Tag Archives: Nature

April 26, 2024 · 11:17 AM

The Humble but Mighty Dandelion

This past week, I’ve been knee-deep in my craft room making flowers. I’ve made crepe paper flowers before, but these are on a whole new level: Giants, to be precise. So far, I’ve made three giant daisies that stand about two metres tall and two of four dandelions in different phases or similar size.

Dandelions are something everyone knows – you’ve seen them, you may have been irritated by their invasiveness in a garden, but honestly, have you ever stopped to look at them? In this project, I’ve needed to look at them in detail – where do the leaves sit on the stem? What colour is the stem? How do the bud leaves fall from the bloom? When does the yellow turn into white fuzzy parachutes?

I found a year-long timelapse of the growth of a dandelion, from seed to seedhead; click on the image below to watch the 3:46-minute video. What I find fascinating is the animation of plants that are only seen when we view them sped up; they stretch, move and grow – the movement is coming from the plant itself as this video was made in a controlled environment (no wind involved).

The edible plant has been used for centuries as a leafy green, leaf, flower or root tea, medicine, and as a source of nutrition for animals such as horses or ruminates (herbivorous grazing animals, such as cattle or deer). It’s an important plant for pollinators as it’s often the earliest flowering plant. For more information about its many uses, check out the Wikipedia article linked here. For a short but informative (and entertaining) video about the lion’s tooth, dent de lion, click here.

The next time you’re outside enjoying nature, stop and moment and appreciate the humble, often overlooked flower! And make yourself a dandelion salad.

2 Comments

Filed under Articles, Links to External Articles, Nature, YouTube Link

Tagged as Dandelion, dent de lion, Edible Plants, Flowers, Garden, Nature

September 10, 2021 · 2:11 PM

Obscurities: Anthropause

I came across this word today, and knew I had to find out more: Coined by scientific researchers in 2020, it refers to the impact on wildlife that Covid-19 has had; specifically, the pause of mankind on a global scale through lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Whales have changed their conversations – it’s quieter out there, with fewer cruise ships (those massive floating cities can drown out every other sound in underwater monitors for an hour as they pass by); Pumas have been spotted roaming through Santiago, Chile, and flocks of Flamingos have landed in the waterways of Mumbai, India. The wild animals that live in cities, coming out only at nights in normal times, have started coming out to play in broad daylight. Birds, who have had to learn to call louder to attract mates in areas with traffic, can suddenly be heard loud and clear.

Not all changes have been positive, however; we live in a complex world, and in a world where some people will take advantage of the situation: Poaching has risen, as has Amazon deforestation. But on the whole, wildlife has benefited from the absence or reduction of human activity and presence. Roadkill has been reduced, and in those areas near nesting sites, such as beaches, birds have been laying more eggs than in previous years, possibly because they feel safer and are less disturbed by human noise pollution. Studies are beginning to emerge about just how the withdrawal of humans on a mass scale is impacting the environment and wildlife, and I hope that one of the results of such research is a plan for making our lives on a global scale become more compatible with, and supportive of, nature and natural rhythms.

In the meantime, with lockdowns continuing in many parts of the world (and because one never knows when and how travel restrictions will return, and no one wants to get stuck paying for a hotel in a foreign country for weeks on end of quarantine, travel is largely self-restricted), mankind is safely behind closed doors, and wildlife will come out to play.

The Nature of Time, or the Time of Nature

Did you know that, as animals get bigger, their pulse rates slow down and their lifetimes lengthen? This means that, from hamster to elephant, each gets around 1 billion heartbeats, though the hamster only lives around 3 years, while the elephant lives for 70; because the elephant’s mass is enormous, their pulse (30 beats per minute) is far lower than the hamster’s (450 bpm). For more information on this, please click here.

This phenomena makes for an interesting juxtaposition when other creatures cross our paths; because each creature has a different metabolic rate, time is relative: A mosquito has plenty of time to move out of our hand’s way because her faster metabolic rate makes our movements seem slow motion; by contrast, if a redwood tree or a yew tree, each of which can live hundreds or even thousands of years, could tell us how it perceives us, perhaps our lives would seem like a blip in time by comparison.

Slow motion filming is becoming not only more popular on platforms such as YouTube, with channels like The Slow Mo Guys, Smarter Every Day, and How Ridiculous, to name a few, but it’s also becoming more accessible as the cameras and their capabilities improve and they come down in price. Even more accessible is time-lapse photography, which has become so prevalent in our media that we might not even recognize that what we see in a few seconds took days of one shot per hour to set up.

Louie Schwartzberg is considered the pioneer in time-lapse cinematography, and you’ve seen his work, though you might not realize it: If you’ve ever watched, for example, the logo clip of Warner Brothers Studios at the beginning of a film, you’ve seen his time-lapse rolling clouds. At the moment, Netflix is showing “Fantastic Fungi”, a film about, well, Fungi, and Schwartzberg is the genius behind the film. It’s a fascinating look into the time of nature, as well as the nature of time.

To watch a fascinating behind-the-scenes video about Fantastic Fungi, with interviews from the cinematographer, please click here. Enjoy!