On this day, 9 March 1914, women battled police in Glasgow during Emmeline Pankhurst’s speaking tour of Scotland. The famous suffragette had been temporarily released from prison to nullify her hunger strike, but now the police sought to rearrest her so she would serve the remainder of her sentence. What they didn’t expect was an organised body guard. Pankhurst’s protectors had barbed wire concealed in flower bouquets and clubs concealed in dresses. Some had undertaken martial arts training, and they carried at least one gun. The Glasgow Herald reported that “Unparalleled scenes of disorder took place. The police stormed the platform and for several minutes a fierce struggle took place between them and Mrs pankhurst’s supporters, several persons being injured. Flower pots and chairs were thrown at the constables, who were obliged to draw their batons. In the course of the mêlée the excitement was intensified by a woman firing several blank rounds from a revolver.”
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Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.
Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.
You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.
Frankentrees.
As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.
On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.
But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:
I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be
I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.
I need to be more like tree
I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.
what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?
Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).
As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “
including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”
It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.
Shit’s tight yo.
Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.
Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.
HOLY SHIT
THE LAST ONE
Solarpunk as fuck!!
Reblogging for “I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.”
The Atlantic Forest biome in Paraguay has been under assault from multiple angles, including intensive soybean agriculture and illegal logging. To combat this, Guyra Paraguay has teamed up with local indigenous communities to purchase land around the edge of the forest. This creates a “buffer zone” to protect the ecosystem from further encroachment.
Within the buffer zone, local people grow yerba mate (a traditional Paraguan tea) in the shade of the forest. This unique agroforestry system provides a source of income for people and habitat for local wildlife.
As of right now, around 7,000 hectares of forest have been protected under this system, and the number will only go up. A healthier forest means healthier soil and water, and more natural carbon sequestration.
“With yerba mate popping up as a key ingredient in natural energy drinks
in Europe and North America, demand is growing fast, and the next step
is marketing forest-friendly yerba mate for commercial success. This
year’s yield was particularly successful, with 15 families harvesting
14,000 kilograms of yerba mate. For the first time, the product was
harvested completely under organic and fair trade standards, opening up
great exciting opportunities to market the crop as a premium product.”
“In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter what you crazy people in California do, because I got smart guys who can always figure out how to make money.” - Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, 2000
I want to talk to you about a chapter of California history that tends to get overlooked. And it’s important for people to remember this because it’s an example of the worst excesses of capitalism, specifically the California Electricity Crisis that happened in 2000 and 2001.
Basically what happened was that in 2000 and 2001, California was facing severe electricity shortages and blackouts. And it wasn’t because they didn’t build enough power plants either.
It traces back to the Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who ran the state from 1990 to 1998. In 1996, Pete Wilson, in collaboration with his Enron (yes, that Enron) buddies in Texas decided that the California electrical grid was too regulated and that it needed to be fisted by the invisible hand of the free market. So they deregulated the electricity supply and made all the power suppliers buy what they think they’re going to need the next day.
This scheme didn’t kick in until 2000, when Pete Wilson had been termed out and Gray Davis (D) had been elected Governor, the people selling electricity discovered that they could make a lot more money by turning off power plants for a little but and then selling it back once the price went up. And since people have no real choice about electricity providers, they just had to sit back and take it.
And that’s literally what they did. Enron was literally shutting down power plants during times of peak demand to raise prices, and the power utilities weren’t able to meet that demand, so they’d have to have rolling blackouts just to prevent the entire grid from going down.
And Enron, they were literally laughing about it.
At no point in 2000 and 2001 did the electrical demand in Calfornia exceed the supply of power available. These deregulated vulture companies that had come in because of Pete fucking Wilson had set up entirely artificial shortages because it made them money.
So next time somebody talks about privatization or deregulation as the end-all be all solution, run. Vital utilities like power, and water should never be in the hands of unaccountable private companies, but need to be accountable to the public and should be focused first on providing service before being focused on making money.
I REMEMBER THIS AND I AM STILL FUCKING PISSED AND BITTER
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
