botanizing

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tfw every specimen you thought was Caloplaca saxicola is just Rusavskia elegans.

(hi I'm alive and I did get into grad school which is why I've been neglecting this blog and will probably continue to do so. but please enjoy this image it took forever to make lmao)

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*sweating, shaking* bro please... you have to let me into grad school... bro I've already quit my job and it would be really embarrassing if I had to ask for it back... bro you gotta understand I bought a ticket for [redacted event] in [city where grad school is located] and it is non-refundable, bro! bro I have packed up my CD COLLECTION and my SCENTED CANDLES!!

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*guy who just remembered he used to make educational posts on here voice*

Vagrant is a real lichenology term referring to lichens that grow unattached to the substrate and are free to roll around like tumbleweeds!

One of my favourite examples is Masonhalea richardsonii, which can be found in alpine tundra in the north. Here are some I found in the Yukon last summer:

forbidden seaweed snacks...

Hark! a vagrant!

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Hark! a vagrant!

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girl help people on iNat are calling anything grey and lumpy Physcia stellaris again

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I think our dear friend Jonathan is afraid of lichens

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Creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) is a nasty little fucker plant native to Europe and Asia that is extremely invasive in North America. It looks like this:

Flowering stems are often about 1m tall. And the basal leaves look like this:

Where I live, it's very common in alleyways and really anywhere there's a patch of unattended disturbed soil. I have some grudging respect for how hardy and tenacious this plant is, but unfortunately it is bent on world domination and must be thwarted.

It grows very deep stolons and tubers that break off and stay in the ground if the upper parts of the plant are pulled out, and it can regenerate from any root fragment left in the ground. Getting rid of it usually involves a lot of digging and sifting through the soil for root fragments (and then digging it out again the next year... and the next...). My latest strategy is to dig it out, then put cardboard down to hopefully smother any new growth.

Apparently the leaves and roots are edible, so when you're done digging them out you can enjoy a snack.

Not to be confused with native harebells (Campanula rotundifolia or alaskana), which are much smaller plants (20-50cm tall) with loose clusters of flowers rather than the spikelike raceme of C. rapunculoides. The native species are less common in urban areas.

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actually nevermind I just remembered the City Nature Challenge is next weekend and I'm gonna wander the entire length of the ravine and be cured of all problems mental physical and spiritual

already regretting grad school and I haven't even been accepted yet

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already regretting grad school and I haven't even been accepted yet

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help how do I ask important people to please for the love of god respond to my emails in a timely manner, but like in a polite and non-passive-aggressive way

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A poem

Some days I feel like Beowulf Some days I feel like Grendel Some days I have pea soup for lunch And think of Gregor Mendel

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Back when I used to walk around my college in a corduroy blazer and slacks I didn't call it "dark academia" I called it "professor drag" and the purpose was to smoothly walk into parts of campus I wasn't supposed to access

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i asked an angel what the deal with lichen was and they got really skittish and told me they could give me the answer to anything in the universe but to please not ask them about the lichen

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in general if you believe that your job is to definitively describe, capture, taxonomise, or exhaustively define reality you are going to have a bad time imo. it's far more useful to ask "which model is useful for my purposes," "does this model basically make sense with what I know of the world," "might another model be more useful for another purpose," &c.

the best map is the territory--but describing everything about the material and social conditions of each individual person on earth, besides being impossible, would be useless. in order to be useful--to describe something about the part of reality that you're interested in, to have the power to make predictions or have insights about that reality, to propose actions in order to alter that reality--you are going to have to generalise. any time you propose to reduce reality to a model you are compromising and generalising something, somewhere. the question is where do you generalise, and how much, and what do you gain from doing so, and what do you lose, and in which contexts is this model useful (i.e. how should you constrain the field in which you apply this model), and in which contexts is it more trouble than it's worth?

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A Peach like you should Pear with me.