United States or Falkland Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When grown in a warm house, in a small, round, wire basket, filled with peat and sphagnum, this little Cactus forms a pretty tuft, which in the spring produces large numbers of white, star-like flowers. Mag. 3755.
In a growing potato plant, direct upwards one of the low shoots and surround it with a little cylinder of stiff carpet paper, stuffed with sphagnum and loam. Cut away the other tuber-disposed shoots as they appear. The enclosed shoot develops into a tuber which stands more or less vertical, and the scales become pretty little leaves.
The sphagnum in which the child is laid forms a soft elastic bed which absorbs moisture very readily and affords such a protection from the cold of a rigorous winter that its place would be ill supplied by cloth.
I quite understand your frame of mind, and think it quite a natural and proper one. You had hard work to hammer your views into people's heads at first, and if Bastian's theory is true he will have still harder work, because the facts he appeals to are themselves so difficult to establish. Are not you mistaken about the Sphagnum?
Narrow antennae and abdominal formation marked the big one a female, while broader antlers and the clearly outlined `claspers' proved the smaller ones males. A little sphagnum moss, that was dampened slightly every few days, was kept around them.
The mothers are careful to collect a sufficient quantity in autumn for winter use; but when through accident their stock fails they have recourse to the soft down of the typha, or reed mace, the dust of rotten wood, or even feathers, although none of these articles are so cleanly or so easily changed as the sphagnum.
That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, all standing in the quaking sphagnum.
He finds poverty more attractive than riches, solitude more welcome than society, a sphagnum swamp more to be desired than a flowered field. Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which modern science makes so much of. He tends to fortify us against the dry rot of business, the seductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth and position.
At the lake-basin the Collector, after he had surveyed his hay-meadow, went around it to the inlet of the lake with his brown pair of attendants to try their luck, while I botanized in the delightful flora which called to mind the cool sphagnum and carex bogs of Wisconsin and Canada. Here I found many of my old favorites the heathworts kalmia, pyrola, chiogenes, huckleberry, cranberry, etc.
A single trunk falling across a stream in the woods forms a dam 200 feet long, and from ten to thirty feet high, giving rise to a pond which kills the trees within its reach. These dead trees fall in turn, thus making a clearing, while sediments gradually accumulate changing the pond into a bog, or meadow, for a growth of carices and sphagnum.
Word Of The Day