Mashed Potatoes As humans gather around Thanksgiving tables in late fall, their feasts often include a common palette of foodstuffs, from turkey to corn to cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie. Uncle Jimmy might put a personal spin on a dish, but, odds are, he’s making it with a traditional ingredient list. Most years, Uncle Jimmy whips up a batch of mashed potatoes. Sometimes […]
Periwinkle There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable. Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some
The Secret Power of Mint Chocolate. Ice cream. Cookies. Coffee. Tea. Chewing gum. They can all feature mint flavorings. In the 21st century, where delectable chemistry can produce seemingly unending concoctions, it’s easy to forget that many of our seasonings and spices are plants, not just artificial flavors. Even chocolate, which can be quite delicious mixed with
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Mortal Flower That Perishes Like All That Is Pure One of life’s great small pleasures is the glory that emerges from translating proper native names into other languages. Sometimes we garner a euphonious moniker with a plain strict translation. For example, Katahdin is a musical name that means “Great Mountain.” While Maine’s High Point certainty is a
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Pumpkin Pie Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? / Hurrah for the pumpkin pie! –Lydia Maria Child, “Over the River and Through the Wood” We continue a tradition of exploring plants and animals associated with Thanksgiving, after investigating wild turkeys, cranberry sauce, and maize. Though cranberry sauce contains some sweetness, most people do not consume it
Ring of Fire We’ve explored Rings of Fire in the sky, and we’ve investigated Rings of Fire in the ground. This imagery seems to be one humans are quite taken with, as today we have another Ring of Fire. This halo of conflagration mixes a bit of the previous examples. It’s associated with the sun, and
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The Corpse Flower Today’s featured object is chock full of interesting and bizarre tidbits. We’ll start with a sentence you probably never thought you’d read: anthophiles worldwide flock to the smell of corpses. Fret not, it’s not human bodies attracting plant lovers, just a scent similar to the one that might emanate from dead bodies.
Sakura If one should ask you concerning the spirit of a true Japanese, point to the wild cherry blossom shining in the morning sun. –Motoori Norinaga, Shikishima no Uta Since at least the 8th century, people in Japan have practiced hanami, which translates literally to “flower viewing.” The flower in question is the sakura, also known as
Maize Many myths surround the first Thanksgiving celebration in the United States. The gathering most commonly cited as the inaugural festival happened in October 1621. For three days, 53 Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony dined with 90 Wampanoags to revel in gratitude for a bountiful harvest. For many people, today’s traditional Thanksgiving meal centers around items
Plants Can Hear As humans, we are experts at anthropomorphology. We easily identify aspects in other organisms that match our own. For example, we understand the eyes of animals, which appear largely similar to our peepers, provide the critters with sight. In art, a long tradition of attributing human traits to non-human entities has provided