This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
For a while I was thinking about how despite being the type species of the order Asparagales,Asparagus is weird and doesn’t really look much like other Asparagales, which tend to have liloid strap-shaped or triangular leaves while Asparagus looks superficially fern-like and and feathery.
Later I ended up figuring out that the resemblance is in their new shoots! If look at a Haworthia or Agave’s flower spikes they look very asparagus-like in the early stages and are flanked with scale leaves. An Agave’s basically looks like a massive version of the asparagus shoots you would see in the stores.
Imagine traveling back hundreds of years and finding your way up a salmon-spawning river in British Columbia to a small village. You walk into the trees and find yourself in a patch of forest dramatically different from the conifer growth around it. Small fruit and nut trees form the canopy, and there are clusters of berry bushes and cleared paths. The forest floor hosts tended herbs used for food and medicine. One child carefully peels moss from the bark of a pruned crab apple tree; another clears the ground next to a salmonberry bush.
Welcome to a temperate forest garden.
A new study shows that once-managed gardens like this are still distinct from – and more biodiverse than – the surrounding forest, even 150 years after Indigenous people were displaced by colonial settlers and the gardens abandoned. More diverse ecosystems are generally thought to be more resilient to environmental change and resistant to the incursion of alien species.
Chelsey Armstrong, a paleoecologist and paleobotanist at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, studied four sites: Dałk Gyilakyaw and Kitselas Canyon, both in Ts’msyen traditional territory in northwestern British Columbia, as well as Shxwpópélem and Say-mah-mit, both of the Coast Salish people of southwestern British Columbia. Each site hosted several villages that were occupied for thousands of years, up until the late 1800s. […]
The garden plants they studied also had seeds that were about twice as large on average -- a trait typically associated with plants that bear larger fruits, which hints that people were purposely selecting for higher production.
The gardens contained 10 culturally significant species not normally found together, two of which fall completely outside their natural geographic range and were likely transplanted.
“Crab apple is a coastal species that likes its feet wet in the intertidal, and we’re finding it far inland in these sites, so people were moving them, in some cases, big distances,” says Armstrong.
“Hazelnut is doing the opposite, coming from the east and being moved toward the coast,” she adds. “We know that hazelnut doesn’t grow anywhere else in the area except for these village sites.”
Both species have enormous cultural importance to the Ts’msyen and Coast Salish people. Hazelnut packs a lot of calories into an easily picked nut that can be stored for up to five years. Crab apples, known locally as moolks, feature in origin stories of the areas, and were a high-status food stored over the winter months to supplement a fish-heavy diet.
“It’s amazing to think that the decisions that were made 150 years ago around stewardship and management persist today,” says Andrew Trant, an ecologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who was not involved with this study. The work shows that “what we do today has the potential to be persistent six generations from today.”
Armstrong says the work highlights how biodiversity and food provision can both be enriched at the same time, in contrast to colonial farming practices in which ecosystems are often stripped down to monocultures in an attempt to boost food production. “There’s a growing body of evidence from everywhere from the Amazon to the Pacific Northwest that in these sites that were continuously occupied for thousands and thousands of years, the effect is actually one of higher diversity,” Trant says.
The study details tie in with Indigenous knowledge, says Armstrong, who has been working with Indigenous partners and colleagues from the four First Nations on whose traditional territory the village sites are located: the Kitsumkalum, Kitselas, Sts’ailes, and Tsleil-Waututh. […]
Oral histories also suggest that the job of tending forest gardens fell largely to children. Elder Betty Lou Dundas of Hartley Bay remembers pruning crab apple trees and clearing the ground around their bases to raise the trees’ productivity.
Willie Charlie, former chief of Sts’ailes, a Coast Salish First Nation, says no knowledge is ever truly lost from his community – even after the assaults of colonialism and the residential school system.
“My grandfather said all of our teaching are still there on the land, so if somebody has a good mind and a good heart and the right intention, they can go out there and those messages are going to come to them,” says Charlie.
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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Jessa Gamble. “Ancient Gardens Persist in British Columbia’s Forests.” Hakai Magazine. 9 June 2021.
scientists in the 1990s, putting a Get More Purple gene attached to a harmless plant virus into an already purple petunia: please get more purple
the petunia, sensing an apparent honest to god Get More Purple Disease, using the previously undiscovered RNAi antiviral ability to shut down all other purple genes along with it just in case: you put VIRUS in petunia? you infect her with the More Purple?? oh! oh! her children shall bloom white! jail for mother, jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!
Let’s learn about flowers as signifiers of queer identity! I’m not gonna figure out how to embed a tiktok, but this is one of those ones where the video is actually worth watching to get a visual of the queer botanical teapot.
Transcript: “Last night, I visited the V&A’s [Victoria and Albert Museum, London] exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities, and there was something that I was surprised to see. A section called Queer Botany highlighted the different flowers that have been used to signal queer identities through history. Obviously we already know about violets for lesbians, and lavender, but it also mentioned the green carnation, made famous as a symbol of homosexuality by Oscar Wilde. It also talks about how other members of the Aesthetic Movement wore certain cut flowers, including the sunflower and the lily. This was accompanied by this fabulous teapot from 1884 in the shape of a man with a limp wrist and a sunflower in his buttonhole. The other side, which wasn’t on display, is a woman with a lily.”
More lesbian fashion history by the creator of this video at dressingdykes.com.
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