The English word pepper is ambiguous. Botanically it could be refer to plants that produce black powdered pepper. The angiosperms (flowering plants) who serve as a source of that spice belong to the order Piperales and to the 3600-member family Piperaceae. (Kings play chess only for goodness' sake is a mnemonic for remembering the order of... Continue Reading →
Find out why the suit of clubs is named as such and discover the parallels between the origins of European cards and the natural history of legumes.
When citrus trees are grown from seed, they revert to a wild state and they can take decades to flower. About 15 years after germination I'm still waiting to see grapefruit blossoms in our kitchen, and of course the short days of long winters at high latitudes don't help the matter. But a few years... Continue Reading →
People who grow plum trees in their backyards or farms realize that these plants not only reproduce sexually by means of their fragrant flowers, but they can also establish a ramet. A ramet is a colony of clones produced by roots that surface from the ground and which then develop into full trees. Barring mutations, the... Continue Reading →
For some reason, it's a widespread belief that watering plants in full sun damages plants. Do droplets really act as tiny magnifying glasses, as some people claim? Rather than digging into professional research immediately to reveal the truth, how would we go out and find out for ourselves? If I go ahead and use a... Continue Reading →
When it comes to the preparation of food, we owe a great deal to the experimentation of past generations. Successful recipes have been preserved by word of mouth and cookbooks, especially in the past century. As I continue to learn how to cook I prefer the advice of my wife and mother to that of... Continue Reading →
The Marcel Laurin Woodland Park is all too easy to under-appreciate. Drive or cycle by it too quickly, and it could easily go unnoticed because of its size--it's not one of Montreal's largest regional wooded areas. But once inside the woods, one realises that it is a special part of Montreal's parks and protected woodlands, which combine to hold... Continue Reading →
What did I just photograph? It's a "volcanic" island of baking soda in a sea of tart cherry juice. In a nutshell, there are acidic ions within tart cherry juice and they're reacting with the baking soda's bicarbonate ion, creating water and bubbles of carbon dioxide. But there's more. Excess bicarbonate also changes the structure of the cherry's... Continue Reading →
What does a flower do with light? In a nutshell, some of the light that reaches a flower's petals is absorbed; some is transmitted through its anatomy and the rest is reflected towards the sky and towards the eyes of pollinators and admirers. But from such a summary, a number of questions can germinate. How does light get absorbed... Continue Reading →
