This spring, I noticed this striped flower in a stand of feral Hesperis matronis
Stripey flowers! And like almost all striped flower variants, almost certainly caused by transposons, aka jumping genes.
To understand transposons, you can think of genes as instructions. So when making a flower, a plant may be following a gene that says:
MAKE PURPLE PIGMENT
And so it does, and the flower is purple.
You can think of a transposon as a gene that says:
About 6 months ago I wrote a little article about what I perceived to be the most significant problem within extension, which is that extension personnel, and specifically tenured and tenure track faculty, simply don’t receive recognition or credit for accomplishing their job. In this essay I’m going to give a specific example of this problem.
Normally, when someone does what they are assigned to do, they are rewarded, or at least an acknowledgement is made that they are performing satisfactorily.… Continue reading this article “Extension….Again”
By Cynthia Lee Riskin
With drought predicted for the west, southwest, and south through June 2015 (National Weather Service March 2015), many conscientious vegetable gardeners will try to conserve water by using soaker-hoses, those bumpy black hoses that weep water onto the soil through tiny pores.
Soaker hoses are made from fine-crumb rubber, usually recycled from vehicle tires. Research strongly establishes that tire particles leach heavy metals, carcinogens, and mutagenics, among other toxins. Yet soaker hoses have not been studied for potentially increasing the toxicity of edible plants.… Continue reading this article “Are Soaker Hoses Safe?”
It’s more than a little bit intimidating to be a part of the Garden Professors team, since I have no advanced degrees, and my undergraduate degree is in Mathematics, with no formal training in Botany, Horticulture or Plant Science at all.
I am, however, an avid and active hobby gardener; I read a lot; and I have a life-long love of learning and sharing what I’ve learned with others, which led to a nine-year stint as a county Extension Educator, implementing a county wide mosquito management program for West Nile, with additional responsibilities for pesticide education and consumer horticulture.… Continue reading this article “Nature’s Poisons”
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you
More than once in the past couple months I’ve come close to pulling the plug on FaceBook. What started as a fun and easy way to keep up with family and friends back home and stalk old girlfriends has devolved into an infinite do-loop of whininess, acrimony and vitriol over GMO’s, organic food, vaccines, and President Obama. … Continue reading this article “Stuck in the middle with you”
Like some television commercials say about their product, “But wait, there’s more”, this statement can also be said about flowering shrubs. Just because spring is over, it does not mean there is no more color in the garden. Yes, there are herbaceous perennials that bloom in summer, but there are some fabulous flowering shrubs that also shine during the dog days of summer besides roses and Japanese spirea. Here are three of my favorite larger shrubs with big landscape impact.… Continue reading this article “There is a Cure for the Summertime Blues”
Regular fishing, for actual fish, is quite possibly the second most boring think ever invented (First place, of course, goes without question to baseball) but sport fishing! Now THAT is something I can get behind.
By sport fishing I mean, of course, looking for sports – chance mutations – in plants. Sometimes a flower color changes, or sometimes a leaf becomes variegated, like on this lilac branch I found at a friend’s nursery a couple years ago
Nurseries are great places to go “fishing” for these sports, simply by walking down the rows of plants looking for anything odd or out of place.… Continue reading this article “Go sport fishing at your local nursery”
– Holly Scoggins
Here’s a couple of clematis (clemati?) you may not be familiar with. Both are easy to grow but differ from the more common large-flowered form. There is a great deal of hybridization within the genus, so many cultivars are placed within “groups” rather than described as a cultivar of the species.
Clematis ‘Princess Diane’
Texensis Group
Clematis ‘Princess Diana’ in the author’s garden.
Crossing a large-flower clematis cultivar with Clematis texensis (scarlet leather flower) resulted in this lily-shaped beauty.… Continue reading this article “Uncommon Clematis”
This month, the Garden Professors have moved to a new website. You can still easily find us at gardenprofessors.com (bookmark that address!), but we’re no longer actively posting on the eXtension website. This change was necessitated by eXtension’s decision to restrict leadership to faculty belonging to premium universities (those paying a sizable annual membership fee). Since neither Dr. Gillman nor Dr. Chalker-Scott belongs to a premium university, and since both are founding members of the Garden Professors, we made a group decision to host our blog independently.… Continue reading this article “Welcome to our new home!”
For years I subscribed to Consumer Reports. I appreciated their objective approach to product testing and lack of advertising. In their own words, their policy is to “maintain our independence and impartiality… [so that] CU has no agenda other than the interests of consumers.” But recently they’ve veered off the science-based trail – at least the one running through our gardens. Their approach to plant and soil sciences is more pseudo than science. And last year, after 30+ years of loyal membership, I quit my subscription when Consumer Reports began partnering with Dr.… Continue reading this article “Spec errors mount”