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.

Herbarium heaven

This is my new favourite place to be, the herbarium at RBGE. It's like a library only it has thousands of dried plants in it. And microscopes.  And it is quiet and climate controlled.

Like many libraries, anyone can use it, all you have to do is email the nice staff and tell them what you want to look at.

Here I'm looking at an Acacia cornigera that was collected from Tobago in 1909. I'm enjoying the strange and very direct connection to the cultural histories that these dusty old labels have too.

The plan is to make a lovely Botanical Illustration of this plant....

As for the specimens themselves, I think they are magical. Rachel Pedder-Smith has lots of interesting things to say about herbarium specimens in her thesis. She considers the specimens as objects, as well as plant material subjects. I realise I am thinking of them more as sort of toenails - discarded parts of living beings - and of the human agents who use them as the sort of witches that go around gathering bits of people in order to do magic on them. Or maybe saintly relic sorts of things. Something slightly more animated with its own self rather than solely by the human interactions with it, at any rate, albeit rendered extraordinary by being seen through a special human prism. I haven't  finished thinking about that so I'll say no more for now, given the risk of deteriorating into talking Pure Balls.

More painting bacteria!

Well I was going to wait and put these up on my website whenever I get round to making it but as I seem to have your attention right now thought you might like to see some more of the nice pictures made by Serratia marcescens, Simon Park and me. These are close-ups from two plates, in no particular order.

There are also some Micrococcus luteus and Micrococcus roseas in there, rather drowned out by ythe Serratia.  And some other bacteria who hitched a ride in the paint, I don't know what the tiny pale colonies are but they probably came off me and found my gum arabic/honey/glycerin medium a delightful place to live.

 

Photos by Simon Park.

Hee hee dust mite

 

There. That's my day's work. Isn't he lovely.  Wanted a record of this for posteriority because I'm going to have to hide him now and that might ruin him altogether.

I must say I got fond of this gadgie the more I drew him. He performs a useful service in my life in dealing with my terrible incontinence of dead skin cells. Yes, I am allergic to dust mite faeces, but that is my problem, and down to having an immune system that thinks it is the military junta of a tin-pot dictatorship, and whose general performance is played out as 'bad cop, ineffectual cop' .  And, when  it gets bored of persecuting mildly infective agents it is prone to savage in-fighting and creating unnecessary factions which lead to the immobilisation of infrastructure and ends with tying up everything in red tape, leaving genuine antagonists free to slip through scot-free.  (Sneeze a lot, inflame the mucous membranes, get a cold. Not the dust mite's fault!)

Above is under UV light, below the same under daylight. Hee hee.