A Flower for the Day

Sometimes when there is snow on the ground and it’s cold outside I take a moment and browse through some of my plant pictures. This afternoon I found a couple of pictures I took  last May that I had intended to edit. I did the editing, and the result is this picture:

It Causes me to Shutter

Do you ever see things and think to yourself I really need to photograph this and then not photograph whatever it was? It might be a plant, or a bug, or a person, or a sunset, or a car, or just something else that is cool.

The picture below is something that I have intended to photograph for a long time, but it took me years before I actually did. Can you tell what it is? (The answer is below in white text, so you’ll have to highlight it to read it). 

What is it?

This is a close up of the bottom of a pot of water as it begins to boil. For years I have boiled water to make tea and marveled at the coolness of water as it starts to boil. I finally took the picture.

Every Rose has no Thorns?

Today I roamed around campus, snapping a few pictures I will need later this semester. My primary targets were terminal buds of oaks, birches, and beeches. I managed to find a few additional plants that were photogenic. One of these was a rose:

You might notice sharp outgrowths on the stem of the plant. To the average person these are called thorns, however, to a botanist they are prickles (thorns are woody outgrowths of branch/stem tissue that occur at nodes, while prickles are outgrowths of the epidermis that occur between nodes). So Poison was wrong, not every rose has its thorns. In fact, no rose has thorns.

A prickle by any name is still just as sharp.