Monday, March 14, 2016
Smell-O-Vision
I wish one could smell the lemon flowers through the screen.
The camellias (in our LA yard) enjoyed their baths this winter. I wish there were more coming, but the Madden-Julian Oscillation makes that unlikely.
On the upside, I traveled eastward with the MJO back to Boulder.
That's one dramatic front, n'est pas?
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I would like everyone to come on over to the intersection of Meridian and 54th to sniff the fragrant cherry blossoms. If you stick your face in them, it's not much, they are single and small flowers and do not look like much. If you step about ten feet away, it's miraculous.
ReplyDeleteMost cherries aren't fragrant, the ones to look for are the old craggy ones.
I wish I could go to DC or Japan for cherry blossom season. Some day...
DeleteThat is such a good point about the craggy ones having the most scent. Cherries and apples belong to the prunus genera of the rose family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae
Roses have been hybridized for showy blooms, but lost their scent along the way. Has the same thing happened to cherries?
One of my favorite geography/genetics stories is about how wild roses were genetically selected to become apples. Rosehips became larger traveling from Asia to Europe along what is now the silk road. It was assumed that humans did the selection, planting food along their trek to ease the way for future travelers.
ReplyDeleteGeographers/geneticists determined, through genetic analysis that apples-roses diverged much earlier than human settlement of that area. The silk road started out as a bear migration trail. 50,000 years ago, the bears ate the bigger and juicier rosehips and pooped seeds along the trail to select for bigger and bigger rosehips -> apples.
I can't find the original paper about the genetic analysis. But, I found a recent paper that cites the discovery as a well-known fact now.
http://www.botany.wisc.edu/courses/botany_940/06CropEvol/papers/Harris%2602.pdf
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12142012