something interesting to say about the lavender undersides of these leaves, or maybe their leathery texture. i turned to my son and asked him what his first thought was when he saw this photo. he answered right away. what he saw was a frog lure jittering slowly across the pads, and then falling off the far edge with a soft plop, directly into the jaws of a five pound bass. see. now i never would have had that thought.

dried lily pads

lake valentine, arden hills, minnesota

don’t let me go

i still don’t know what botanical process causes this breathtaking stained-glass effect. if any of my plant geeks have any insight, i’ll take it. for some reason, this particular patch of ferns in my back yard seems to create this effect most years. it’s almost as if the fern is saying, please, don’t make me go back to winter. look how pretty i can be. take me with you.

fern leaflet

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

throwback thursday

we just got word that the grape harvest in the faugères appelation has already been completed. which means that we have missed a year of wine grape clusters transformed into table grapes after a day of picking in the fields. wine grapes are some of the sweetest fruit we’ve ever eaten. in fact some of the sweetest dessert of any kind we’ve ever eaten.

selection of wine varietal grapes

autignac, france

malum

ok, follow me. so the latin word for apple is malum. if you look this up you will discover that the latin word malum means evil or wicked. why would an apple be associated with evil or wickedness? well, the first thing that comes to mind is the garden of eden and the apple of knowledge. so maybe apples and evil are intertwined all the way back to latin. ah, but wait. the latin word mālum with a long “a” means apple. but the latin word malum with a short “a” means evil. root of the french word for evil, “mal,” and lots of english words like malefactor, maleficent, malediction, etc. the two words come from two greek roots that are entirely unrelated, and so it is purely coincidence that malum, long “a,” and malum, short “a,” happen to be latin homographs. if, of an evening, you find yourself poking around the internet on this subject, you will also find that the apple in the garden of eden was almost certainly not an apple, which doesn’t grow well, or at all, in the deserts of southern iraq, but was most likely either a quince or a pomegranate. so there you have it. two words: malum and malum, tied together by their spelling and by a rich cultural history, and, in the end, completely and totally unrelated. i can’t decide if i’m happy about the way i just spent the last half hour, or sad.

crabapples

minneapolis, minnneota

strange transplant

we found this guy in a puddle in the middle of an asphalt parking lot in downtown minneapolis. i can only guess where he came from. probably the mississippi river, but that would have made for an awfully long flight for an insect that flies only rarely during warm weather. he looked half drowned, but was probably happier in his puddle than in our car, as we drove him home to get his portrait taken. we only found out later that he was a water scorpion, and that the long needle at his back end is neither a stinger nor an ovipositor, but a breathing tube. and that he grabs his prey with those mantid-like front legs, then eats them by sucking their fluids out. despite this somewhat antisocial behavior, i find him rather handsome, in a gangly, awkward, lyle lovett kind of way.

brown water scorpion (Ranatra fusca)

minneapolis, minnesota