Marilyn's Photos - Feb 19 2026 - Snow Melting

 

With the snow  receding, I’ve been doing dog duty in the back yard for the last week.  With each few  inches, another clean-up can occur.  I’m not sure how much of a melt we will get. to complete the clean-up.  Likely I will be cleaning up till March.  And then a new season starts. I notice Millie never stepped in her own poop.  I would watch her in the yard covered in snow, and she made zigs and zags along her route to avoid things.  I am not so lucky.  The human foot is attracted to a dog poop like a metal to a magnet.   While dog poop is the normal sort of every-day find after snow and ice melt, there are many more interesting things found as glaciers melt. Poor 5,300-year-old Iceman Otzi, found in the Alps.  He received a severe arrow wound causing rapid blood loss, and then a severe, potentially fatal head injury.  No accident there.  And the remains look too real to show you here.  This is breakfast time when I am writing. And likely there’s no time that seems the right time.   Besides finding people under the snow, there’s a history of the mundane. Take mittens.  A 1,100-year-old-mitten was found in Norway.  I wonder what the history of lost mittens through the ages might be.  AI is at the ready:  A famous lost mitten dating to 16th-17th century in Sweden had the “two-end” knitting technique.  Supposedly that was a lost practice.  Seems strange to me - it is just normal to tie two mittens together with a string.  There’s no genius involved. Did you know that scientists left a message in a bottle in 1951 on a glacier under a rock cairn on Ward Hund Island in the Canadian Arctic?  It was to document the retreat of the ice between the rock cairn and glacier edge. In 1959 it was 4 feet, and in 2013 when found, the distance was 333 feet. The 2013 team left the note in the bottle, and added their own asking to continue the experiment.  Here are some mittens showcased on a previous year’s Fantasy of Trees wreath.

Marilyn's Photos - Feb 18 2026 - Olympic Style

 

Have we looked at 2026 Olympic style?  It seems there are some things to see. Here’s the “funky” Norway curling pants.  They decided to wear the style to honour one of their curlers who died of cancer in 2022:  “We thought one game honouring the old team and wearing the full Norwegian outfit there on the ice would be just amazing.”  I guess the Ukrainian skeleton athlete should have decorated his pants, and he’d still be competing. The predominance of dark colours along with a lot of red, white and blue shows in the pictures.  But that’s not the case for Haiti.  Take a look at these two outfits.  There are only two athletes, maybe that explains it. Since I can remember, every country has  name brands designing the uniforms/outfits.  Then the public gets to wear a bit of history during and after the games.   As I went searching for articles, I found many more YouTube videos being retrieved.  I took a look at a  top 10 one HERE, but the white female presenter (who is on screen more than the clothes) was wearing a black durag.  It got my attention more than the attire so was distracting at best and a creepy at worst.  (We’ll look at that more separately.) Finally, I found coverage of every team.  It is on yahoo HERE.  If you aren’t a persistent researcher, you can go with AI and what it gives you.  Descriptions like “features fashion-forward, sustainable, and culturally inspired athlete uniforms.”   I guess I should get used to this “breezy, know-it-all, too-many-adjectives, hyphenated-word-expression kind of writing.”  If I parody it too much, I might start writing like that. A bank of fog rolled in yesterday overwhelming the sun.  It was quite dramatic on the escarpment horizon.  Today?  A severe weather warning for freezing rain and a winter snow storm.  And the fog? It has mostly gone south. What do you think of this garden sculpture?  My quick answer is that it is not here in Niagara. To my mind - only in places like the U.K. with its mist and rain.

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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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