Too many gardeners are not, and have blogs in addition. One woman, from a not too far island, in these multi-cultural-lingual-ethnic archipelago, proudly displayed a picture of her so so garden with a huge mutilated over fifty year Ficus benjamina.
TO THE PROUD
GARDENER IN THE WEST ISLE
and
COMPANY
If you find caterpillars or any other pest, disease, in your plant, tree, bush or vine follow me.
Go to search, if you know the botanical name of whatever, the ideal, theoretical solution of any problem be at hand/brain, if not dead.
For example: Plumeria+caterpillars +disease. Or Plumeria+disease+photos.
The ability to research will allow you to climb to unimaginable heights if consequent.
Lets imagine for argument sake that you live in Barbados or Gilligan's Island and there is an old Ficus requiring corrective pruning after a hurricane. Or a cane in a hurry.
Instead of renting a truck with a basket+hiring too illiterate fools, you would do the following.
Identify whatever, if the botanical name is not available search with the common name to find it. Example: Trinitaria. If you are fortunate, the local, common name may appear in your language in the www. You could then, I insist, if fortunate, find the botanical+disease+correct pruning+planting+care and so forth.
BOOK REVIEW
WICKED PLANTS
AMY STEWART
Algonquin Books
2009
Fifty Plants that Changed
the Course of History
Bill Laws
2010
If the reader has some interest or training in history, botany or teaching both books will be useful, informative and a reference when unwilling to sit in front of a monitor to investigate.
The first is more attractive, easier to handle when reading in bed, a most in my reading habits.
The second has color pictures, an unfriendly font, in my opinion, giving the book a hateful defect, the text book
feel.
But the problem as a somewhat studious gardener is this type of unnecessary opinion, even if that is what I do most of the time in this blog, I find it intolerable in a book. Extrapolating on historical issues with actual religious, judicial, views is annoying.
Sugarcane
Saccharum officinarum
page 167
...In theory, Spain's rulers after the Reconquista could have adopted the farming methods of their conquered foes to grow and process the sugarcane. But with their attention fixed on foreign conquests rather than on nurturing the homelands, the Spanish, instead of investing in their
agriculture, invested in slavery.
I will not get into the implications of such declaration in a book about plants, since it seems absurd to offer opinions on historical facts that can not be changed. They were and happened, period.
What I will add is that capturing people, making them slaves to sacrifice, to work the fields, mines, to sell, exchange, is very OLD and not a patrimony of Portugal, Spain, England or modern countries if you will.
Almost every relevant culture has had some manner of keeping slaves within their social structure. Take the untouchables in India, 400 million of them. What are they if not slaves? But since their religion and beliefs create that stratification, no one will call them slaves, what they are.
Now as a farewell, in Puerto Rico, USA, (not burkina) things are looking just the same. In 2011, it has been raining every other day, with less than normal temperatures. It is wet and a little cooler than I like it.
On the crime scene, the numbers are moving up and quickly, a good thing for funeral homes and flower industry.
This is something no one dare to write/talk about. Crime and death create jobs. You may not like it but it is a reality.
apaga i vamonoh.
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