Category — lines under latin

Halving the number of days between December 21 and March 21 lands us on Tuesday February 5, 2008 sometime around noon. As this midwinter hump approaches I am curious about the use of seasons. While I know that “winter” and “summer” are created by the tilt in the Earth’s axis which places us in northern hemisphere closer or further from the Sun at different times of year resulting in variable temperatures; what I don’t know is where winter starts. I mean at what latitude do people call the season winter (for the english speaking world). Do other languages account for more than four seasons? There is of course the rainy season and the dry season in many places. Can seasons be named after colors? Certainly we could look at the color studies of Johannes Itten (page 23) and pick out the seasons quite easily…

In any event, the Red Twig Dogwood is a wonderful plant with particular winter interest that thrives in full sun and should be cut back at the end of each winter. It lives with the other Cornus species in the Dogwood collection at the National Arboretum and is tough to miss this time of year. Happy midwinter…

Ahhh yes… the elusive Paw Paw tree. I first learned about the PawPaw tree in my plants and ecology class as one of the 300+ plants we met. I’ve seen patches of seedlings on a stream bank in central Virginia, searched out specimens after dark in the Chicago Botanic Garden, and read stories of George Washington enjoying it as his favorite fruit. But I didn’t get to taste a PawPaw until Kate and I discovered some ripe fruit on a patch in Theodore Roosevelt Island this past fall. IT IS DELICIOUS. For those of you unaware of the delights of a paw paw, it comes from the PawPaw tree which is a US native understory tree that grows up to about 25′ in height. The fruit is a little smaller than a mango and tastes something like a cross between banana and vanilla custard. IT IS DELICIOUS. This of course is very confusing to me as we continue to ship bananas and similar fruits many miles to keep our cereals adorned. While it’s true that many of the native PawPaw trees have been lost to development, our landscape is still fit to grow them from the Midwest to the East Coast (the PawPaw tree is native to 25 states). I have this story in my head where at some point early in our post European conquest development someone says that he or she likes bananas better than paw-paws and poof…we start jumping through hoops to procure this exotic fruit only to forever neglect the backyard pawpaw. I would love to start seeing the now elusive paw paw on our grocery shelves but have yet to come by them. While their are people working on cultivars that offer more, better tasting fruit, there doesn’t seem to be too many folks working on the agricultural potential of this darling. The PawPaw Foundation is something of a lonely, but hopefully viable voice.