Three plants — all old favorites of mine — that have recently caught my helper Isaac’s attention on our walks around downtown Palo Alto: two because of their striking foliage and flowers, one because its multitude of yellow flowers seem to thrive everywhere, even in the most unlikely wastelands. Then the first two have remarkable — and, alas, similar — names: acanthus, agapanthus. While all three have odd common names: bear’s breeches / britches, lily of the Nile (not a lily, and from South Africa, far from the Nile), daylily (again, not a lily — and why day?).
Archive for the ‘Taxonomic vs. common’ Category
Three plants
May 6, 2026Living tubes, no sex
April 4, 2026Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house). I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans). Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.
An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:
The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees
My hedge is a blood-headed beautiful man
March 1, 2026Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.
Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).
There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:
The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )
A rose for Sharon
June 21, 2025An occasional poem (in free verse) for my friend Sharon on her recent birthday, wrapped up in the calendar, the female body, and plants and their sexual symbolisms, with photos. The poem first, then remarks on its form, then a bit of background information.
Invasion of the superb birds
May 9, 2025Yesterday, a greeting card from Ann Burlingham, written on 5/5 in Pittsburgh (mostly about the University of Pittsburgh graduation on 5/3, featuring graduate Opal Armstrong Zwicky among the crowd of about 5,000), arrived in Palo Alto on 5/8, with a note beginning:
Another Superb Bird! How many can Australia have?
(#1) [from the Ikonink cards website:] Original Artwork: Superb Lyrebird (Menura superba), illustrated by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould’s Birds of Australia (1840-1848). Currently displayed at the Australian Museum.
The dandelion caper
March 9, 2025This posting is in a genre I’ve come to think of as Kharkiv Opera: a pleasant, playful, or joyous event staged in the face of terrible times; from my 3/2/25 posting “Three men walk into bar”:
the Ukrainians have been managing to mount opera performances in an underground bomb shelter in the city of Kharkiv. They sing and dance and enjoy one another’s company.
Today’s pleasure is the enjoyment of the plants and flowers around us, something that has been with me since I was a child at my father’s knee (so, for 80 years now), and was shared with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who was a wildflower enthusiast) and my guy Jacques Transue (whose passion for gardening matched mine), and survives now in my little patio garden (with super easy-care plants on it that I can look at through French doors while I work at the computer) and in occasional short walks in my neighborhood (with my sturdy outdoor walker to rest in as needed, and with the company of a caregiver, who I can talk with about what we see, while we refer frequently to on-line sources in Spanish and English).
Briefly noted: the halls of ivy
October 28, 2024From Nathan Sanders on Facebook on 10/26:
(#1) [NS:] I love when ivy changes colours! — at University of Toronto.
— AZ to NS: That is indeed lovely. It’s Parthenocissus tricuspidata, so-called “Boston ivy”, a vining plant in the grape family closely related to Virginia creeper, and not related at all to English, or common, ivy, Hedera helix (which I have growing all over my little patio). English ivy is evergreen; Boston ivy is deciduous, its leaves turning color gorgeously in the fall before dropping off.
Golden barrels
October 1, 2024From a 9/16 visit to Stanford’s Arizona Garden — the “cactus garden” in local talk — engineered by my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (who will be L from here on out), to investigate new things (for him) in the area — so many wonderful places open to the public for free — and to provide me with enjoyment (and useful exercise with my walker).
When we came around a corner of the path from the parking lot, and suddenly faced an alien-planet vista of huge astonishing plants of all sorts, as far as the eye could see in every direction, L gasped in surprise and delight. And close to the ground there were all manner of other plants, every one of them a novelty. Nothing labeled, no information supplied, but I could provide some facts from memory. Though mostly L was being carried away in delight by the visual excess: everywhere you looked, another bit of (mostly dangerous) living magic.
Then, around a corner there was a large garden island populated by cactuses I certainly recognized. “These are called barrel cactuses, for obvious reasons”, I said, but for a few moments he didn’t care what they were called, they were amazing, and in fact adorable. Some of them were arranged in what you could think of as family groups. They were golden-green, with huge spines all over them. Spines so big you could feel them individually, discover they were soft and flexible, but with spear-sharp tips.
Eventually, L looked them up on his phone and discovered that they were, specifically, golden barrel cactuses. From Mexico originally, but in the desert far from the Mexico City region he grew up in.
Sneezeweed’s the name, not elecampane
February 17, 2024Or, for that matter, the eccentrically spelled elecamphane. This in reaction to a third plate from the 19th-century American Flora compendium that I’ve been posting about recently (“My wild valentine” posting here; “Daffodil poem” posting here). Which calls the plant elecamphane, but the name is elecampane, and everyone knows this plant as sneezeweed. The plate:
(#1) The usual spelling is elecampane; a net search turns up the ph spelling only on this American Flora plate — but in any case the flower is pretty clearly not elecampane (Inula helenium), but is instead a garden variety of the closely related common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), which is (to my eye anyway) considerably prettier than elecampane
