Mar 25 2023 - Superbloom

  

Bing has a photogenic place on the planet each day as its search page image.  Today it is Anza-Borrego desert park near San Diego with the superbloom question.  Will it have a superbloom like the one in the picture? It looks like it might be the case given this article HERE and the array of plants - "COYOTE CANYON was the prettiest with the largest Sand Verbena plants that I have seen as well as 20+ species of wildflowers including Dune Sunflower, Spectacle Plant, Desert Gold, California Primrose, Desert Dandelion, Lupine and the hard to find Desert Calico. " Most of the pictures showcase purple Sand Verbenas. This brilliant purple display started at the beginning of March so is likely over shortly. As far as you can see floral displays!   Soon our Spring bloom will come - masses of Trilliums.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Nov 10 2021 - Rose in November

Roses start blooming 6 to 8 weeks after the leaves first shoot, and stop blooming when the temperature goes to 0 degrees celsius.  With our warm weather this fall, many roses are still blooming here in Niagara.  Here's a question that people are asking: "Q. Even though winter is just around the corner, I’ve been noticing white rose bushes that are covered with medium-sized flowers still blooming freely. The bushes are 2 to 3 feet tall and very bushy. Do you have any idea what variety it might be? A. While there are many white rose varieties, I suspect the one you have been admiring is a floribunda rose variety called Iceberg. This variety was introduced in 1958 and is a favorite landscape plant throughout the country." Iceberg is one of the most widely planted white roses.  Why?  Because it blooms and blooms from summer into late fall. Here in Niagara, we'll have hard frost and then freezing temperatures, and there will be frozen little rose buds on the bushes.  We'll know the plants are dormant for the winter.  There's no snow in California, except for the mountains.  If we were in California, what would we do to make sure our roses go dormant for the winter?   You would strip off the old leaves in late December, so your plants are asleep until spring. And blooming peak season is April in southern California.  Now that's a tantalizing thought for us in Niagara, where April is daffodils and tulips, and the peak blooming month for roses is June.

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Feb 16 2021 - How Do Plants...

 

How do plants know when to bloom?  Why do some bloom early in the spring and others late in the fall?   Have some snow drops in the greenhouse and I wonder why they aren't blooming.  They were potted up from the garden at Christmas and now there's more light and they are early bloomers.   This article from Washington University HERE says:  Scientists believe they’ve pinpointed the last crucial piece of the 80-year-old puzzle of how plants “know” when to flower. "Determining the proper time to flower, important if a plant is to reproduce successfully, involves a sequence of molecular events, a plant’s circadian clock and sunlight. At specific times of year, flowering plants produce a protein known as Flowering Locus T in their leaves that induces flowering. Once this protein is made, it travels from the leaves to the shoot apex, a part of the plant where cells are undifferentiated, meaning they can either become leaves or flowers. At the shoot apex, this protein starts the molecular changes that send cells on the path to becoming flowers."   And so there are Clematis blooming in the greenhouse, but now Snow Drops.  On the other hand, when I look up "first signs of flowering stage" the articles and mages that are retrieved are all about Cannabis!  That's it's own story. Here's a beautiful blooming view- Toronto's Guild of All Arts in Scarborough. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

May 18 2020 - Fireworks over the Falls?

Fireworks?  No public fireworks this year in Toronto.  Home celebrations are allowed. How about Niagara Falls?  Their website says that they are open for fireworks and schedules are published with phone numbers to call.  But they aren't open.  All the public-facing venues are closed.  No familiar fireworks on this weekend of this year. We and Scotland are the only two countries that celebrate Victoria Day. We've had celebrations since 1845.  May 24th has a long history in Canada.  It became such a big deal that by Confederation in 1867, all-day celebrations were held.  Even after Victoria died in 1901, May 24th kept going - honouring her as the "Mother of Confederation".  Not worrying about the current Monarch and celebrating their birthday with the same scale of festivities. There's a nice alignment weather-wise to have this as the summer marker.  I think ahead of the festivals, getaways, cottage visits and similar events that are not to be this summer. Even if we do participate in something, it will be tinged with concerns and caution.  We'll be distance dancing our way through the summer of 2020. Driving in Niagara is still accessible. This amazing tree is at the corner of Honsberger Ave and Fifteen Streets in Jordan. This is an old-fashioned gravel sort of road, reminding one of the roads in rural Niagara in the early 1950s, before the wave of asphalt took over. If you go to google maps, the tree is alive in July 2012.  It would be great to find out how old it was - you can see how massive the trunk is.  To get this picture? This was photographed as a 5 picture panorama and put together in photoshop.

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March 25 - The Song is Ending

CBC interviewed REM band member Mike Mills on the weekend.  The hit End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) came out in 1987 and became a satiric and defiant anthem.  So 30 years on, it has come back into the social consciousness and is being played again. What did I find most compelling in the interview?  He and Michael Stipe wrote the music first, then gave it to Peter Buck to write the lyrics, and this is what he came up with. They had no idea this music was going to say this much.   So while this song is about the 'ending', I started to wonder about how songs conclude.  What kind of endings are there? Some of the songs we were singing in the choir have a little 'hmm', 'ooh' or 'ahh' to signal the end, a sort of fade out.  And some come to a leaping big chord and just stop.  These are pretty fun to sing.  We're singing a sort of Celtic orientation/religious/inspirational set of songs. What comes to my mind on the thumping last chord songs? Oscar Peterson and his big endings.  I found this description of his version of West Side Story's Tonight (1962): "Tonight swings mightily right from the downbeat. Peterson twists the melody and trades lines with bassist Ray Brown as drummer Ed Thigpen lightly stabs and jostles the duo with his sympathetic brush work. And then there’s the big pay-off — chorus after chorus of burning swing, round after round of exuberantly shouted choruses, and finally, a stop-time ending." What are the most famous and enduring song endings? In our time, it is an easy answer: the Beatles ending for A Day in the Life.  "Following the second crescendo, the song ends with a sustained chord, played on several keyboards, that rings for over forty seconds. " This ending is considered to have made history and is the  #1  popular song endings.  For classical songs, the #1 ending is Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 – IV. I haven't looked at the most interesting song ending lyrics, or the songs with long endings.  There likely are more variants on endings - that's for another day.  We likely have lots ahead. Yesterday's weather was too cold for me to garden, so I created spring with some spring flower photo processing.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://www.blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca