Marilyn's Photos - Feb 15 2026 - Big Plants

 

Arum Titan is the biggest “plant” on the planet.  One tall stem and leaf structure - 20 feet tall.  One big 6 to 10 foot tall flower that is very stinky.  I’ve got the miniature versions in my garden.  Very stinky - rotting flesh is the smell. That smell attracts flies who pollinate the plant.  It must work as there are always little bundles of red berry-looking seeds at ground level each year.  And more stinky plants coming up in various places.  That’s our current largest plant.  Before that in the far distant past, preserved in fossils are the Prototaxites.  It was almost 30 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. It would look like a tall tree trunk on the horizon. And that was before trees existed. It was a complex fungal rhizomorph rather than a towering, upright structure. Yet it was distinct from fungi in physiological functions. It is proposed that it was a completely new and extinct lineage, separate from plants, fungi and other eukaryotes.  I guess we should just call it a living organism.   Remember last week’s story of the oldest evidence of sewn fabrics lying in a museum for 50 years before being dated.  Here’s the similar story for Prototaxite.  A fossil specimen collected by Charles Darwin’s friend, Joseph Hooker, was mislaid for 163 years at the British Geological Survey offices in London.  That would have collected a lot of dust.  Don’t on’t you think they might notice? There are fantastic renderings - beautiful drawings full of mystery and intrigue of the landscape with Prototaxites present.  Here are a few. This seems more botanically inclincled. Here’s the Titan Arum in Niagara Falls. Could this be a Ringling Circus rendition of man during the Prototaxite era?

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 14 2026 - Bleeding Hearts

 

How did the flower Bleeding Hearts come about?  The shape is so perfect a symbolic heart.   “The outer, heart-shaped petals act as landing platforms for larger insects, particularly bumblebees. The white, “bleeding” droplet is actually a modified petal that guides the pollinator towards the nectar spurs located on top of the heart…” Originating in China,Korea and Japan the plant’s common Chinese name means Purse Peony.  The peony reference is with the leaves being similar to peonies. The Korean common name is Gold Bag Flower - the same comparison with a drawstring purse.  The Japanese common name Sea Bream Fishing Rod - the similarity in appearance of the inflorescence to a number of little fish hanging by their tails from a rod, while clasping yet smaller fish in their jaws.  I have to guess that our common name of Bleeding Heart derives from Europeans, though there is a Japanese love story associated with it. The smaller Dicentra formosa was discovered by Scottish surgeon and naturalist Archibald Menzies on the Vancouver Expedition. He collected seed in 1792 in Nootka Sound and gave it to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1795. The one we think of as Bleeding Heart was introduced to England in 1810 - it isn’t Dicentra but Lamprocapnos as Dicentra is considered obsolete. However, the North American native bleeding heart plants are of the genus Dicentra.  So I guess confusion can reign over Bleeding Heart’s genus names but definitely not over its shape of a symbolic heart. Here are some Bleeding Hearts, hearts found and a Valentine on ths February 14th Valentine’s Day.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 13 2026 - Is this Friday?

 

It seems unusual that we have so few superstitious days - Friday the 13th.  Why don’t we celebrate the number 12 which is considered “complete” and be positive rather than something that is bad luck? Everywhere it says the origin is likely the 13th guest/disciple being Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper, along with Jesus dying on a Friday even there’s no explicit reference in the Bible that Friday the 13th “carries a curse.” The Bible generally condemns superstitions and says the opposite -  that nothing is done outside of “god’s sovereign control”. Don’t mind me thinking that’s even scarier.  I guess this superstition would be an “afterthought” superstition - something that made sense in the rear-view mirror.   Thinking of the idea of the rear-view mirror metaphor, the rear-view mirror was invented in the 19th century.  It was first patented in 1921 for regular cars. It was called a wing-mirror.  It was known as the “Cop-Spotter.”  There may have been rear-facing mirrors on horse-drawn carriages, and it seems to me this would be likely.  How else will the Americans know that their stage coach is being overtaken by robbers? There’s a reference in Wikipedia that one of the motor racers claimed he got the idea from seeing a horse-drawn vehicle with one.  That was in 1904. We have three of these Friday the 13th this year.  That’s the maximum in any year.  The next is March and the final one is November.  I checked that out thinking of Port Dover and its place in history as the motorcycle convention capital on every Friday the 13th.  Good thing it happens in Canada where the weather is mostly too cold.   There are two lesser known superstitious days.  Tuesday the 13th in Spain and Greece, and December 28th in Britain, France and Spain. In Italy Friday the 17th is considered more unlucky that Friday the 13th. So I guess they won’t be worrying about their gold medal standing today as much as the other countries. These are all Western traditions.  There are many superstitious days in Eastern cultures - way too many.  It seems like the opposite of Western cultures. And what about this ironic headline for today:  “Funny Friday the 13th Jokes to Brighten Your Day.” I didn’t find any Paperwhite Narcissus bulbs this fall.  They would be blooming now in the greenhouse.  We’ll have to make do with a picture.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 12 2026 - Prehistoric

 

Prehistoric.  When did history start? And do most of those headlines start with things like “Prehistoric discovery in … cave … rewrites human history?” I saw that headline today. Prehistoric is basically “before writing.”  Written records of “early civilization” started around 5000 or so years ago.  Do a little searching and we find out there is a precise sense of time spans, but for us non-academics and general lay people, prehistoric covers the time from the appearance of Homo Sapiens - 315,000 years ago in Africa to the invention of writing - 5,000 or so years ago.  So the span of Prehistory is Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) to the beginning of “ancient history. “ Moving on to more precise terms for time, here’s something I’ve seen for the first time today:  kya.  This is an abbreviation for “kilo years ago” - a thousand years ago.  We didn’t learn this expression in school - it came into common usage in the mid-to-late 20th century.  Radiometric dating made it standardized.    Each of us could have our own timeline terms and abbreviations - after high school - ahs or maybe before undergraduate university - buu.  What about the graduate degrees?  Maybe before masters degree - bmd and amd.  That’s got a Tolkiensian quality to it, don’t you think? There’s a scientific term called Before Present (BP) - and it is a time scale used in archaeology, geology, and similar disciplines.  They account for a million years ago - abbreviated as Mya, Myr or Ma - equal to a million years (or approximately 31.6 teraseconds). No quoting me here, as there’s a debate over this terminology. And there are conflicts with the International System of Units. As the planet is billions of years old, I assume there is also a bya - yes there’s a billion years - however, that’s ga, and a trillion years - that’s ta, one quadrillion years - that’s pa, and one quintillion years - that’s ea.  So now that we know we can go a long way back, what was this prehistoric discovery news?  The oldest known pieces of sewn clothing are from a cave in Oregon. This will rewrite the log of human history.  The items were approximately 2,000 years old. That dates advanced skills working with plants, animals and wood thousands of years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed. Do you think it will change the chart below? This is a re-examination of a collection first dug up in the 1950s and stored in a museum. Current modern lab tests were able to date them accurately.  Pictures of the discoveries are HERE.   I see some ma years in this geologic time scale chart - isn’t it a beautiful one page view of things? Given it is geological, it won’t get any updates from this discovery. Here’s one of my wreaths that goes to the Grimsby Garden Club meeting on February 26th meeting where I speak on Nearby Gardens to Visit in Ontario.  If you are nearby, please come - it is free to all.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 11 2026 - Redacted

 

How does redacting work?  Are there automated tools to do this?  How many people would it take to do manual redacting? Automated redaction has been possible for easy things like Social Insurance Numbers and similar structured information.  There are advertisements for AI-powered redaction tools.  Microsoft has a find “redact” and “mark for redaction” - that seems like old school to me as find and replace has been present since the beginning of time.  There are article on the reversibility and visibility of redacted words.  There isn’t a number given to the Epstein files - “collection of millions” - and 300 gigabytes of data doesn’t sound that big to me. Perhaps we saw 3 million as a recent number of released files.  So many to go through for Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The method or tool used for redaction is automation tools - digital redaction tools within PDF software. And then there is human intervention - called manual “crude” methods.  The Epstein redactions are criticized as being inconsistent and ranging from over-redaction (entire pages) to under-redaction - allowing text to be recovered. Suddenly an editing technique is in the spotlight.  There have been many more photo editing scandals - replacing and changing images than text scandals. Text editing redaction scandals of the past include whiting out the Haiphong Massacre (1946), removing it from public records entirely,  Marilyn Monroe’s communist sympathies, Nixon Oval Office Tapes, and wait for this one:  the CIA redacted WWI-era documents about secret ink until 2011.  It looks like one could write the book on what “not to do” by outlining the methods that the Department of Justice used.  Here’s the essence of it  HERE.  There are techniques in my photo editing software that I use to bring out “hidden” images structures like clouds.  Here’s the prime example of before and after.  You can see that texture has been brought out in the windows,  that what was blurry or hazy has been dehazed and that there are clear details of the background.  It was a nice surprise discovery for me in this case.

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