October 6th: Just as the strong winds of fall begin to blow, this milkweed plant is getting ready to hitch a ride. The pods have opened, revealing up to 100 brown seeds, each one connected to a silky parachute. The design is ingenious - some seeds will fly many acres away. The seeds are the plant's future, and key to the destiny of monarch butterflies, too. These are the only plants they will lay eggs on, so a good crop of milkweed is also good for insuring the survival of these beautiful butterflies.
September 18th: Here's a good look at what tree roots look like, thanks to an eroded hill in one the city's ravines. Roots are pretty cool - they weigh about as much as all the branches and leaves, making them an underground mirror. Roots tend to grow outward, like the bottom of a wine glass, providing stability. They usually don't go very deep, either, since their job is seek out and absorb water and minerals. The roots grow in a random way, often along the tracks made by worms or natural grooves in the soil.
September 20th: I was in the country today to celebrate my Aunt and Uncle's 60th wedding anniversary. When they got married, corn was just starting to become one of North America's big crops. Scientists had figured out how to take this South American plant and change it so that it could endure being crowded together to increase crop yields. Next, they made the kernels infertile, so each year, farmers have to buy new seed. When my Aunt and Uncle got married, corn was something you ate, when you ate, well, corn. Now it is used to make 1/4 of all the stuff you can buy in the supermarket - it is in soda pop, most cereals, processed foods, and even in the plastic packaging. So if we are what we eat, we are all now children of the corn.
September 14th: These strange growths are called 'galls', and when I told my wife what they were, she said they made human sex seem clean, neat and tidy. Here's why: bugs like aphids bite the bottom of the leaf, secreting special chemicals. The leaf reacts by growing the gall, which is like a defence mechanism. What it doesn't realize is that the bug lays eggs within the gall, which serves as the new home for the young ones as they hatch and eat. When the gall turns red, it is ready to burst open, Alien-like, to release the juvenile insects into the world. The good news is that the plant survives all of this just fine. On the up side, it does make human reproduction seem downright neat.
September 8th: This heavenly-looking grass is Chinese Silvergrass. The silver head is beautiful, and full of seeds. Thousands of seeds will be lofted into the air by this stand of plants alone, which may explain how this grass got here. It is an ornamental grass that probably escaped from someone's garden on the wind, and now grows in the sheltered valley of Mimico Creek, far from any house.
September 2nd: I spent much of yesterday and today on the 401, driving my son to Montreal for school. Along the way, practically every roadside ditch was thick with this plant, known as Phragmite Australis. I wondered why there was so much of it. Turns out, it is an invasive species from Europe that likes brackish ( i.e., salty) water. Scientists suspect that the reason it is so common beside highways is that the salt from the roads keeps the ditch water brackish, an environment this plant loves. Everything really does affect everything else, in ways we can barely fathom....
