Herself’s Houston Garden

Denise McConnell got tired of the lawn that surrounded her Las Vegas home. The grass needed watering almost every day, mowing every week and a seasonal schedule of fertilizer and weed-control applications. To top it all off, it looked dull. “It was pretty nondescript,” the 62-year-old accountant says. “And my water bill was averaging about $100 a month.”
Giving Up On Grass

Homeowners are trading in putting-green turf and clipped hedges for landscaping that is much closer to what might have been there in the first place.

Inspired by the gardens she saw on a trip to Italy’s Tuscan countryside, Ms. McConnell worked hard and gradually transformed her yard into an oasis of heat-tolerant and water-efficient plants. Today, she is surrounded by beds of flowering perennials, herbs and fragrant vines. Her garden offers maximum privacy, and her monthly water bill? Cut in half, to about $50.

Garden-design strategies that encourage minimal watering, called “xeriscaping”—based on the Greek word for ‘dry’—first emerged in the West, where water resources are thin. Employees of Denver’s water department are widely believed to have coined the term in the early 1980s—and now it is spreading in other regions among conservation-minded homeowners who want to grow beautiful gardens. Read more “Gardening with out a sprinkler and be sure to check out the slide show with the article

From the unintended consequences dept. . .

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.
Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people. Read more Russian squirrel pack ‘kills dog’

More information:
Furious squirrels attack stray dog
The pack of mutant black squirrels that are giving Britain’s grey population a taste of their own medicine

The world is a cooler, wetter place because of flowering plants, according to new climate simulation results published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non–flowering varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by ever–wet rainforest.

The simulations demonstrate the importance of flowering–plant physiology to climate regulation in ever–wet rainforest, regions where the dry season is short or non–existent, and where biodiversity is greatest.

“The vein density of leaves within the flowering plants is much, much higher than all other plants,” said the study’s lead author, C. Kevin Boyce, Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. “That actually matters physiologically for both taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and also the loss of water, which is transpiration. The two necessarily go together. You can’t take in CO2 without losing water.”

This higher vein density in the leaves means that flowering plants are highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where it can return to Earth as rain.

“That whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and transpiration would have been much, much lower in the absence of flowering plants,” Boyce said. “We can know that because no leaves throughout the fossil record approach the vein densities seen in flowering plant leaves.”

For most of biological history there were no flowering plants—known scientifically as angiosperms. They evolved about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and took another 20 million years to become prevalent. Flowering species were latecomers to the world of vascular plants, a group that includes ferns, club mosses and confers. But angiosperms now enjoy a position of world domination among plants.

“They’re basically everywhere and everything, unless you’re talking about high altitudes and very high latitudes,” Boyce said.

Dinosaurs walked the Earth when flowering plants evolved, and various studies have attempted to link the dinosaurs’ extinction or at least their evolutionary paths to flowering plant evolution. “Those efforts are always very fuzzy, and none have gained much traction,” Boyce said.

Boyce and Lee are, nevertheless, working toward simulating the climatic impact of flowering plant evolution in the prehistoric world. But simulating the Cretaceous Earth would be a complex undertaking because the planet was warmer, the continents sat in different alignments and carbon– dioxide concentrations were different.

“The world now is really very different from the world 120 million years ago,” Boyce said. Read more

Read the paper
An exceptional role for flowering plant physiology in the expansion of tropical rainforests and biodiversity