A roundup of news of interest to gardeners...
Landscaping
“The high-priced garden landscapers that make this flat sandy bog bloom are not used to the question, ‘How much will it cost?’” Barbara Amiel under Madoff cloud in Palm Beach, Florida (Maclean’s).
A mini test track lined with transplanted pine trees and tulips was installed last month in the basement of the Detroit’s Cobo Center to show off the latest electric vehicles at that city’s once-famed auto show.
Famed designer of New York’s Central Park and other remarkable public landscaping projects was a “farmer, journalist, and former sailor with no formal training in architecture, engineering, or any related field” notes Leonardo Vazquez in Landscape Architecture. If the Frederick Law Olmsted of 1857 offered to plan and manage your city’s central park, you probably wouldn’t hire him, he writes. But he did have great leadership skills, and that was the reason for his success, according to Vasquez, director of the Leading Institute (
theleadinginstitute.org).
Lawns
“Get off my lawn,” roared an outraged Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, brandishing a gun to make his point. The actor/director’s latest flick made his day with $29-million in ticket sales the first weekend of its wide release. But wouldn’t a greater threat have been posting the lawn with signs proclaiming it to be treated with herbicide?
The cost of mowing and maintenance of the lawns at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s stately Ottawa mansion was almost $73,000 for 2007-2008 according to National Capital Commission figures released to Sun Media. Throw in another $5,767 for grass seed also and it sure isn’t your average suburban lawn.
Lawn signs in Cornwall, Ontario, are unfair, says Graeme Norton of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. At least those being posted by the local gendarmerie in front of homes where three people have been charged with drug possession. The signs read clearly: “Drug search warrant” and police aim discourage crime with them.
“St. Paul’s, another Grit home with all the nice lawns.” Allan Fotheringham expresses surprise Michael Ignatieff chose not to run in the Toronto riding (Maclean’s: for those outside Canada, a ‘Grit’ is a member of the Liberal political party)
Trees
In Ontario, the native white spotted sawyer beetles are reproducing on blow-down and slash piles of white pine, reports Jen Llewellyn in Horticulture Review. The populations have grown so high in some areas, that the white spotted sawyers have been observed attacking healthy pines. She’s starting to get calls, says the Ontario government pest specialist.
Deforestation in the Amazon dropped sharply in late 2008, satellite images showed that 635 square kilometres of forest vanished in the last five months 0f 2008, down from 3,433 square kilometres of the same five months of 2007, reported The Globe and Mail.
The Vatican goes green! The 33-metre Austrian pine that decorated St. Peter’s Square in Rome this past festive season will be recycled into “toys for needy children and garden furniture such as benches for schools.”
Blue ash (Fraxinus quadrangulata) can somehow regenerate itself through seed in the wild. However, nursery growers say that blue ash is probably one of the most challenging species of trees to propagate from seed or cuttings, reported Ontario government expert Jen Llewellyn in Horticulture Review. This may eliminate it for the time being as a candidate to replace other species of ash decimated by the emerald ash borer, to which blue ash is apparently distasteful.
Pruning trees can prolong the life of a tree by decades, Richard Ubbens, Toronto’s director of forestry, told the National Post’s Allison Hanes. He said that proper maintenance could reduce damage caused by weather events such as snow, ice and wind.
Kathleen Farley of San Diego State University in California and Jackson reviewed data sets from efforts to establish new forests in Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe and found that increased tree and shrub growth typically resulted in the loss of one-third to three-quarters of stream flow, writes Michael Tennesen in the journal Science.
At cost $8,208 for the delivery of 30 northern white cedars to Rideau Hall on Sussex Drive, Ottawa, the National Capital Commission informed Sun Media. This works out to $273.60 per Thuja occidentalis, somewhat a steep price when 2-metre specimens were being offered at around $75 in Toronto.
Deforestation produces 17% of the world’s carbon emissions, equal to the output of the entire United States, writes Nathan VanderKlippe in the Financial Post.
It takes 75,000 trees to produce a single edition of the Sunday New York Times according to the Toronto Sun, which neglected to say how many trees it took to produce it’s own sister paper, the Sunday Sun.
Vancouver’s Stanley Park Hollow Tree Conservation Society as been firmly put in its place by Park Board Commissioner Aaron Jasper, who told the otiose organization, “I want to be very clear in my mind that you’re not turning this it a Franken-tree.” The dead and decaying red cedar stump has been a source of contention for many a past month out in the Left Coast’s La-La Land.
Trees in old-growth forests are dying at twice their former rate and that climate change is the likely cause, researchers report in the journal Science. While the scientists focused on the western U.S. and Canada, there are indications that eastern North American forests are similarly affected.
A walk through an arboretum enabled people to perform better on a standard working memory task. . . in comparison to the stimuli of a stroll through a downtown landscape, reports Science on recent research reports. Perhaps the overlords at the University of Guelph will bear this in mind the next time they attempt to sell off that university’s celebrated arboretum to developers.
Shrubs
Lo and Behold™ ‘Blue Chip’ is a miniature butterfly bush with fragrant long-lasting blooms. Yet another hit from Proven Winners will be on the way to your friendly local garden centre in just a few weeks. ‘Blue Chip’ is a splendidly accurate name, but Lo and Behold? Sounds like female sales staff in somwhat revealing attire.
Flowers
‘Doda’ is a new addictive drug created by grinding dried poppy husks or poppy seeds containing opiates into a fine powder. According to the National Post’s Dave Bowden, it is commonly ingested with hot water or tea, rather than injected, and is popular with some South Asian men. The source is dried poppy plants imported from Arizona and Afghanistan for flower arrangements, giving a new meaning to the phrase high society florist.
Laguna™ Heavenly Lilac is a new, neat lobelia highly suited to container gardening. Promoted early by the Proven Winners people who know the early bird gets the worm and the interest of the green thumb brigade, it should be in any garden centre worthy of that designation this spring.
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck named their first daughter, born December 2005, Violet. Now she has a sister, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth Affleck. Shakespeare might have written a sonnet . . .
Pantone, the colour people, have proclaimed the shade of ‘Mimosa’ to be its 2009 pick of the year.
“Women who are given flowers enjoy a more positive mood for three full days after they receive them,” according to MSN Health & Fitness and Prevention magazine, quoted by Canadian Florist.
Roses
Repairs to the granite markers in Rideau Hall’s Rose Garden set back Ottawa’s National Capital Commission $2,375, reports Sun Media.
Vegetables
“Is it a pea, a bean, or a pulse? Pulses are the dried edible seeds of legumes and includes beans, peas (such as chickpeas) and lentils,” according to Barb Holland of the commuter tabloid Metro. Now you know how to check your pulses.
In Nigeria, calabashes are used as spoons, bowls, sound boxes of musical instruments – and now as crash helmets. A new law requires motorcyclists to wear such proper protection, much to the dismay of some. So they have taken to wearing the vegetable skidlids, but determined authorities say they will haul such law-breakers into court.
The Modern Botanicals is a range of ceramic tableware from the intriguingly named Big Tomato Company, we learn from Brit monthly House & Garden. For more, you can visit
bigtomatocompany.com, while contemplating if, over there, they know that a ‘tomato’ is slang for an attractive girl. The things one learn from horticulture . . .
Fruit & Nuts
The “Sun Tattoo” is a cloth stencil that, according to Maclean’s, allows you to tan floral and curlicues patterns onto your back and backside while leaving other areas of skin covered by the stencil in contrasting white. So what has this to do with horticulture? Sometime ago a similar idea was patented . . . for stencilling logos on apples. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Author Wolfgang Stuppy explains that a citrus fruit is actually an “armoured berry,” according to the Canadian Press.
Floating bunches of bananas are credited with separately saving two lives after the sinking of the Indonesian ferry Teratai Prima last month. One survivor is reported as having clung to his organic lifesaver for some 27 hours following the disaster in which 250 other passengers lost their lives.
Never let it be said that we ignored the United State’s new commander-in-chief in these pages. When it comes to peaches, President Obama is qualified to judge. During a one-time gig as a food critic of Check Please! on a pubic television restaurant review show in 2001, he went bananas over the peach cobbler served at the Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop diner in his Chicago neighbourhood.
Six deaths and some 500 illnesses caused by salmonella-infected peanut butter snack bars in the United States crossed the northern border. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced a recall of nine infected products, including those from popular brands Clif, Larabar, Nature’s Path Organic and Hebert’s Fully Loaded.
Beverages, Herbs & #
Instead of sickly-sweet, diabetes-inducing cocktails, the in-thing is now adding cayenne, haberno or red Thai peppers, claims Maclean’s magazine. The Scoville heat ratings of each of these, in order, are 50,000, 1000, and 200,000, something Maclean’s neglects to mention, or bhut jolokia at 1,001, 304? Caramba! Enough to give one cojones furiosis indeed. A juniper on the rocks, if you please.
‘Deficit irrigation’ improves agricultural efficiency reports Emma Marris in Nature. Thus, Zhang Jianhua, a plant physiologist at Hong Kong Baptist University, has heavily promoted a management technique called ‘partial root zone drying,’ in which some roots are watered and others are not. Wine growers in Australia, among others, have enthusiastically taken up this technique says Marris.
“Oral pleasure activator,” said the label on a bottle of Italian vino. “The product, of taken in recommended doses, has hilarious, introspective and evocative effects; reduces inhibitions and loosens control. Can make the world appear more beautiful and inspire dreams, poetry and visions.” Alas, ‘twas a protest by the Tuscan-based wine lovers’ site
winenews.it, created as a protest against yet more EU over-regulating by that dread organization’s proliferating bungleaucrats. Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate.
Colombia hopes early this year to join other coffee-producing nations to buy an influential share in Starbucks Corp., according to Gabriel Silva, director of Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers. Brazil and Central American growers are already interested in a possible deal reported the Financial Post.
Squeezing a lime into Mexico’s Corona beer originated, so one theory goes, from an ancient Meso-American practice designed to combat germs, with the lime’s acidity destroying bacteria. Except, as any horticulturist knows, limes originated in eastern Asia. Never mind, according to Michael Kesterton of The Globe and Mail, the ritual dates back only to 1981 and an enterprising barman. So what happened to the lager-and-lime of British pub fame?
A Niagara winery received $108,000 of taxpayers money to study icewine prospects in China, courtesy of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). China is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s super-economies and would seem to require little foreign aid.
Tampa, Florida tops the charts as the United States most caffeinated city, followed by Seattle and Chicago, reported the National Post. The reason? Tampa residents were the most likely to take pain relievers containing caffeine and to drink lots of tea, says HealthSaver, the health-care discount service that commissioned the survey.
A new habanera pepper sauce is being offered called “Bernie in Hell.” Dedicated to disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff it sells at US$10 a bottle from the website of a enterprising New York artist.
Hélas, France has just lost its leadership as the world’s biggest wine consumer and exporter to Italy, reports Aurelian Girard in The Epoch Times. As producers, though, both will shortly be overtaken by the United States with an anticipated annual production of about 3.7 billion bottles. Cheers!
Shoppers looking for fresh garlic in most grocery chains seem to find only one supplier – China, writes Judy Creighton of the Canadian Press. And their cloves are often dried out and lack flavour from being shipped such a long distance. There was a tariff to discourage such up until 2007 but, since federal bungleaucrats failed to enforce the dumping onto Canadian markets, it was allowed to expire. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Ottawa’s overpaid snivel serpents.
Houseplants
Cactus 1549: call sign of the US Airways Airbus A320 that crashed landed in the Hudson River, New York City last month after reportedly colliding with a flock of birds.
“Citruses should be planted in a free-draining compost mix,” advises Clare Foster in the magnificent U.K. monthly House & Garden. Compost? you may well ask. For those not blessed with transatlantic-speak, over there they call compost what we ignorant colonials refer to as potting soil. Anybody would think they invented the language, along with modern gardening.
Seeds
McKenzie is all a-twitter with many new flower varieties especially suited to container gardening. Snapdragon ‘Cascading Chinese Lantern,’ Verbena ‘Imagination,’ Marigold ‘Vanilla,’ Begonia ‘Show Angels,’ Petunia ‘Shock Wave Ivory,’ Geranium ‘Summertime,’ and Lupins ‘Gallery White’ will delight those of the green thumb brigade whose space is limited. These seeds should be started indoors over the next few weeks.
Questioning the germination and growth of a 2000-year-old date seed excavated from near the Dead Sea, renewed a controversy. An arctic lupin seed from the Yukon estimated at 10,000 years old was germinated over 40 years ago. Similar claims have been made for a 3000-year-old Nelumbo nucifera seed, also Chenopodium album and Spergula arvensis from a 1700-year-old site in Denmark, to say nothing of cereal grains from Pharaonic tombs. None of these latter have been radiocarbon dated however, unlike the date seed, but only estimated from their associations with other material.
For the Birds
More bad news for Alberta’s oil sands: The Boreal Songbird Initiative, a U.S. conservation group in Seattle, Washington estimates that over the next 3 to 5 decades, as many as 166 million birds from 290 species might be lost, contaminated by oil or drowned in tailing ponds, the journal Science notes. This could represent, at worst, a 50% decline in the bird population of the 14 million hectares that contain oil sands.
Scientists ponder why starling flocks land, notes the journal Science. The answer is, apparently, because everyone in the flock wants to, according to a computer model devised by István Daruka of Eötvös University in Budapest.
The ‘Over the Fence’ feature of Harrowsmith makes it well worthwhile the price for this magazine alone. In February’s issue, Devon Jorundson of Swan River, Manitoba suggests making a squirrel baffle for bird feeder poles from a four-litre milk jug or plastic bleach bottle. Cut off the bottom, slice down one side and attach to the pole cone end face down. Do we hear some frustrated chittering?
The Good, the Bad and the Bugly
Gypsy moth populations were slightly up last year – until the wet conditions favoured a disease of the alien pest, an entomopathogenic fungus, Entomphaga maimaiga, reports Jen Llewellyn in the trade publication Horticulture Review. A further check to gypsy moth was NPV, a type of viral pathogen, she writes. This latter is being investigated by a New Brunswick-based company as a natural control.
Emerald Ash Borer continues its relentless expansion in Ontario. In early December, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency reported its presence in Pickering, immediately to the east of Toronto, in the vicinity of Liverpool Road and Finch Avenue East.
Populations of insects that feed on corn and other crops in the United States may flourish and expand to new territories as global climate change brings warmer summers and milder winters in the decades ahead. At least so says study leader Noah Diffenbaugh, a Purdue University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. Far be it for us to disagree with distinguished academics, but records indicate that temperatures are dropping, and have been for the past decade. Check outside if you don’t believe this. Should please the IPCC people, though.
Australian scientists report in the journal Science they have persuaded the bacterial parasite of fruit flies Wolbachia to alter its tastes and infect disease-carrying mosquitoes. Obtaining approval to release the bacteria into the wild, however, may take many years say researchers, even those such as Wolbachia, which are not genetically modified.
Employment as a mosquito researcher in Brazil is one of the worst jobs in the world, according website
worst-jobs.com. With 3,000 bites in three hours, the potential for malaria is to say the least, high, comments Omar El Akaad in The Globe and Mail. You don’t want to know any of the others. Trust us, really you don’t.
Pest control involving ants and wasp nests while trapping skunks, raccoons and ground hogs came to $10,252 at Rideau Hall, Ottawa in 2007/2008 Sun Media reports.
Hordes of voracious caterpillars are destroying crops and prompting terrified villagers to flee their homes in northern Liberia in what is described as the West African country’s worst plague in 30 years. No, the news did not come from supermarket tabloids but the UN Food and Agriculture Organization agency.
A failure in much of the acorn crop in much of the U.S. this past season has left squirrels scurrying and, according to Tim Evans in USA Today joining the illustrious ranks of other big-time losers such as investment bankers.
Household cockroaches are remarkably nimble. Under attack they skitter away in some unexpected direction. Researchers report in Current Biology that the wily little insects first turned away, and then raced along one of four preferred trajectories, of approximately 90º, 120º, 150º, and 180º relative to the stimulus. The latter, suggests Science, a rapidly approaching rolled-up newspaper.
Thanks to plant pest interceptions by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), some Columbian and Ecuadorian cut flowers face more inspection in 2009, reports the periodical Canadian Florist.
Compost
“Do you think the word ‘dung,’ D-U-N-G, would be offensive?” Newsweek records U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens as enquiring, while engaging in a case-related discussion about which four-letter words pertaining to “sexual or excretory activities and organs” should be regulated on broadcast television. Gardeners are wont to know it by an earthier name also of four letters, your honour.
“I walked in a prisoner and walked out a scientist,” Craig Ulrich told the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting. Convicted of manslaughter while studying biology at Washington State University, Seattle, he had spent four years in prison. There he devised a more efficient composting system. Ulrich is now a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Nevada, Reno, reported the journal Science.
Tools
A heart-shaped trowel is a practical gift for Valentine’s Day suggests Brit magazine House & Garden. “Made by the excellent Dutch toolmaker Sneeboer . . . It can be engraved with a personalized message, and costs £30.45 plus p&p.” Fifty bucks or more for a trowel? Ah, those extravagant Europeans. For more, visit
harrodhorticultural.com
Fungi
Now it is cheap truffles China is inflicting upon the outraged French fanciers of the pricey fungus. Fifteen tonnes of Tuber indicum arrived in France last year, and has reportedly been illegally substituted for the real McCoy, Tuber menalosporum. Claudine Muckensturm, the Paris-base head of the Finance Ministry’s fraud-prevention unit announced a “clean up of the sector” will commence shortly.
Toronto filmmaker Rob Mann has released his movie Know Your Mushrooms to hometown audiences. According to commuter paper Metro’s Chris Alexander, it is a “rambling and lyrical love letter to toadstools of every persuasion centres into the arcane wilds of the Telluride Mushroom Festival and is more fun(gi) than a bucketful of basidomycota.” Hollywood, you have competition.
Pathogens
The European strain of tar spot disease of maples has been adapted to native sugar and Manitoba maples, researchers led by Dr. Tom Hsiang at the University of Guelph confirmed. This is serious news, notes Nursery Crops Specialist Jen Llewellyn, since the fungus could become as virulent on native maple species as European forms.
Former CSIS undercover agent Grant Bristow testified in an Ottawa court that the racist Heritage Front attempted in 1991 to use money from Iraq or Libya to destabilize North America by utilizing bats and fruit flies to spread a new virus into crops, disrupting the continent’s food chain.
Fertilizer
Citing “unprecedented volatility” in global markets Calgary-based fertilizer producer expects to write down the value of its operations by US$115-million in its fourth quarter report, said Report on Business. Despite the news, Agrium shares rose $2.16 to $42.96 on the TSX.
If fertilizer giant CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, succeeds in an unsolicited US$2.1-billion takeover bid for rival Terra Industries Holdings Inc. it would create a major fertilizer producer. Terra had 2007 revenues of $2.4-billion, according to Report on Business.
While the Potash Corporation had its best fourth-quarter results ever in 2008, but said weak fertilizer markets will cause it to face a slow start to 2009.
A lack of the silvery metal molybdenum limits nitrogen fixation in tropical soils, reports Nature Geoscience. The finding comes for the work of Lars Hedin at Princeton University in New Jersey and his colleagues, and calls into question the role phosphorus was thought to have in the process.
Pesticides
The European Union states and parliament have agreed a compromise deal under which 22 toxic substances would be banned from use in pesticides, according to a report in the National Post. The substances will be banned due to their toxic or carcinogenic effects. Not all EU thingies were happy. “We have been submitted to great pressure from industry which has exaggerated the situation and created panic in the farming community,” German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer was reported as lamenting.
The arsenic-contaminated soil from over half a century of agricultural pesticide use was removed prior to construction of Summerhill Woods subdivision in Newmarket, Ontario. However, homeowners were not informed of this when they purchased their new homes – or that the soil of surrounding woods and trails remains contaminated with increased levels of the cancer-causing chemical.
“Viable, effective alternative solutions do not exist to control a wide range of insect pests threatening our green spaces,” despite Ontario government claims, says Landscape Ontario. “If they exist, what are they?” queries the professional organization in the trade publication Horticulture Review, challenging the new proposed legislation enthusiastically launched by provincial Preem Dalton ‘Squinty’ McGuinty.
“The long-awaited regulations for the Cosmetic Pesticide Ban have finally been published . . . The regulations are aggressive, extreme, unfair, insensitive and illogical,” says Tony DiGiovanni, executive director of Landscape Ontario.
Gardeners
In case you missed out on really important news: we now have a gardener in the Senate. Ontario’s Nicole Eaton, the philanthropist and gardening books author who has an occasional gardening column in the National Post, has made it to the Red Chamber.
“It’s about bringing down your ambitions and doing the simple things, so you nurture and create it yourself rather than going to the garden centre. Life gets a bit slower and the rewards are huge,” Brit gardener Diarmuid Gavin told the BBC as an answer to “the depression enveloping the nation.”
The well over 110 decibel ‘ping’ of titanium golf clubs connecting with balls may make you deaf, says a study in the British Medical Journal. Opines weekly Maclean’s: “The study results are no surprise to golf widows. Entire phases, like ‘time to clean the gutters,’ ‘I sure could use some help with the garden,’ or ‘but mother invited us to lunch’ have long been inaudible to the dedicated duffer.”
Should you hang a photo of a beautiful landscape or garden in your cubicle or office? If you would like to enhance your thinking and memory, this might be one way to go, explains Louise McCoy in The Epoch Times. Even better is the real thing. Those taking walks in natural settings, such as parks and gardens, consistently scored 20 per cent higher in attention and memory tests than those walking in the city, according to researchers at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Gardening in the City
Trees become threatened when wind speeds reach more than 50 kilometres an hour, writes the National Post’s Allison Hanes. A typical storm in the Toronto area can bring wind speeds of more than 60 kilometres, with gusts up to 80 kilometres, she adds.
The City of Toronto delivered a bag full of lapel pins to each councillor’s office early this year. This plastic bag came printed with the city logo and very nice to – except Toronto has embarked on a campaign to curb the use of plastic shopping bags, reports the Toronto Star. The city’s thingies say the bags were purchased before the campaign was launched. We say that’s pure chutzpah.
Under provincial orders, the city of Toronto tested 100 homes for lead-contaminated drinking water. Just over half exceeded acceptable levels, apparently caused by lead service pipes. So if as a Torontonian, you are considering a vegetable garden this spring you might wish to have both the tap water you will be using for irrigation as well as the soil for lead contamination.
Nominations for the Green Toronto Awards, to be presented next 23 April, are being accepted up to 27 February. toronto.ca/greentoronto awards for precise information on how to make your nomination(s). Who knows? Your nominee(s) might get to meet the mayor, deputy mayor and alleged actor Ed Begley Jr. Oh, like man, wow!
Coyotes are moving in to the more tony parts of Toronto. Local tabloid Beach Metro published a photo taken by a local resident in the Neville Park Ravine of eastern Toronto showing a superb male specimen. His family is excited, the Beacher says, but his “two dogs have mixed reviews.” Queries Beach Metro, “Can the roadrunner by far behind?” Beep, beep.
Why are cats far less likely to get ‘skunked’ than dogs? Respondents to The Globe and Mail suggest cats are more cautious, while being ‘skunk-sized’ makes them less likely to attack one. Dogs being usually larger are more prone to attack and fail to realize the consequences. Worse, queries one owner of three cats, “How many dogs would learn that lesson?”
Science and the Gardener
According to experiments by agroecologist Gerry Glover, perennials, as represented by tall-grass prairie meadows, require just 8% of the energy that a typical high-input annual wheat field needs to make the same amount of harvestable nitrogen, notes the journal Nature’s Emma Marris.
What propels scientists toward their ideas? Molecular biologist Julian Hibberd’s came halfway through a lap of the guesthouse pool of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Laguna in the Philippines, Emma Marris recounts in the journal Nature. He remembers “swimming up and down thinking about C4 rice,” he told her. C4 is a form of souped-up photosynthesis.
Scientists at the University of Guelph are a resourceful lot. Investigating a parasitic wasp, Cerceris fumipennis, as a bio-surveillance tool to monitor emerald ash borer, on which the wasp predates, the researchers constructed a trailer-born mobile colony of the predator, complete with the ground nests to which it takes captured EAB adults as nosh for its young. This trailer was towed around the province last season and found to be an effective means of monitoring, reports Jen Llewellyn in Horticulture Review.
New Zealand entomologist Dr. Thomas Buckley says DNA testing from tree lobsters from three Pacific Islands shows the Lord Howe Island variety, Dryococelus australis, is a separate species, reports Dani Cooper of ABC’s News in Science. A tree lobster is terrestrial, 15-centimetre-long stick insect. We knew you were waiting breathlessly for this information.
A belch of some 21,000 tonnes of methane on Mars may indicate microbial life underground, reports NASA. Then again it could be caused by changes in rocks, says the agency. According to one story, a senior scientist was asked if he expected to discover life on Mars. “No,” he said. What then did he expect to find? “Politicians.”
University of Washington palaeontologist Peter Ward argues that the main threat to life is life itself, explains The Globe and Mail’s Michael Kesterton. In his view, the Earth’s history makes it clear that, left to run its course, life isn’t naturally nourishing – it’s poisonous. Borrowing from Greek mythology, Professor Ward calls this the Medea Hypothesis in a direct challenge to the Gaia Hypothesis. The only hope for the planet over the long run, he says, is management by human beings.
Welcome to the kvetching aspen, the only known tree with a mating cry. Or how about the wind melon, which can levitate? Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg new book, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, is referred to by Science as “a bit of lunacy sure to appeal to slightly twisted plant lovers,” so we could hardly resist it.
A bioterror incident will likely occur somewhere by 2013, concluded a U.S. congressional commission. Such an event is more likely than a nuclear detonation, reports the current edition of Scientific American.
Surveys of Pakistani herdsmen and herbalists by researchers led them to investigate the grass Panicum turgidum, which can grow in brackish waters and salty soils, but avoid accumulating salt itself, which would make it unappetizing and harmful as animal fodder, reports the journal Science.
Weather
Environment Canada’s Dave Phillips envisions 2009 will bring, amongst other joyful news, less snow and rain, a warmer, drier summer, and overall more dry weekends and fewer thunderstorms according to the Toronto Star. We’ll wait and see if he is as accurate this year as for 2008. So far . . .
While Torontonians shuddered as the Arctic Clipper blew into town with wind chills of -29ºC, North Dakotans had actual temperatures approaching -40ºC. Groundhog Wiarton Willy had better be on the ball for an early spring.
Another note to climate warming enthusiasts: Las Vegas received heaviest snowfall in nearly three decades. Some 15 centimetres covered much of Nevada’s capital, closing McCarran International Airport and the freeways.
A snow clogged Vancouver sets Maclean’s, the nation’s ubiquitous weekly, wondering if this former Wet Coast city “shouldn’t host the Winter Games in summer.”
Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarter, climate researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, certainly must know his stuff. “The probability of snow on the ground at Christmas is already lower that it was even 50 years ago but it will become an even greater rarity many places by the latter half of the century,” the National Post reports him as stating. A snowbound Canada offers him a frigid digit.
“Without spending a fortune, people can have snow or ice crampons. Why not buy some?” Montreal Councillor Marcel Tremblay, in charge of city snow clearing and the brother of Mayor Gérald Tremblay, tells taxpayers how to avoid slipping on uncleared iced-up sidewalks. Crampons are spiked metal attachments for boots used by mountain climbers.
Saskatoon records its longest streak of temperatures below -25ºC. Environment Canada warns that exposed skin would freeze in less than 10 minutes. Northwest Europe and especially France is hit with snow, freezing rain and sub-zero temperatures as frigid air masses move in from Siberia. Parts of B.C. report record monthly snowfalls, blaming it for several roofs collapsing and seniors trapped in their homes for days. Global warming enthusiast Al Gore stays where its nice and warm.
Doubtlessly yet another result of global warming, arctic weather grips Europe. Marseilles and the Cote d’Azur received several inches of snow. Part of eastern Germany recorded -28ºC and icebreakers were at work on waterways in that country and at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In Poland, dozens of deaths were being blamed on low temperatures while in London, the fountains in Trafalgar Square, overlooked by Canada House, were full of ice. The Dutch held in a national skating marathon on the Oostervaardseplassen tidal area, near Amsterdam, for the first time since 1996.
Down on the Farm
What do these scientists have in common? Jerry Glover, an agroecologist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas; Peter Dodds, a molecular biologist at the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization Plant Industry in Canberra, Australia; Zhang Jianhua, a plant physiologist at Hong Kong Baptist University; Richard Sayre, director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri; and Julian Hibberd, a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge, U.K. They are five crop researchers who could change the world, writes Emma Marris in the journal Nature.
Now mushrooms are being affected by financial meltdown. Rol-land Farms fired 120 migrants and other workers while it tried to save itself from an ambitious over-expansion at its Campbellville, Ontario factory, reported the Toronto Star.
Stevia is a perennial plant from tropical and subtropical South America and Central America. The leaves yield an extract up to 300 times the sweetness of sucrose. Stevia has been grown on an experimental basis in southern Ontario since 1987, writes the Toronto Sun’s Susie Mah. It could potentially become a viable crop for farmers here.
It’s an ill snowfall that blows no one no good. Cash-strapped Alpine farmers are raking in fortunes harvesting snow and selling it to desperate Austrian ski slopes, reports the National Post.
Three years ago, Israel pulled its settlers out of Gaza. Left behind in perfect growing, working order were 3½ million square metres of greenhouses, along with irrigation and infrastructures. These had accounted for 15% of Israel’s agricultural exports. The Palestinians needed only to walk in and continue production. In early 2009, those same people who would have so benefited by its existence have wrecked almost everything. Are you listening, Jimmy Carter?
Genetic Modification
Genetic modification is being used to combat wheat rust by a team at the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization Plant Industry in Canberra, Australia. The serious fungal disease threatens 19% of global wheat production. And an international team at BioCassava Plus, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is utilizing GM to turn the staple crop of much of Africa into a ‘superfood,’ reports the U.K.-based journal Nature, normally highly allergic to such.
Environment
Methane levels in the atmosphere have started to rise after almost eight years of near-zero growth, an international study says, reports ABC’s News in Science Dani Cooper. Scientists are not sure why this is happened simultaneously at all measurement locations across the globe but they say further research is needed to understand it.
The 5% carbon pollution target set by Australia would only help avert catastrophic global warming if the target was adopted by all countries, says Canberra-based climate scientist Dr. Michael Raupach of the CSIRO. But this is unrealistic he adds, according to ABC’s News in Science.
“Half the work done by the IPCC is to make things appear what they are not.” Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg slightly modifies E. R. Beadle’s axiom.
While disdaining some, not all off-repeated words of 2008 are over, says Robert Priest in the weekly NOW. For instance, “green” as a verb, noun or adjective. Not even the great slayer of the language, Stéphane Dion could damage it, says Priest. “Green is going to be hard to wear out.”
Global warming preachers have had a shocking 2008. So many of their predictions this year went splat, wrote Robert Bolt in Melbourne, Australia’s Herald-Sun. Here’s their problem, he says: they’ve been scaring us for so long that it’s now possible to check if things are turning out as hot as they warned. And they’re not. Oops.
Seeking to become “the world’s most environmentally sustainable airline,” Air New Zealand flew a Boeing 747 for a couple of hours on a 50-50 mixture of jet fuel and jatropha plant oil. Cannily, just one of the aircrafts four engines was run on the blend. Two hours flying time will certainly take Air New Zealand a long way from the Antipodes. The island nation’s national bird is the kiwi. It is flightless.
Continental Airlines conducted the first U.S. biofuel commercial flight last month. The biofuel was a 50/50 mixture of regular jet fuel and fuel made from algae and jatropha plants. Both these latter are sustainable, second-generation sources that do not impact food crops or water resources or contribute to deforestation, reported The Epoch Times.
According to the weekly NOW alternate magazine, the Sierra Youth Coalition as a bottle of polluted Athabasca tar sands on sale on eBay. The group alleges a sudden surge of rare cancers in affected communities.
World demand for palm oil as a supposedly ecologically acceptable alternative biofuel could shortly cause the extinction of one of man’s closest relatives, the orangutans on Indonesia, home to 90% of the great apes. Canadian research scientist Birute Mary Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat as palm oil, writes Robin McDowell of the Associated Press.
Only a few Americans die every year from the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, reassures the current edition of Scientific American. Introduced into the U.S. a century ago, it ravages wildlife however, killing about 90% of prairie dogs in infected areas such as part of South Dakota.
If growing forests in India can generate lucrative carbon credits, then why isn’t everybody planting trees? Paroma Basu reported in the journal Nature that UN-delegated bureaucracy is the root cause. But then again, not one such carbon credit has yet been sold which does tend to question the well-laid schemes of Al Gore et al.
Travel
Internet voting for the ‘New 7 Wonders of Nature’ is underway. Canada has nominated Niagara Falls, Ontario’s Long Point, Rocher Perce in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and the Bay of Fundy between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Anheuser-Busch will stop giving free beer samples to Busch Gardens visitors. They will still sell brews there but not give away suds samples. Now you know recession is really here.
Show Biz
Harrison Ford, 66, has signed onto the film Morning Glory, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Some how, despite being described as a ‘comic role,’ we doubt if Harrison has suddenly developed an interest in horticulture, much less floriferous if hallucinogenic vines.
Actress Drew Barrymore regrets the 2006 Golden Globe Awards when she wore “that Gucci green dress where her boobs looked like watermelons.” Bless you Drew, you’re a true Barrymore. However, years earlier, vertically challenged actor Alan Ladd had described filming with Sophia Loren as being like “bombarded with watermelons.”
Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie and actor Josh Duhamel were married early last month at the Church Estates Vineyards in Malibu, California, reported People.com. A considerably more salubrious location than many others, oenologists might observe.
Actor Jeremy Pivens pulled out of the Broadway play Speed-the-Plow when his doctor found levels of mercury in his blood that were six times higher than normal, allegedly caused by eating sushi twice a day, according to reports in Maclean’s and elsewhere. But according to the New York Post, it sounds fishy and the show’s play’s producers have demanded a second medical opinion on the human thermometer.
The main character played by Billy Bob Thornton in his new flic is a manure salesman, hence the pungent title of Manure. It also stars Ghost Town’s Tea Leoni and Sex and the City’s Kyle MacLachlen, who should prove much more photogenic than a pile of . . . well, manure.
Law and the Gardener
Not everyone in Ontario is happy with proposals to ban pesticides later this year. “If these proposed directions are followed in the final regulations, our industry will have no ability to deal with insect infestations when they occur on clients’ properties,” says trade group Landscape Ontario, stating that its 2,000-plus members cannot support the draft regulations for the Cosmetic Pesticide Ban Act.
Police in Finland have identified a suspected car thief suspect using a DNA sample taken from blood found inside a mosquito discovered in the abandoned vehicle, reported Agençe France-Presse.
The long arm of Manitoban law has reached out to tightly control bear spray and other animal repellents containing capsaicin pepper extract. Businesses must now keep records of purchasers while keeping such sprays concealed from public view just like tobacco products are in Ontario. Police in the prairie province cite numerous instances where criminals have used bear spray as a weapon. Ursus populations are breathing easier.
If you must attempt to illegally import 40 kg of raw opium into the country, it might be inadvisable to attempt to conceal it in cans of expired tomato paste. An Aurora, Ontario man has been charged after the Canadian Border Services Agency discovered the drugs in part of a food shipment from Iran.
Toronto’s celebrated parks and environment committee enthusiastically welcomed a bylaw making it verboten to smoke within nine metres of children’s play areas in city parks. Alas, the kooky councillors have already been beaten by their provincial counterparts in Belleville, Collingwood, Orillia, Peterborough, Ottawa, and Woodstock – amongst others. Expect the city’s 833 such to shortly display signs warning puffers may pay $305 upon conviction.
Winter brides fearing colds, flu or worse should take oregano extract, vitamin D3, freeze-dried garlic and sauerkraut. So recommends John Hopkins, owner of À Votre Santé in Montreal, according to Joanne Latimer writing in Maclean’s. In Toronto, naturopath John Demster instead administers intravenous vitamins up to three times a week at $85 to $110 a crack to the nervous ones.
Paul Bentley was in a Nottingham, U.K. court charged with “intending to contaminate goods and making a threat,” according to the Associated Press. It was claimed that he scattered peanuts around the food plant where he was employed. Like another well-known Brit, he may have come to Nottingham once too often but surely it was groundnuts since this was England where peanuts are a nickname for urologists.
Business
“It’s perfume, but it’s not too perfumey,” says the Toronto Star of an organic fragrance that “smells softly of green tangerine, rose and jasmine.” If you wish to, er, smell, of “green tangerine” it will set you back $99 at Premiere de Mai Perfume by Florascent US$99
saffronrouge.com.
The wind-farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed, reported The Daily Telegraph. A wind farm industry sources admitted: “It’s not ideal for us. It’s the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby,” said the Brit newspaper.
Honda announces it will commence selling its new Insight hybrid on 22 April that just happens to also be Earth Day.
‘Dandelion Cotton,’ ‘Apple Crumble’ and ‘Cocoa Cuddles’ were three of 30 new colours in General Paint’s new Down to Earth collection, selected from 125,000 submissions from readers of Canadian House and Home magazine (more at
generalpaint.com). According to The Globe and Mail’s Danny Sinopoli, names have been selected elsewhere on occasion by a bunch of the executive’s girlfriends over two days and reportedly involved wine.
Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. are changing focus from sparkling juice drinks and increasingly returning to their soda pop heritage, stepping up advertising and changing logos. Perhaps the good old times are what consumers really want.
Health
A study from the University of California, Berkley of young adult women linked high blood levels of vitamin C with lower blood pressure. However, another study of 7,627 women at the Harvard Medical School in Boston showed that participants who took beta-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E or a combination of supplements had no significant reductions in their risk of cancer.
A researcher at the University of Alberta has found a cost-effective way to produce antibodies against gluten, potentially opening up a whole new world for people with celiac disease, reports Canwest News. Celiacs cannot tolerate gluten – a protein found in wheat barley and rye – and currently there is no cure.
An outbreak of rat lungworm disease in Hawaii has been traced to organic food, reported the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Parasitic worms are passed from rat feces to slugs or snails and then to people. Many cases have been occurred over the years some, like three most recent, causing serious brain damage.
According to Chinese traditional medicine, if an ailment is said to be cold, such as a cough or runny nose, warmer foods should be taken, such as ginger and shallot soup, says the China Research Group of The Epoch Times. Conversely, if an ailment is hot, such as a dry, soar throat and sweating, cooler foods should be taken, such as banana, cucumber, tofu, “and so on.”
New research indicates that drinking coffee lowers the risk of developing cancer of the oral cavity or throat, at least in the general population of Japan, notes the National Post, reporting research by Dr. Toru Naganuma in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
More bad news for smokers: now “third hand smoke” deposits toxins furniture, fabric, walls and even hair, posing an especial risk to young children. Other research shows that women who smoke tobacco during pregnancy leads to physical aggression in children as early as 17 to 42 months of age. Bullying then joins a long list of harmful effects, including low birth weight, stillbirths, sudden infant death syndrome and behavioural problems in children writes Aaron Defel of Canwest News.
“Consumption of a diet high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and poultry, and low in red meat and refined foods may positively influence a woman’s overall health and prevent other cancers and chronic diseases,” said Dr. Marilyn L. Kwan, a researcher at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California (Reuters).
A $6-million Canadian-funded research under the new science of epigenetics is to be launched to study suspected link to gene change caused by household chemicals. Headed by Dr. William Fraser, the University of Montreal, Maternal-Infant Research on Environmental Chemicals, it is testing pregnant women and infants for low-level exposure to 400 chemicals, including pesticides.
“What we have done is plunge the thermometer into the mouth of the world population to measure the temperature.” Jean-Mark Léger, on a poll finding about half of the world’s consumers are feeling the heat over their country’s economy, quoted by The Globe and Mail. One suspects he selected the wrong orifice.
A 57-year-old practitioner of traditional Chinese herbal medicine was arrested after a client alleged he used sexual acts to treat her, reported the Toronto Sun. Now that’s carrying the alleged advantages of herbalism too far.
Amongst many a traditional hangover cure listed by National Geographic is that of Russian leafy birch branches “to whip toxins out of a hungover drinker in the sauna.”
China’s strong green tea sounds more palatable or perhaps pickled plums from Japan. Definitely not though sour pickle juice from Poland, shrimp from Mexico or Romania’s tripe soup. Thank you, I’ve had enough wine.
Malaria researchers are alarmed at the prospect of what could happen if malaria parasite worldwide develop resistance against the new artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs. The wormwood-derived drugs appear to be failing on the Cambodia-Thai border, the area known as ‘the cradle of antimalarial drug resistance,’ where previously chloroquine, sulphadoxine-pyrimthamine, and mefloquine have all met their match, writes Martin Enserink in the journal Science.
Bullfighter
“Most of the [IPCC’s] information for the Arctic came from the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) and a diagram from that report illustrates the problem. The very large area labelled ‘No Data’ covers most of the Arctic Basin, an area of approximately 14,250,000 km² (5,500,000 square miles). Remember, certain arctic ice conditions are core to Gore’s alarmism.” Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press
“OK, I’ve been shovelling snow every day for the past three weeks. Can the scientists please tell me when global warming is coming back? I’m beat!” J. Edwards, St. Catharines, letter to Toronto Sun.
There is little evidence to show herbal remedies purported to relieve symptoms of menopause actually work, writes Carly Weeks in The Globe and Mail. A new study published by the British Medical Journal in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin questions the efficacy of black cohosh, dong quai, evening primrose oil, ginseng and red clover.
From all the studies produced by billions of dollars of research in the last two decades, the only thing that has been learned for sure is that climate change is a natural function which the human race has not begun to comprehend, notes Henry Lamb of the Environmental Conservation Organization. He also suggests that, as it always has, the climate will change according to the dictates of the architect of the universe, not according to the dictates of Barack Obama, Al Gore, Carol Browner, the U.S. Congress, or even the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change.
Climate change has been blamed for everything from cockroach migrations in Australia to Legionnaires’ disease in Britain and poor attendance at a Madonna concert in Johannesburg. Why shouldn’t it be blamed for Montreal’s lousy snow removal as well? National Post editorial.
Just in case you continue to receive dubious advice as to the alleged toxicity of that festive poinsettia that is still hanging in there, it is let another medical myth. So said Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll of the Indiana School of Medicine in the illustrious British Medical Journal.
Australian journalist Andrew Bolt calls fellow countryman Tim Flannery, famed for his inaccurate forecasts, a “professional panic merchant.” In a CBC interview, Bolt suggested that Flannery equated to Canada’s David Suzuki. Explains the Financial Post’s Peter Foster: “It was not a compliment.”
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 per cent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be a science has turned into a cult.” William Happer, professor of physics
“Dr. Bocker of Bonn, on the Rhine, well known for his experiments on the digestion of articles of food, has discovered that sarsaparilla [root beer] has none of those wonderous purifying properties usually attributed to it, and that it is a useless and expensive hospital drug. This but confirms the opinion which has been previously expressed through our columns.” Scientific American, February 1859
Clean air saves lives, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. This astounding news was headlined in many a newspaper, from the Toronto Sun to The Globe and Mail.
The herbicide atrazine and the drugs meprobamate and phenytoin were present in more than half of the samples collected from tap water distributed to homes and businesses from 19 U.S. treatment facilities, reports the British-based weekly Nature. None of the levels were deemed unsafe assures the journal while neglecting to add that, according to an EPA study, to attain a cancer risk from atrazine, you would have to drink 150,000 gallons of water per day for 70 years.
