plants

A Mushroom... (or toadstool) is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. In this post, I'd like to share the variety of mushrooms I've been seeing in the monsoon season, in and around the city!   The terms "mushroom" and "toadstool" go back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on application. Between 1400 and 1600 AD, the terms mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns were used. Puffball Mushroom Black Puffball Many species of mushrooms seemingly appear overnight, growing or expanding rapidly. This phenomenon is the…

I don't find it necessary to go to jewellery shops, as Nature provides me plenty of jewels! All the photographs below are from local gardens in Bangalore. Do I want pearls for a necklace? Here are the pearls of the Sterculia foetida, locally called the Jungli Badam. The monsoon season, or even a dewy morning, provides so many diamonds. Here are hundreds,sprinkled over a spider web: One of the bugs we see often is, indeed, called the Jewel Bug. It appears in rainbow glory, with a metallic sheen, on top of our most common plants and weeds: And when the…

I felt quite thrilled as I found these leaves of Four-leaf Clover, and clicked them on February 5, 2018. Why the thrill? Here is the entry about Four-leaf Clover. Amongst other things, it says: The four-leaf clover is a rare variation of the common three-leaf clover. According to tradition, such clovers bring good luck,though it is not clear when or how that tradition got started. The first reference to luck might be from an 11-year-old girl, who wrote in an 1877 letter to St. Nicholas Magazine, “Did the fairies ever whisper in your ear, that a four-leaf clover brought good luck…

I often come across the Balloon Vine (also called "Love in a puff") on my walks through the fields and forests around my city. It's a very common vine, indeed....and in fact, in New Zealand, it is identified as a prohibited pest plant! However, in Kerala, the flower of this vine  is one of the ten "sacred flowers" Seed pod and flowers: I found that the scientific name for the genus of this vine is "Cardiospermum". The name intrigued me, until a friend and avid amateur botanist, Ajit Ampalakkad, showed me the seeds inside the "balloons". Each seed was attached to the…