Botany Photo of the Day

It is neat to see the fascination of macro photography at the turn of the last century is still with us after the turn of this century. I've always attributed mine to being nearsighted!

About Blossfeldt :
A series of comic books drawn by architects even figure a city called Blossfeldtstad, with architecture inspired by vegetation.
http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~vguerra/Other/Cites/bloss.htm

Looks alot like the pine barrens in Southern New Jersey where I live. Sandy acidic soil and stunted trees especially pines. It's another area that seems to suffer fires as part of its life cycle.

where in the sam hill is burns bog anyway? you don't locate a lot the places you name here!

The closed cones on the tree in the picture and your mention of fire made me wonder- are the cones of these bog trees serotinous?

Please mention the camera and film, or equipment you are using.

beautiful pic. yes, Peter, I agree, it does look like South Jersey. I thought it was the local 'blue hole' area out at Menantico, Millville, NJ.

Sophie, thanks for the very interesting link - I wasn't aware of that.

bob - click on the "southeastern section of the bog" link, and use the magnifier bar in the upper left of the Google Map to zoom out to see that this is in the southwest corner of British Columbia.

Matt - I had to look it up: “persistent or variously serotinous”!

Tom - for this particular image, I think I used a Canon S30 (I was just starting out with photography!), but for most of the photographs I take on here, I use the equipment listed here: About Botany Photo of the Day.

Daniel

Another reason for the cone question was that the trees in your photo reminded me of the P. contorta ssp. bolanderi trees found in the "pygmy forest" at Mendocino White Plains in northern California. Those "trees" grow in extremely acidic soil (ph sometimes below 3!)The Mendocino trees' cones are mostly serotinous. Information on this variety is limited, but there is a brief description here

Matt

Any news of the fire?

It will of course open the cones and release the seeds to start the cycle over.

For Matt - serotinous cones occur scattered across the range of Pinus contorta; they are most frequent in subsp. latifolia, occasional in subsp. contorta (now includes var. bolanderi) and least frequent (very rare, if ever at all) in subsp. murrayana.

Well, the fire has gone “underground” - we've had some cloudy weather the past couple days with rain, so the surface fires and “candling” have ended. The smoke was particularly bad here a couple nights ago, but it's quite clear now and the air quality advisories have been lifted.

Still, since it is a peat bog, the fires underground continue - it's an interesting phenomenon, I think, how the fire is able to tunnel under the surface and emerge elsewhere. Because of this, the same number of firefighters were still working on the fire as when it originally started, even though there's little apparent fire. News reports suggest that lessons were learned from previous bog fires - one of the techniques now used is to tunnel into the peat and saturate it with water from fire hoses.

Cause of the blaze is still unknown, as far as I've heard.

Here's an article from a few days ago - the extent reached 2 square kilometres in size.

I would like to know , where those pinus are growing by natural. In the mountanis of Chequioslovachia ???

Information on Pinus contorta, including distribution range (by the way, I believe it is now Slovakia and the Czech Republic - two different countries).