Bitter vetch

I've been busy this year helping to put a show together for an international collaboration of botanical artworks celebrating native plants. Here's a crop of one of my pictures, Lathyrus linifolius.
More later!

Five plants that nodulate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria

Hooray! Here they are, my lovely nodulating pals, this year's work. It's on show now until the 28th September 2014 at RBGE :

Acacia cornigera (L.) Willd.  - bull's horn acacia.

Lathyrus vernus (L.) Bernh.  - spring vetch.

Strongylodon macrobotrys A. Gray - jade vine.

 

Myrica gale L. - bog myrtle.

Hippophae rhamnoides L.  - sea buckthorn.

I'll maybe say a bit more about these later, but right now I'm going to sleep.  Goodnight, and thank you all.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The world turned upside down

Most people's roots grow in a downwardly direction as ane fule kno. Delightful phenomenon of the week is the upwards-growing or negatively gravitrophic rootlet that grows out of the nodules that our good friend Myrica gale (bog myrtle) makes on its roots in collaboration with mutual friends Frankia bacteria.

This happens when the oxygen concentration in the soil is very low, which is often for the Myrica gale, which likes to live in stagnant bogs. Frankia like a bit of oxygen for their business purposes and so they make the lobes of lots of the nodules send rootlets up to the surface, like snorkels. Marvellous.

Time for some more not-science

Well,  here we are again with the marmite and the paint and the test-tubes and stuff.  It's because I want to draw some fenugreek, or methi, or Trigonella foenum-graecum, another beautiful and useful and fragrant plant.

I'm trying to get these fellas (fenugreek seeds) to grow, they sprout a bit and then die after about five days. So while I'm planting them out,  I'm wondering if I can encourage them to nodulate with their bacterial pals...

Do you like my Blue Peter Scool of Laboratory Equipment Test Tube Racks? And my fantastically inappropriate test tubes? I was going to make some agar to grow my seed in but the pressure cooker is full of chicken soup, maybe some other day....

So I got some of the soil and nodules and roots from some local sweetclover to see if I could innoculate my seeds' substrates. When it comes to the favourite flavour of bacteria, both plants are partial to a Sinorhizobium meliloti, I hear.

And here is my nonsense on the windowsill. In good company with the Winogradsky columns.

See the little purple one there? That's with the cobalt blue-violet paint, a tasty snack for S. meliloti.

Nonsense, like I say, I'm expecting my seeds to survive for another four or five days and then die.

Although as  a backup plan I might have a look at the sweetclover or Melilotis officinalis, which I've taken a real shine to on account of its gorgeous perfume and ability to sieze a shitty habitat. 

Here it is doing its phytoremediation work on the ash dump at Musselburgh.

bog myrtle

 Owen and I went to Rannoch Moor to intrepidly hunt my bog myrtle. It's a fabulous place,  a complex blanket bog, a transition mire and a quaking bog.

What you don't really get an idea of from photos is exactly how boggy a bog is when you get there. You can't walk across this stuff, you have to leap gracefully from tussock to tussock and if you miss you're up to your neck in it.

And that's exactly what the Myrica gale loves. Apparently the more it sits in the stagnant water, the more it nodulates with its bacterial friends.

Bog myrtle has Frankia friends, like the Alnus glutinosa, and look! Here they are together having a nice time, I don't know if they are sharing their bacteria, I suspect they are, and who could blame them.

So how do you go about making a lovely botanical illustration of this beautiful and useful and fragrant plant?  I'm not absolutely convinced I've got the foggiest about that but for starters here are some sketches and drawings and nice conversations I've had with the plant.

Intrepid plant hunting

It's all just an excuse, isn't it, to have exciting days out in interesting places. That's a good bike that is too.

Im looking for Hippophae rhamnoides,  Sea Buckthorn. Found it, too:

That's a good plant, that is.  

Then I come home and do lots of this sort of nonsense:

I'm going to enjoy this plant as it has a relationship with my lovely Frankia bacteria, who make beautiful orange nodules, they'll go lovely with the berries....

And the ubiquitous predatory spider mite makes an appearance. I don't know why I'm compelled to make a note of it, I'm always delighted to see them scampering about their business, but suspect it's a bit like those children who shout "DOGGIE!" every time they pass a hound of any sort, part of the fun is in the shouting itself.

still swarming

 There's a little feature on Simon Park & me & Serratia marcescens doing painting on page 132 in  this month's Microbiology Today, the splendid organ of the Society for General Microbiology. You might like to see it because Simon is doing the talking here and it's very nice.

People who live in glass houses

It is a little known fact that diatoms are the Integrated Circuits or microchips of the living world. They hook up to magnetic bacteria through bacterial nanowires and play a central role in Pond Cognition.

In fact that is not a fact, it is a story I made up on the grounds that diatoms have silicon shells. It's a good story though and I will choose to believe it.

Anyway here are some tiny tidy diatoms, lovingly crafted with the finest watercolours for your viewing pleasure. Actually if I'm being honest I made them for my own looking pleasure but don't tell my Public or they will want to pay me even less than the 47p an hour rate I can currently ask. 

making paintings with bacteria

In Simon's lab at the University of Surrey

Before and after pictures of these two plates of collaborative paintings between myself, Serratia marcescens and Simon Park.

 

So the paint medium is this wonderfully contaminated but nevertheless fragrant and delicious mixture of gum arabic, honey and glycerin in water.  The pigments I'm using are:

A: ultramarine  (Na_8-10Al₆Si₆O₂₄S_2-4 , a.k.a. Reckitt's or dolly blue)

B: phthalo blue  (C₃₂H₁₆N₈Cu , humanity's contribution to the porphyrins)

C: diarylide yellow (you can buy 100 tons per month from this company)

D: phthalo green (like the blue, only the phthalocyanine is chlorinated)

E: cobalt violet (Co₃(PO₄)₂ )

F: zinc white ( Philosophers' Wool to you)

G: chrome green (Cr₂O₃)

H: lamp black (we scrape it off the gas lamps on our way to t'mill in the mornings and keep it in our flat caps.)

Because of the interactions with those opportunistic chaps in the paint this is a total flop as regards answering any of my paint-bacteria questions, and so much the better, sez I, as it means I can use some of my favourite phrases about it such as "inconclusive" and "poorly understood" and will therefore just have to do some more of this very fun and nice work.