Some cool animal plant images:
Surely She's a Sexy Sumac
Image by bill barber
Female Sumac, North Garden
From my set entitled ‘Sumac”
www.flickr.com/photos/21861018@N00/sets/72157607186471302/
In my collection entitled “The Garden”
www.flickr.com/photos/21861018@N00/collections/7215760718...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumac
Sumac (also spelled sumach) is any one of approximately 250 species of flowering plants in the genus Rhus and related genera, in the family Anacardiaceae. The dried berries of some species are ground to produce a tangy purple spice often used in juice.
Sumacs grow in subtropical and warm temperate regions throughout the world, especially in North America.
Sumacs are shrubs and small trees that can reach a height of 1-10 meters. The leaves are spirally arranged; they are usually pinnately compound, though some species have trifoliate or simple leaves. The flowers are in dense panicles or spikes 5-30 cm long, each flower very small, greenish, creamy white or red, with five petals. The fruits form dense clusters of reddish drupes called sumac bobs.
Sumacs propagate both by seed (spread by birds and other animals through their droppings), and by new sprouts from rhizomes, forming large clonal colonies.
The drupes of the genus Rhus are ground into a deep-red or purple powder used as a spice in Middle Eastern cuisine to add a lemony taste to salads or meat; in the Turkish cuisine e.g. added to salad-servings of kebabs and lahmacun. In North America, the smooth sumac (Rhus glabra), and the staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), are sometimes used to make a beverage, termed "sumac-ade" or "Indian lemonade" or "rhus juice". This drink is made by soaking the drupes in cool water, rubbing them to extract the essence, straining the liquid through a cotton cloth and sweetening it. Native Americans also used the leaves and berries of the smooth and staghorn sumacs combined with tobacco in traditional smoking mixtures.
Species including the fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica), the littleleaf sumac (R. microphylla), the skunkbush sumac (R. trilobata), the smooth sumac and the staghorn sumac are grown for ornament, either as the wild types or as cultivars.
The leaves of certain sumacs yield tannin (mostly pyrogallol), a substance used in vegetable tanning. Leather tanned with sumac is flexible, light in weight, and light in color, even bordering on being white.
Dried sumac wood is fluorescent under long-wave UV light. Mowing of sumac is not a good control measure as the wood is springy resulting in jagged, sharp pointed stumps when mowed. The plant will quickly recover with new growth after mowing. See Nebraska Extension Service publication G97-1319 for suggestions as to control.
At times Rhus has held over 250 species. Recent molecular phylogeny research suggests breaking Rhus sensu lata into Actinocheita, Baronia, Cotinus, Malosma, Searsia, Toxicodendron, and Rhus sensu stricta. If this is done, about 35 species would remain in Rhus. However, the data is not yet clear enough to settle the proper placement of all species into these genera.
Save The Snail
Image by zenera
Camille West » Save The Snail
It was a quiet cafe in Orleans, France
where we held our midnight rendezvous,
conspiring pour la resistance
It seemed like something Woody Allen would do,
talking politics, ethics, animal rights
one fateful night long ago.
The mood like the food we kept it light
till someone ordered escargot.
How sad for the snails, I cried woefully
shedding tears on my brioche.
To have given up their lives needlessly
for the bourgeoisie, how gauche
To my friends, I cried You and your dialectic.
Save the dolphins.
Save the ozone.
Save the whale...
There is a factory I know where they are farming escargot.
We must save our friend the snail.
We planned the mission with the utmost precision,
spied the factory from across the boulevard.
The alarm was taken care of by Pierre the electrician,
while I seduced- I mean, subdued- the guard.
Need I tell you, our timing was crucial
not to be caught at the scene of the crime.
