Category Archives: Plants

11 year old is onto Monsanto and how to fix the food system

The “dark side of the industrialized food system.” as related (accurately) by Birke Baehr at TEDxNextGeneration Asheville.
Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Then they mess with the dirt to make the plants grow. They do this because they’ve stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables. Like pesticides and herbicides to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or rise into our waterways, poisoning our water, too.
His personal goal:
A while back, I wanted to be an NFL footall player.
I decided I’d rather be an organic farmer instead.
[applause]
That way I can have a greater impact on the world.
He’s got a turn of phrase:
We can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital.

-jsq

At 100, Elsie Quarterman attends her Cedar Glade Wildflower Festival

Dr. Elsie Quarterman pioneered the ecology of cedar glades. Yesterday she attended the annual festival named in her honor, the Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade Wildflower Festival at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, Lebanon, Tennessee. Aunt Elsie is 100 years and five months old, and isn’t getting around as fast as she once did, so she met with her students and grand-students at a local restaurant. Only a few of them are pictured here:


Kim Cleary Sadler, Assistant Professor of Biology at Middle Tennessee State University and co-Director of the Center for Cedar Glade Studies. (Student of Thomas “Tom” Ellsworth Hemmerly, who was teaching and couldn’t come.)
Dr. Elsie Quarterman, Professor Emerita of Plant Ecology, Vanderbilt University
Carol C. Baskin, Professor of Biology, University of Kentucky

There were classes, botany walks, owl hoots, and musicians. Here’s the schedule. It was sunny this year, unlike last year’s great flood. Next year, you should come! Get out of town, take a walk in the glades.

Elsie got a guided tour, with Tennessee State Naturalist Emeritus Mack Pritchard and his successor Randy Hedgepath. Here they are with Elsie’s nephew Patrick Quarterman, while Gretchen Quarterman photographs a glade.

Here State Naturalist Randy Hedgepath consults with Dr. Quarterman about identification of a cedar glade plant.

Elsie got out of the car to look at this one with Randy and Ann Quarterman: Continue reading →

Loblolly pine pollen

A loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) candling with pollen:

We have lots of these, but not many with limbs like this so close to the ground. This one is in a cemetary with no close competitors, so it spread out more than up.

Pictures by John S. Quarterman, 27 April 2011, in the Revolutionary War Cemetery in Louisville, Georgia.

-jsq