The Great Plains where we live (and which we have transmogrified incidentally) are meadows. Our stunning alpine tundra
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This time of year, a little inside and a little outside is where I want to be; it all depends on the weather. Luckily, either way I have something to see and something to learn.
• Plant or Candelabra? Various Sumacs (members of the genus Rhus) can be counted on to provide garden interest year round, with leaves, flowers, and fruit catching the eye in different seasons. The fruit, called a drupe, often remains on the branches through the winter, but it can be harvested and ground into a spice used in Middle-Eastern cooking, or soaked in water, strained, and sweetened into a lemony drink sometimes know as rhus juice. The common three-leaved poisonous plants—ivy, oak, and sumac—are actually
This funny diary will be read before we make our compost bins with worms.
I am so excited and yes a little nervous about next Tuesday for our Seedlings class. I am bringing in a bunch of live worms for kids to look at and take home with them! We will be reading the adorable “Diary of a Worm” by Doreen Cronin. In this hysterical diary, kids get to see a portrait of a regular worm family and what worms do all day. After we read the book, we will observe live worms from a worm compost bin. The class will then go to work creating their own individual worm bins to take home.
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"Cecropia palmata" by Constance Sayas. Watercolor.
Be sure to visit the Gates Garden Court Gallery this weekend to view this year’s annual exhibition of botanical illustration by students and instructors. A range of media are presented in the show, ranging from colored pencil and watercolor, to graphite and pen and ink. Many of these original works are available for sale and purchases support Denver Botanic Gardens.
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Photograph by Jonathan Singer
Anything about Magnificent Botany is bound to get my attention, so it was with great joy that I realized that the publication of this stunning book was bringing Dr. W. John Kress to Denver. He’s a curator at the Smithsonian Muesum of Natural History, and I’m delighted to hear him speak! Jonathan Singer, the book’s equally famous and remarkable photographer, will also be here and I am eagerly anticipating this Saturday’s event . Mervi Hjelmroos-Koski had a great post about the book on her blog.
Three new Colorado records of mushroom species were discovered among our collections of our Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi, thanks to a visit from Gasteromycete specialist, Dr. Scott Bates. Dr. Bates identified a Tulostoma and a Geastrum (an earth star, pictured above) which have never been documented as occurring in the state before now. The Geastrum has been collected three times throughout the last decade right here in the Botanic Gardens, presumably brought in by landscaping projects and then the spores have migrated with the help of our gardeners. It has not been reported here in the wild but Scott Bates has recorded it from Arizona in natural habitats.
These are puffball-type mushrooms, fungi that form pretty, bulbous, white fruiting bodies; what we know as mushrooms are the fruiting body or reproductive part of the fungi,
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