Centaurea, Knapweed

The feathered bracts on the involucres finally helped me identify these pretty flowers as knapweed, genus Centaurea. I haven't been able to do any better than that yet. Some Centaurea species are invasive exotics while others are North American natives. These may be some escaped horticultural variety. Whatever they are, they are doing very well in a clearing near our house, and I think they are lovely.

• Connecticut Botanical Society's Knapweed selection
• USDA Plants Database entry for the genus Centaurea

Pita Bread

A few weeks ago, I was grocery shopping near the Interstate, where they get those city groceries, and I bought a package of pita bread. It wasn't very good pita bread, but it got me thinking about how I hadn't had any in years. After an Internet search, I started testing pita bread recipes. It's quicker and easier to make than I expected, and I love to see the flat bread dough rounds puff up into off-kilter balls in the oven. For me, it's both food and entertainment.

I favored a bread machine recipe because I'm lazy and because room temperature in this house is seldom conducive to yeast incubation. I modified the recipe and directions for better results, and what follows is a recipe that works well for me.

1 cup water
1 tsp salt
1 TBS oil
1 1/2 tsp sugar
3 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast

Place all ingredients in bread pan, select Dough setting and start. When dough has risen long enough, machine will beep. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface. Gently roll and stretch dough into 12" rope. Preheat oven to 500°F, making sure you have an oven rack in the lowest position.

With a sharp knife, divide dough into 6 pieces. With a rolling pin, or by hand, form each piece of dough into a circle 6 to 7 inches in diameter. Set aside on a lightly floured counter top. Cover with a towel. Let dough circles rest a few minutes. Handle with care while rolling and transferring. Holes and tears prevent them from puffing up in the oven.

Place 2 or 3 pitas on a wire rack. (I'm using the porcelain-covered racks from our smoker. Cake racks will do, but racks out of discarded appliances like toaster ovens are more substantial, and work better.) Place your small rack directly on the oven rack. Bake pitas 4 to 5 minutes until puffed and tops begin to brown. Avoid over-baking, or the pitas will turn hard and brittle. Remove from oven and immediately cover pitas with a damp kitchen towel until cool.

These are recipes I tried, and from which I "developed" the recipe above.

• How to Make Pita Bread by Saad Fayed, About.com's Guide to Middle Eastern Food.
• Easy Pita Bread from Diana Rattray, About.com's Guide to Southern U.S. Cuisine
• Garvick's Pita Bread
• Bread Machine Pita Bread Recipe
• Peppy's Pita Bread

Cucumber Claws

Cucumbers picked from the garden have bumpy skins, with a small blunt spine in the center of every wart. (If your knowledge of cucumbers is solely from the grocery store, you won't have encountered these, as they are brushed off when the cucumbers are oiled for cosmetic purposes.) While the cucumbers are still just unfertilized ovaries, they already have those little spines, and as the fertilized fruits start to develop, the spines are fully formed and stickery, like kitten claws.

Hand Me Down My Walking Stick

I always enjoy seeing walking sticks--that is, sticks that walk, not sticks to assist people walking. These insects are as difficult to write about as they are to photograph. It's not that they won't hold still--they are very obliging, as their frozen poses make them resemble twigs even more. It's just that they are so long, and so inanimate--how can you capture their strangeness in a photograph?

I'd hoped to clarify what I was talking about with a scientific name, but the walking sticks are members of the orthopteroid orders, and Internet taxonomic schemas are inconsistent in naming the stick insects. I'm going to follow Willi Hennig (1981), my grad school hero, in calling them phasmids.

Harlequin Bug

I'm sure these are the first harlequin bugs we've had in our garden since we've lived here. Murgantia histrionica is big and showy, and this year it's abundant on the broccoli. No heteropterist would have overlooked a pentatomid this striking. I was surprised and pleased to find that the eggs of this species are as beautifully marked as the adults. Too bad about the broccoli.

Disquieting Tomatoes

This year I experimented with some heirloom garden seeds. Although our garden looked pretty early in the season, the alternating heat, cold, heat and drought of the last few weeks have taken their toll.

The beans and broccoli did not do well for us, but I have plenty of tomatoes for canning sauces and ketchup. They're not ideal, easy-to-slice, easy-to-peel tomatoes, though. The Hillbilly tomatoes are rough and gnarled, and many of the Amish Paste tomatoes sport noses and perhaps other appendages. These extraneous tomato ovaries range from diverting to disturbing.

Gathering Pollen

The field thistles see plenty of traffic these days. Although honeybee visitors are scarce, there are plenty of native bees gathering pollen.

Monosodium Glutamate

Recently, I wondered "Where do they get monosodium glutamate?" If you buy a jar of "Accent," or bulk MSG from a Chinese grocery store, where does it come from? Chemistry is a topic well-covered by the World Wide Web, and I found the answer soon enough. I guessed correctly from the name that monosodium glutamate is a salt of glutamic acid (an amino acid), and I learned that commerical glutamate is a product of bacterial fermentation (like yogurt), starting with molasses, sugar beets, tapioca and/or grains, and a culture of Corynebacterium glutamicum.

I was surprised that there was so much emotional baggage associated with MSG. I didn't really want to know what other people thought about MSG; I wanted to know how it was made. I had to wade through ubiquitous editorializing to find that information.

• The Wikipedia entry on "monosodium glutamate" presents some facts about MSG, but theirs is very brief account.
• All About MSG from the Australian Glutamate Information Service . This is an industry-sponsored informational site, with emphasis about how glutamate is a naturally-occuring flavor, present in traditional foods as soy sauce. I found their account of the "umami" flavor very interesting.
• The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth About MSG. You might guess that this is not a pro-MSG site from that title. Evidently, there is an MSG conspiracy afoot, and these articles blow the lid off.
• A list of MSG articles from Newstarget.com, Describing his point of view, Mike Adams says ...a few years ago, I...I realized that practically everything we are taught about health, disease, food and medicine is utterly false. Everything I had ever been told about health -- by my doctors, schools and even my own government -- was a lie. Trust no one.

Accordion Universe

I don't understand why some musical instruments strike people as funny. If you dropped an accordion and a banjo off the Empire State Building, which would hit the ground first? Who cares? What's the difference between an accordion and a chainsaw? You can tune a chainsaw. That's the spirit of this article: Accordionists in D.C.: They Aim To Squeeze by Joshua Zumbrun, Washington Post Staff Writer (Saturday, August 18, 2007).

Despite the mockery, it's good to see the accordion get a little attention and respect.

Imagine a universe exactly like ours in every way but for a lone exception: There is only one type of music. Accordion music.

This week, such parallel universes have collided.

The rift in the cosmic fabric could be found at the Holiday Inn Commonwealth Ballroom in Old Town Alexandria, site of the 60th annual Coupe Mondiale, the World Cup of accordion competitions for younger players.

In Accordion Universe, all music is powered by the swaying bellows pulling air in, pushing it out. There's the familiar oompa-oompa-oompa of polka everywhere, yes, but the instruments also can play whimsical pop and mournful ballads. All types of music, in fact, with the soft drone of the keyboard being pushed to and fro.

The scene at the hotel on Tuesday night for the competition's opening performance is much like any international gathering. A melange of languages wafts through the lobby; bags droop below the eyes of jet-lagged travelers. But our universe ends and this universe begins as someone pushes a birdcage bellman's cart through the doors; it's laden not with suitcases but a pile of accordion cases. At the end of the hallway, accordionists are practicing a difficult riff. And in the rooms, strains of accordion jazz and accordion pop and accordion polka mix with spoken French and Chinese and Danish.

"The soundtrack of life is full of accordions," says Faithe Deffner, the U.S. delegate to, and vice president of, the Confederation of International Accordionists, which stages the Coupe Mondiale every year. "People don't see accordions very much, but they're always in commercials, television, movies."

Burdock Disgrace

I've been enjoying Ada E. Georgia's 1914 handbook, Manual of Weeds, subtitled With Descriptions of All of the Most Pernicious and Troublesome Plants In the United States and Canada, Their Habits of Growth and Distribution, With Methods of Control. It's part of a series edited by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Cornell University's Uberbotanist, entitled The Rural Manuals. Bailey's Manual of Cultivated Plants, a reference I use frequently, was evidently conceived as part of this series.

Ms. Georgia and Dr. Bailey both bristle with that old Yankee urge to set the world straight on how Things Should Be Done, and I was particularly taken with Georgia's account of Burdock (Arctium sp.), the plant I photographed by our woodpile last week.

The presence of one of these huge weeds in flower and fruit should be considered a disgrace to the owner of the soil so occupied, for it must have remained in undisturbed possession of the ground for the necessary second year of growth before reproduction.

The root is enormous; often three inches thick, driving straight downward for a foot or more and then branching in all directions, taking strong hold on the soil and grossly robbing it....

Burdock roots and seeds are used in medicine and the destruction of the weeds may sometimes be made profitable; roots should be collected in autumn of the first year of growth, cleaned, sliced lengthwise, and carefully dried; the price is three to eight cents a pound; ripe seeds bring five to ten cents a pound.

I shudder to think what she would say about Pocahontas County, for every local fleece I've tried to work up and spin has been riddled with burdock seed heads. No sane spinner would ever buy a second fleece in such a condition. The sheep farmers hereabout sell their wool in a wool pool, which means that there's no incentive to keep their fields burdock-free if the other farmers don't. All the wool brings the same price, and the West Virginia Department of Agriculture reports that our wool is exported to Europe, where it is used to make felt for industrial machinery. One local handspinner I met raised and sheared her own sheep, and spent much time every year digging the burdock out of her fields. A life-long sheep farmer, spinner, and weaver, she told me she threw away fleeces with burdock contamination.

Buzzing Bombyliid

These large, showy flies are common here, buzzing conspicuously around the yard. They are called bee flies, family Bombyliidae, because they sound like bees. Some species look like bees too, but this one doesn't (at least, not to me). Their larvae are parasitic on the larvae of other insects. Caterpillars, grubs, hymenopteran larvae in their nests, and grasshopper eggs are common hosts. I've read that after the bombyliid flies lay eggs on a wasp's nest, each fly hatchling crawls into a brood cell and waits until the wasp larva has completely consumed the paralyzed prey its own mother has provided. The maggot then consumes the fully-fattened wasp larva.

The adults feed harmlessly on nectar and pollen.

• Bombyliidae page at the Tree of Life Project
• Bombyliidae page from John L. Foltz at the University of Florida

Underwing Moth In Mourning For Taxonomic Stability

Underwing or Catocola moths are common on Droop Mountain, and there are quite a few species with colorfully-striped hindwings of yellow, orange, or pink. Thursday night's rain brought a nice crop of Friday morning moths, and of course I nudged this large individual, anticipating a surprising flash of color. I got a real surprise this time, for the moth took flight, with flashes of intense flat black. Lucky for me it didn't fly far or high, and I was able to get a picture of the hindwings.

There are Catocolas with specific epithets like lachrymosa and dejecta, and I've seen these funeral hindwings in field guides and collections, but this was my first black Underwing on the wing.

Historically, the Underwings are members of the Noctuidae, but that family was a taxonomic dumping ground, and lepidopterists have been working clean-up for some time. The Noctuoidea of Eastern Canada includes Catocola in the Noctuiidae. Bugguide.net has placed Catocola in the Eribidae. Curiously, both resources cite the same taxonomic authority: "Kitching, I.J., and J.E. Rawlins. 1999. (The Noctuoidea, pp. 355-401 in Kristensen N.P. (editor). Lepidoptera: Moths and butterflies. Volume 1: Evolution, systematics and biogeography. Handbook of Zoology/Handbuch der Zoologie. Walter de Gruyter. Berlin/New York)."

White Snakeroot--Pretty, Toxic

It seems our little field is a cornucopia of toxic plants, both native and introduced. I've long recognized this as "some sort of Eupatorium," but I decided it was time for more precision. Because I don't have the "Compositae" volume of The Flora of West Virginia, I turned to my field guide collection, and soon determined this was White Snakeroot, Eupatorium rugosum, a native plant. When I visited the USDA Plant Database to confirm my identification, I learned that Eupatorium rugosum is a junior synonym of Ageratina altissima (L.). I haven't identified when the revision occurred, but a huge, widely-distributed genus like Eupatorium sensu latu was bound to need some taxonomic attention.

White Snakeroot is the cause of "the milk sick" that killed Nancy Hanks, described here by Lincoln's law partner, William Hernodon:

In the fall of 1818, the scantily settled region in the vicinity of Pigeon Creek [Indiana] ... suffered a visitation of that dread disease common in the West in early days, and known in the vernacular of the frontier as "the milk sick."

It hovered like a spectre over the Pigeon Creek settlement for over ten years, and its fatal visitation and inroads among the Lincolns, Hankses, and Sparrows finally drove that contingent into Illinois.

To this day the medical profession has never agreed upon any definite cause for the malady, nor have they in all their scientific wrangling determined exactly what the disease itself is....A fatal termination may take place in sixty hours, or life may be prolonged for a period of fourteen days.... Sometimes it runs into the chronic form, or it may assume that form from the commencement, and after months or years the patient may finally die or recover only a partial degree of health."

When the western frontier still lay in the Eastern Deciduous Forest, cattle often wandered into the woods to browse on White Snakeweed. It not only poisoned the cows, but was concentrated and passed along in the cows' milk. The settlers were correct in naming milk as the cause, although the "medical establishment" was slow to catch on. White snakeroot... by George Ellison for The Smokey Mountain News describes the "milk sick" history:

Milk Sick Cove ... Milk Sick Holler ... Milk Sick Ridge ... Milk Sick Knob ... and similar place names are common throughout the southern mountains. They are so-called because of an association with a once mysterious and deadly disease known variously as "milk sick" or "milk sickness" or"puke fever" or "the slows" or "the trembles."

....The search for the killer plant is filled with wrong turns, chauvinism, regionalism, and general pigheadedness. In the 19th century scientific research was concentrated in the northeastern United States where milk sickness did not occur; accordingly, the problem was viewed from a theoretical perspective rather than from a practical and preventative one....

In 1838, an Ohio farmer, suspecting that white snakeroot might be the cause, fed leaves from the plant to some of his animals. Sure enough, they developed milk sickness and died. The farmer published his exciting find in the local newspaper. But farmers don't make medical discoveries, do they? No, at that time, only certified professionals were allowed to make discoveries. A famous eastern physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, denounced the farmer's experiments. He was sure that the cause was poison ivy. Dr. Drake, alas, helped set back milk sick research and treatment for nearly a century, causing, indirectly, thousands upon thousands of deaths, predominantly infants.

At about the same time, Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby came into the Illinois wilderness with her family. Upset by the poor health of her neighbors, she decided to become a physician and returned to Philadelphia to take training in nursing, midwifery, and dental extraction, the only courses women offered to women at that time.

After her return to Illinois, an epidemic tore through the little settlement where she resided and practiced as Doctor Anna. She noted in her diary that the humans and animals contracting the disease had been drinking milk. In an attempt to locate the "guilty" plant, she followed grazing cattle, observing the plants they fed upon. But she was baffled in her field research until she happened upon an elderly Indian medicine woman known as Aunt Shawnee. When Doctor Anna described what she was looking for to Aunt Shawnee, the older woman took her into the woods and pointed to white snakeroot.

Like the Ohio farmer, Doctor Anna tested the plant on a calf, which soon developed "the trembles," while other animals not fed the plant were fine. She started a white snakeroot eradication program that virtually eliminated milk sickness from southeastern Illinois within three years. Wanting other doctors to know about white snakeroot, she grew a patch in her garden and wrote letters inviting physicians to come and examine it for themselves....The eastern medical establishment, alas, ignored the findings of the two women....

Finally, in the 1920s, researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture led by Dr. James Couch isolated from white snakeroot a highly complex alcohol they named tremetol. More recent research has refined the original USDA scientific analysis, but the culprit plant had, finally, been officially "discovered." Information was spread in the late 1920s throughout the medical and agricultural communities. Fencing laws and supervised milk production largely solved the milk sick problem....

Some further information about White Snakeroot:

• Missouriplants.com: Photographs and descriptions of the flowering and non-flowering plants of Missouri, USA

  Flowering - July - October. Habitat - Rich, rocky woods, base of wooded bluffs, rock outcrops, thickets. Origin - Native to U.S.

  Other info. - This species can be found throughout Missouri and is quite common. The plant is variable in its pubescence and a couple different forms are mentioned in Steyermark. I won't go into those here.

  This species is very toxic if eaten in quantity as it contains barium sulphate. Cows which graze on the plant produce poisonous milk and this was the cause of death for a number of pioneers in this country.

  American Indians used a tea made from the roots to help diarrhea, painful urination, fevers, and kidney stones. The plant was also burned and the smoke used to revive unconscious patients.

• USDA Plant Database has it as Ageratina altissima (L.) and lists Eupatorium rugosum as a junior synonym, as does
• Connecticut Botanical Society.

Ladies Tresses--An Orchid Surprise

I spotted this little orchid early this week in a weedy field we've recently started to mow. There were two flower spikes, about 14 inches tall, with no leaves associated. The flowers must be ephemeral, because, when I visited them a day later, they were gone, and another spike had sprung up a few feet away. These are "Ladies' Tresses," the genus Spiranthes. I've learned that there are 32 described species, and that they are a challenge to key. My North American field guides differentiate among them in part on leaf shape, although admitting that often leaves and flowers are not present at the same time. There's one challenge right there.

Spiranthes is certainly good enough for me. It's a pretty name for a lovely plant, and it refers to the spiral arrangement of flowers on the inflorescence.

• Connecticut Botanical Society's page on Spring Ladies Tresses
• Wikipedia's Spiranthes entry
• USDA's Plant Database entry for Spiranthes
• Spiranthes - Ladies' Tresses from "Discover Life."

Galinsoga, Quickweed

This little garden weed has been bothering me since I moved to Droop Mountain. Springing up in new-tilled soil almost instantly, it has eluded my attempts to identify it. People around here call it "Devil's Delight," and that is certainly fitting, but I wasn't able to identify it with any of my field guides, and I don't have the "Compositae" volume of The Flora of West Virginia.

This week I finally found it in Manual of Weeds by Ada E. Georgia (1914). It's called "Galinsoga," which is its generic name as well. Galinsoga is native to South America, where it is used as a spice. It's named after an eighteenth century Spanish physician. Although it has a world-wide distribution, it doesn't seem to have an English name that's really stuck to it. It's sometimes called "Gallant Soldier," evidently a misinterpretation of the scientific name, and Newcomb's Wildflower Guide also calls it "Quickweed." It definitely is quick to sprout, and quick to flower.

• Hairy Galinsoga: Galinsoga ciliata from Virginia Tech Weed Identification Guide
• Wikipedia's Galinsoga parviflora entry
• Rutgers University's Galinsoga page

The Unknown Lygus vanduzeei

I think this mirid is Lygus vanduzeei Knight, 1917. I've keyed out quite a few individuals of this species in my day, although I can't do it now, as a microscope is necessary. You'll have to take this as a provisional identification. The mirid is posing on a White Snakeroot (Ageratina altissima (L.)) inflorescence.

Although handsomely-marked, this bug has not been the subject of life history studies. Unlike its much-studied congener, Lygus lineolaris, (the Tarnished Plant Bug), Lygus vanduzeei has never received a common name, and, while widespread, it is not abundant or agriculturally significant enough to warrant much study from entomologists. Like most insects, it goes about its business of eating and making more insects without any human attention.

Field Thistle

The thistle buds have finally popped open. People around here call them "bull thistles," but my field guide awards that name to a different species. I think this is the "Field Thistle," characterized by its deeply cut leaves and the felted white hairs on their undersides.

Cryptic Coreid, Bitter Blackberries

The blackberries are scarce this year, and the ones I've found are small and bitter. That doesn't seem to matter to this coreid nymph, who is cryptic indeed among the blighted blackberry leaves.

Longtime Pocahontas County residents recall a time when people picked blackberries by the gallon. Jim Comstock rhapsodized on blackberry season in West Virginia, and how it provided abundant fruit for any person energetic enough to go berry picking. Those days seem behind us in Pocahontas County, perhaps because the forest has returned to land logged and burned in the early twentieth century. The trees have simply shaded out the blackberries, huckleberries, and wild strawberries. Deer browsing may also play a role, but I've noticed blackberry canes and huckleberry bushes are still abundant--they're just sterile.

• Wild Blackberries and Foraging for Blackberries from "Wildman" Steve Brill
• Difference between black raspberries and blackberries

Ownership of The Good Earth Manuscript

This article about Pearl Buck's The Good Earth manuscript appeared in last week's Pocahontas Times, and has gone behind their firewall. I thought it significant enough to warrant a longer circulation time, so here is an excerpt.

For the record, I think it would be a terrible mistake for any more Buck manuscripts to be housed in Hillsboro. The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace used to display the manuscript of Absalom Sydenstricker's translation of the Bible into Chinese, until it was destroyed through carelessness a couple of years ago. Sydenstricker was Buck's father, and his translation from Hebrew and Greek into Chinese was the first Chinese Bible, and is still in use. The old Stulting house contains an assemblage of late nineteenth century furniture and bric-a-brac unrelated to Buck or her family, and the ladies that maintain the landmark find this stuff much more significant than some unintelligible old manuscript. It costs $6 to tour this faux-plantation house, and for many people, it is only a chance to brag that someone once had enough money to build an ostentatious house in Hillsboro.

Good Earth unearthed: Rightful home of manuscript May be in Hillsboro by Drew Tanner, August 2, 2007 Pocahontas Times

While Pennsylvania-based Pearl S. Buck International and the author's heirs have been in the national spotlight in their dispute over the ownership of a long-lost manuscript, the rightful owners may be right here in Pocahontas County.

In June, the FBI recovered Buck's original, type-written manuscript of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth, in a suitcase of Buck's personal documents and letters after the daughter of one of the author's former secretaries tried to put the items up for auction. Officials at the Samuel T. Freeman & Company auction house notified investigators of the find.

In a bill of sale recorded at the Pocahontas County Courthouse, Buck signed over all of her manuscripts to the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation for one dollar in 1970, "including... the Good Earth manuscript[,] the exact location of which is unknown."

Members of the Foundation have been hesitant to make much of their claim to the manuscript, saying they are more interested in promoting Buck's legacy than causing a stir with PSBI or the author's family.

However, they insist, the manuscript belongs with the others the foundation owns, which are stored in an archive at West Virginia Wesleyan College, in Buckhannon. They are currently working with an attorney to figure out how to proceed.

Foundation board member Ruth Taylor said she would like to see a permanent home for the manuscripts constructed at the author's birthplace, in Hillsboro, as the author and the foundation originally intended.

Retired Lewisburg attorney Robert Jacobson said he was at Pearl Buck's home in Vermont when she made the decision to turn over possession of the manuscripts the evening of October 15, 1970.

....Buck wanted to be able to tell representatives from PSBI that she had already conveyed her manuscripts to the Birthplace Foundation. In order to do that, Jacobson said he told the author she needed to record that decision in writing.

The value of the manuscripts, estimated at the time to be worth between $650,000 and $1 million, helped the foundation secure the grants necessary to restore the author's birthplace. Buck was active in promoting the restoration of the house, and penned the memoir My Mother's House to further aid the foundation in its efforts.

The Birthplace Foundation has since restored the house to the way it appeared in 1892, the author's birth year. The house is open for tours from May through October, and the foundation has two employees who sell tickets, guide tours and keep the house clean. The house is full of many of Buck's personal effects, family heirlooms and period furnishings.

....In Hillsboro, the birthplace gets much of its support from the West Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs, said foundation president Rose Anderson. Additional income is received from private donations, people who pay to tour the house and sales at the gift shop. Taylor said the birthplace receives just a few thousand visitors each year, but that she would like to see that change.

....With an archive of the manuscripts on site, Taylor said she envisions the birthplace as a center of study on Buck's writings and her role as a leader of civil rights and women's rights, and as a pioneer in international adoption and racial understanding.

....The manuscript and the suitcase of documents in which it was found are being held by the FBI until the rightful owner is determined.

Thistle Suspense

These thistles are keeping me in suspense since I started watching them several days ago. The handsome, silky bracts subtending the inflorescences have unfurled, but the capitate inflorescenses are still curled up inside these swelling buds.