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BLUETS AT THE BRIMFIELD ANTIQUE SHOW

I went to the Brimfield outdoor antique show and ended up driving over and crushing some of these flowers. I was directed to park on this spot. I still own what I did to those little delicate flowers but in a strange way I was actually helping the local population of that species. You will have to read on for that explanation!

This beautiful spring wildflower is tiny, colorful and elegant, floating above the ground on the thinnest and most spindly of stems. They thrive on moist flat areas where the grass is diminished and mowed moist fields where the grass is continually kept at bay. The world renowned Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield Massachusetts is a great place for them to thrive because acres of moist soils are continuously mowed to make way for the largest antique extravaganza in the world to take place three times a year. Many of them do get run over by tents and parking cars but the the conditions are still so favorable that they continue to thrive! I drove over a bunch of ‘em and when I loaded my van with all of my recently acquired antique finds I took great care to not crush any more! I did feel guilty for the ones I ran over with my automobile.

However, interestingly enough the huge show is helping the species locally by requiring the continuous mowing of fields to park cars on, even if many of them ending up getting crushed.

The complicated world of species survival, local species extirpation, and unintentional species codependency grinds on.

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REPORTING LIVE FROM MONSON MASSACHUSETTS

Dear readers and subscribers: while the rest of the internet goes on and on about all of the topics it goes on and on about incessantly, here at the Sanguine Root, in our little corner of the internet, we are measuring Mayapples with a tape measure and discussing a very fascinating aspect of this specie’s morphological variations between New England and Southeastern Pennsylvania!

So welcome to this respite and its accompanied breath of fresh air as we discuss the differences in morphology between like populations.

Upon immediate observation, the Mayapples that grow in and around Monson Massachusetts are much bigger in every way than the ones that grow in Southeastern Pennsylvania. They are noticeably taller, and have much larger leaves and leaf spans. The stems are twice the thickness. It is a startling difference. I’ve not yet found anything written about this in the literature and would love to see it. We are going to present our hard data and make some reasoned arguments, so fasten your seatbelts.

So this is a large patch of Podophyllum peltatum, that I planted from a locally sourced donated specimen. The picture below has the leaf span clocking in at almost 22 inches!

Why are Massachusetts Mayapples so much bigger, larger, wider, taller than Pennsylvania Mayapples? The simplest explanation is probably the correct one: The only Mayapples that survived in Massachusetts are ones that can withstand the late Spring snowstorms, so the ones that had a genetic variation favoring larger and thus stronger stems survived over time, leading to the existing populations overwhelmingly having these features. They can survive the occasional late Spring snowstorm and still make it to flower. The Pennsylvania Mayapples are to a less of degree likely to have this problem and thus are more diminutive in their morphology. Why grow larger or any more taller than they need to?

Genetic variations within species between geographic regions is an endlessly fascinating topic!

The stem base at one inch! In Southeastern Pennsylvania, these are 1/2 inch! What a difference! Below is my cultivated patch.

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Sharply contrasting commutes: The Schuylkill expressway must be abandoned!

The traffic on the way home this Friday afternoon here in Philadelphia is unpleasant. Not for me, because I am on my bicycle. I just breezed past all of the stuck cars and zoomed home, even taking some mountain bike trails through the park. The two pictures below are taken just minutes apart and are two completely different worlds. Both taken in the midst of the city of Philadelphia. A startling contrast!

The Schuylkill expressway hardly moving.

Just hundreds of feet away and two minutes away from the first picture in this post of the woods of Fairmount Park.

I found a Tulip Poplar flower on the trail! This is the brief part of the year to celebrate this tree to its fullest!

Liriodendron tulipifera

Back to the urban planning aspect of this post:


It is great that I can bike from point A to point B in some cases in Philly and always take advantage of the opportunity when I can! It is a such a pleasure to go bicycling especially when the weather is fair. I wish everyone commuting in Philly this afternoon could have the same experience I had. It would help in the political process of collectively re-imagining and re-engineering our cities to be more pleasant and more environmentally intelligent. This post is part two of the Sanguine Root call for the total elimination of the Schuylkill Expressway.