The Fossil Record

Kiku

The house smells like apple cider and pumpkin pie today, because that's what we had for breakfast this morning. My dog happens to love pumpkin pie, but it reminds me of how homesick I get this time of year for New York State, where I'm from. There's nothing like a crisp northeastern October day filled with cozy sweaters, orchards and hay rides. If I were up there right now, I'd be raking some leaves up that actually turned pretty colors before they hit the ground, instead of just dying, sad and brown when they fall off the trees, the way they do here in Texas.

I'd also be sure to take a trip to the New York Botanical Garden after my yardwork was done, to see their new exhibit on the Japanese art of cultivating Chrysanthemums called, "Kiku."

I bought the spider mums in this picture at the local grocery store. I thought they were beautiful, but I really had no idea when I brought them home how highly regarded these flowers are in the Japanese culture. Gardeners there meticulously train different varieties of the flowers over long periods of time to grow up to six feet tall, or to produce hundreds of blossoms from one plant, using techniques that have been developed over a span of 1500 years.

The flowers were first brought to Japan by Buddhist monks in about 400 A.D. The Japanese emperors are said to have loved the flowers so much that they built thrones out of Chrysanthemums. The flower is also featured on the Imperial Seal of the Emperor of Japan.

The New York exhibit is the result of five years of that Botanical Garden working with the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, and is the most elaborate exhibit in the history of the New York Garden.

To see a video about the exhibit and the art of Kiku, check out the
New York Botanical Garden site.

Prehistoric plant rediscovered!

In 1994, a field officer who was out bushwalking and rock climbing in the Wollemi National Park outside of Sydney, Australia, found an odd plant specimen that he had never seen before. The discovery turned out to be a 200 million year-old coniferous evergreen tree, which came to be known as the Wollemi pine.

Wollemia nobilis (the tree's species name) is what scientists call a Lazarus taxon, or a "living fossil"--a grouping of organisms that we have fossil evidence of, but had been thought to be extinct. Some other examples of plant and animal life that have been "rediscovered" as Lazarus taxa are the Ivory-billed woodpecker and the woolly flying squirrel. The discovery of new species is always very exciting for scientists--but especially so when the plant or animal is one that has been part of Earth's history before.

Prior to David Noble's discovery of the Wollemi pine, scientists had found fossils resembling the Wollemia species throughout Australia and New Zealand, but had never seen a living specimen. Soon, they found about a hundred of the trees scattered about the area and set out to try and preserve them.

In their conservation efforts, they started a program to try and raise young Wollemi pine trees to sell to the general public to try and increase their numbers throughout the world. So now you can possibly plant a tree in your yard that has been around since before the Jurassic period!

I don't know about you, but that makes me a little nervous. You just never know what kind of wildlife a plant like that will attract--perhaps the kind with really big teeth and a keen sense of smell.

To learn more about the Wollemi pine, visit The Wollemi Pine Homepage, or the Australian Government's Wollemi Page, where this photo is from.