Frankenstein Seeds

Good morning, kiddos. I've got two things to talk about today - one's an offer and one's a report. First the offer...

Remember ProPil Pop Quiz #8? It was going to be about mystery seeds? But before I posted it, I found out that four o'clocks were bushy plants that put resilient tubers in the ground and made beautiful, aromatic trumpet-like flowers?

Then remember Five Dimensions from mid-August? The pics that were in there are below.



Well, the plants have gotten bigger, and they're much more flowery now. Beautiful indeed and aromatic as advertised. They've been in bloom since that time - a full month. So now we've got four o'clock seeds - lots of them. They are actually sort of Frankenstein seeds, since there were two types of four o'clocks that grew next to each other, and in all likelihood, our sedulous bees cross-pollinated them.


Do you want some Frankensteiny four o'clocks to beautify your home? We will be happy to send a little baggy of seeds from the Ocean State to you. I expect they will grow in a container on a porch, but be aware, if you plant them in the ground A) they do spread underground via tubers and will probably come back bigger next year, and B) they make lots of seeds, so they may be rather difficult to eradicate once planted. Let me know. It would be fun to keep the mystery seed conversation going for years in the future.

And onto the report... I've started reading The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution by William R. Polk. Catherine and Stephen know I like learning about the Native Americans. My brain got a wallop last night when I read about how the Native Americans lived in New England. Here's an excerpt:

Generally, Indian houses were not scattered across the landscape as they were among the colonists; the East Coast Indians from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland were townspeople. Although later British colonists insisted that Indians were nomads (and so not really attached to the land the colonists wanted to appropriate), their eyes told them otherwise. As the pamphlet commissioned by Lord Baltimore for the use of colonists in 1635 admitted, “They live for the most parts in Townes, like Countrey Villages in England.” Earlier, in 1539, the country of the Florida Indians was described as “greatly inhabited with many great towns and many sown fields which reached from one to the other.” On the site of modern East St. Louis before the arrival of the Spaniards, the city we call Cahokia had a population of “upwards of 20,000.” Unlike the Great Plains nomads whom the white men would meet centuries later, East Coast Indians were settled farmers and villagers.

Sue seemed to know all of this, but I guess I had this picture in my head of nomadic peoples on horseback, spearing buffalo and migrating with their teepee villages to take advantage of good hunting and good weather. Instead, I see these...



...settled wigwam communities surrounded with farmed plots. I dunno, call me stupid. I thought that was fascinating. Probably I was whispering across the aisle in class and missed this part of Social Studies.

PS
Also I found this letter from the author's personal website. He has a long history in foreign policy, way back to President Kennedy. For the politically-minded, Polk shares his increasingly skeptical views on Obama and the new administration.