Skunk Cabbage Kicks up a New Stink

Part of my dissertation involved immersing myself in the history of plants that have been adopted as crops outside their country of origin – novel crops, as I referred to them. It’s a long history, with recorded attempts to move plants from one place to another going back as far as the ancient Egyptians. Even before that, probably for as long as we’ve been human, we have been moving plants around, whether by accident or design.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

In episode 8 of the BBC’s Wartime Farm historian Ruth Goodman decides to do some picnic catering for a party in the park, an event that would have been encouraged under the ‘Holidays at Home’ scheme – an attempt to provide some light relief for a population that was discouraged from unnecessary travelling.

An extraordinary apple tree in a garden in Lincolnshire is 400 years old. It inspired Sir Isaac Newton to think about gravity, and in 2015 British astronaut Tim Peake took its pips into space. In this episode, Emma the Space Gardener talks with Jeremy Curtis, Head of Education and Skills at the UK Space Agency, about sending Newton’s apple seeds into space. She finds out what’s happened to the space saplings and has a close encounter at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Ever wonder, “Can Bearded Dragons Eat Purple Cabbage?” Learn if purple cabbage is good for your scaly friends and the possible advantages and disadvantages of adding it to their diet.

A well maintained green sward with stripes from a lawnmower is the epitome of a British garden. It could be something to do with the amount of rain we get but it also depends on the type and care of the grass.

In the cold wet winter it is a good time to plan where to visit as the year improves. The South West is the obvious place to start your visiting tour of gardens containing exotic plants.

There are many interesting terms that may have uses in our UK gardening. We  have probably all experimented with Bonsai aiming for the perfection of small trees in small pots as a demonstration of bonsiers art. I have used the root restriction technique to get miniature or smaller shrubs for a smaller garden but stopping short of root pruning.

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The Asian longhorned beetle (ALB; Anoplophora glabripennis) is not easy to miss – adults of this large, black beetle with white spots, black and white striped antennae, and blueish feet are between 1 and 1 ½” long (Fig. 1). ALB larvae are equally striking as the large, white segmented larvae can be nearly 2” in length (Fig. 2). Established populations in the U.S. are found in Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, and a new infestation was recently found in Charleston County, South Carolina.

There are diamondback moth caterpillars on the right. The caterpillar on the left is a cabbage webworm.