The Tree Log

Moon Tree at the Goddard Space Centre   Moon Trees - Sounds like something Enid Blyton might have conjured up for a children's book, right? But it's not the stuff of fairytales, there WERE seeds taken to the moon by astronauts on two of the NASA missions - the Apollo 14 mission of 1971 and the Artemis mission of 2022 (1). The seeds on the Apollo mission were carried by Stuart Roosa who had worked as a smokejumper (2) for the US Forest Service before entering the astronaut programme. A thousand seeds were sent to Roosa by his old boss, the Head of the Forest Service, who was curious to discover whether zero gravity had any effect on resulting seedlings and trees. Roosa took the seeds with him and kept them in the command module as it orbited the moon. 

Yesterday was one of those crappy days where a 5 minute job morphed into taking all morning. And even then, the completed job was promptly discarded. This was followed by a bout of clumsiness that even I, the dropper of the open yoghurt carton (mercifully nearly empty), could barely believe. This is not me. It's tick weather, I'm not sitting down outside! After I'd cleaned up the splatters of vanilla yoghurt from the front of the washing machine, my week-old suede (ruined!) slippers and the hindquarters of my startled dog, I was really fed up with myself. I needed to hit the reset button. Or the gin. I went for the reset button and headed for my local park.

I love listening to In Our Time, possibly THE most eclectic - maybe even eccentric?- show on the radio. Melvin Bragg wrangled the various guests for over 1,000 episodes and so his dulcet tones are in almost all the episodes. However, since he retired it's been chaired by Misha Glenny. If you've never listened before, there are episodes on everything from Aphra Behn (playwright and spy) to  The Mariana Trench. You can learn about Prayer, The Gothic movement, The Enlightenment in Scotland and St Hildegard of Bingen and every single thing in between!  There's an episode on the evolution of trees , if you want to listen to it.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a medlar in a fruit shop these days. To be honest, you'd be hard-pressed to find a fruit shop these days. But I am reliably informed that we have been eating this weird-looking fruit since the Romans introduced it to Europe 2,000 years ago (1) until it fell out of favour in the 1950s. Medlars - looking not at all bum-like The reason that the medlar was popular for 2,000 years is certainly not because of its user-friendly properties. You don't just pick it off the tree and eat unless you have teeth like a horse and guts that can withstand the onslaught. No, you pick the fruit in October and November when the little brown globes are about 2 inches in diameter and as hard as bricks and then you have to carefully store them (crate of hay or sawdust) for a month until they become VERY ripe, in the process known as 'bletting'. This was a term invented in the 19th century (derived from the French verb  blettir - to become over-ripe) to descri...

At last! The gods that handle the Dark Arts that link domain names to blogs have smiled on me and at the umpteenth attempt, I have managed to point my domain name at this blog. So now we can get started! I found this little anomally in my path as I took a walk around my local park. I was brooding over my inability to get the blog and domain name to link up and couldn't work out what I was doing wrong, so I took myself off for a head-clearing walk. And to look for a sign! Initially I walked past this, but I was almost out of the park and back on the pavement, but something about the way it was lying piqued my interest and when I doubled back to pick it up it was not TWO keys as I had thought, but a 3-winged key. I've never seen one before.  Have you? This particular key is from a sycamore - there are ways to tell the various 'helicopters' apart and hopefully I'll get around to writing about that. Sycamore keys with more than two wings are unusual, but tend to happen ...