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Saturday, June 4, 2016

ROSE OR NOT, ITS EVERY BIT AS BEAUTIFUL

A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE...IS A MINUSCULE TAMARACK CONE!
TAMARACK FEMALE CONES...LOOK  LIKE MINIATURE ROSES

Saturday, 7:15 AM.  51 degrees F at both the ferry dock and on the back porch.  Wind variable,  calm with occasional light gusts.  The sky is overcast, cloudy and foggy, and it is raining lightly after .25" of rain last night.  The humidity is 97% and the barometer is falling, now at 29.83".  It looks like the weather will be unsettled for the week ahead.
    I picked up our usual ten baskets from Hauser's yesterday, which they had been holding for me, and hung them out.  Eight geraniums and two colorful petunia baskets.  I put the porch rugs out and all the indoor plants.  It is quite a menagerie, and the porch and deck look like summer now.
   A rose is a rose is a rose...unless it is a tamarack (Larix decidua) female cone, which looks erily like a miniature rose.  Of course, it is not a flower at all, but a cone which, when fertilized, will bear naked seeds, not enclosed within a fruit. Gymnosperms produce "naked seeds."  Angiosperms produce seeds that are within a fruit.  The former is more primitively evolved than the latter. Angiosperms have flower structures, gymnosperms do not.  Last year our two tamaracks bore no cones (after a very severe winter); this year they are back to doing their thing.
   But, rose or not, the tamarack cone is every bit as beautiful.

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