Charmed
- Crone
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
Yes, well. After the famine, a deluge. Well, no, more a trickle, but a rather delightful trickle.
In the garden, a flock of goldfinches came calling and calling and calling. Their song a rainfall in the drought. A charm, a glitter, a glamour of goldfinches.
Some large-flowered aster-type plant is out.
Aster - star - the name that Merlin, in CC gives to his Welsh pony and then to another pony he is given in Brittany.
I have learned from David George Haskell's How Flowers Made Our World that the aster family is the second largest (in some counts the largest) species-rich family of beings. Orchids may have more. There are something like 7,000 mammals and more than 28,000 orchids.
Orchid babies are completely reliant on fungi. They parasitise the fungi (effectively) for a few years until they are mature enough to grow leaves and can then offer the fungi something in return. They are, as it were, wet-nursed. Like cuckoos, the parent plants send their offspring off with nothing. The seed has no nutritious casing to feed the seedling. It is just an embryo. Many orchids have relationships with only one species, even only a few specific variants of one species.
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