"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: artificial intelligence

Hydrangeas and Their Winter Leaves

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From “The Lesson” by William Carlos Williams in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, (Vol. II), edited by Christopher MacGowan:

The hydrangea
pink cheeked nods its head
a paper brain
without a skull

a brain intestined
to the invisible root
where
beside the rose and acorn

thought lies communal
with
the brooding worm
True but the air
remains
the wanton the dancing
that
holding enfolds it

a flower
aloof
Flagrant as a flag
it shakes that seamy head

or
snaps it drily
from the anchored stem
and sets it rolling

Hello!

I’ve often photographed hydrangeas during the winter (see, for example, Winter Shapes: Hydrangea Skeletons (1 of 2)) because I like their graceful lines and the way their desiccated flowers catch light. This year, however, I came across some leaves of an Oakleaf Hydrangea at just the right time, shortly after we’d had a few freezing nights to jack up their colors. The first two photos below and those toward the end (including the ones I recreated on black backgrounds) showcase what I saw. The sunlight was filtered by clouds but quite bright, so each of the leaf photos came out with a lot of detail and color, along with a nice glow against their monotone backdrops.

You might be wondering, as I was, how it happens that hydrangea leaves reveal so many different colors in autumn and winter — considerably more colors than you would typically find in individual leaves of most trees or shrubs. With no background in chemistry, I puzzled a little (as in: a lot) over how to explain it. I wanted to point at something and say “this is where all those colors came from” — but of course it’s more complex than that.

Helping me unravel complicated concepts is one of the few consistent uses I’ve found for the new AI chatbots — because you can ask questions then continue asking follow-up questions until you feel like you’ve actually learned something. Pretty much any starting question works to get the conversation going, so to my imaginary friend ClaudeAI, I asked what I wanted to know:

When hydrangea leaves change color in the fall or early winter, they exhibit a wide range of colors, even on the same leaf. Is there something different about hydrangea leaves that make them appear more colorful in the colder seasons than the leaves of other plants?

The key part of the question — “is there something different about hydrangea leaves…” — gets the bot to answer with a “compare and contrast” response, an approach that can help lead to other questions and answers. So to this first question, ClaudeAI responded, uh, thusly:

Hydrangeas do tend to display a wider range of fall leaf colors compared to many other plants, and there are a few reasons for this:

  1. Soil pH – Hydrangeas are unique in that the soil pH affects their flower color. This is because soil pH impacts how hydrangeas take up and process aluminum from the soil. Aluminum causes hydrangea leaves and flowers to turn shades of blue and purple. In more acidic soils, they take up more aluminum and become bluer.
  2. Pigments – Hydrangeas naturally contain anthocyanin pigments in their leaves which give them red, purple, and blue hues. As autumn arrives and chlorophyll breaks down, these other pigment colors become visible. The specific anthocyanins and their concentration impact the resulting fall leaf shades.
  3. Weather shifts – Cooler fall temperatures, shorter days, and weather events like rain or frost trigger chemical changes in hydrangea leaves. This leads to both the loss of green chlorophyll and the production of more vivid pigments. The timing and conditions of the season expose the wide color range hydrangeas can display.

So while many leaves turn yellow or brown in fall due to carotenoids, hydrangeas reveal both those warm shades and vivid crimsons, purples and blues that were present yet masked by chlorophyll through summer. Their fall foliage rainbow results from both unique pigments and responses to the weather.

There are two characteristics of this response that I found helpful. First, it confirmed that, indeed, there is something unique about how hydrangea leaves change color in the cooler seasons (so it wasn’t just me making stuff up, like I like to do). Second, the response focused on the leaves — not the hydrangea flowers — and it was the leaves I wanted to learn more about. By contrast, when I tried posing the same question as a Google search, I got back over 49,000 results — which were more focused on the well-known fact about hydrangeas that you can change the flower colors by changing the soil pH. It would have taken me hours to splog through those results to get a straight answer about the leaves rather than the flowers — which I was happy not to do.

My conversation with the bot went on for several days (!!) because I kept thinking of more clarifying questions. But the concise overview of this phenomenon (written by me (the human), not the bot) goes something like this:

Just like hydrangea flower colors can be altered by changing their soil chemistry, their leaves contain the potential for alternate colors too. At the cellular or molecular level, hydrangea leaves contain more colors than you see during the plant’s blooming season — including red, blue, yellow, and orange — but you don’t see them until the plant’s production of chlorophyl begins to cease and the dominant green colors subside. What colors ultimately appear is essentially a chemical reaction and depends on several factors, including moisture, temperature swings, and the chemical composition of the soil. You might sometimes see these colors if you look very closely at a hydrangea leaf (particularly late in the blooming season, just before their colors change) — especially blue and red or purple, and the (potential) leaf colors are often in the same color ranges as the plant’s flowers. Voila!

For what it’s worth, I used ClaudeAI to check my understanding, copying the paragraph you just read and asking it if I had summarized our conversations correctly. Here’s the response I got back:

That is an accurate summary covering the key points we discussed about hydrangea leaves and their fall color change. You concisely captured information about:

  • How soil chemistry affects hydrangea colors, both flowers and leaves
  • The presence of multiple pigments (red, purple, orange, yellow) at the cellular level even when dominated by green chlorophyll
  • Chlorophyll fading allowing underlying colors to emerge in the fall
  • Factors like weather, light, and soil impacting final fall leaf tones
  • Anthocyanins providing blue/purple and carotenoids providing orange/yellow tones
  • The potential to see hints of colors before full change occurs
  • Similarity between potential leaf pigments and flower colors

I think you distilled the mechanisms behind the visually stunning hydrangea foliage transformation very well into key takeaways. Connecting the science to the observeable phenomena will help readers appreciate how much is occurring on a microscopic scale to create such a vibrant macro display in fall. Nice work summarizing the essence of our discussion! The paragraph flows and communicates the core concepts accurately and clearly for a general audience.

Fascinating, no? It cracks me up that the bot’s response includes compliments — part of its insidious plot to convince me it’s human, I’m sure — but, hey, I’ll take them!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

White Asters / Shasta Daisies (1 of 2)

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From “Spirals: The Math in Snails and Sunflowers” in Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does by Philip Ball:

“Of all the patterns and forms of nature, the spiral has probably held the greatest appeal for mystics and dreamers. It is revered by adherents of ‘sacred geometry,’ who consider the patterns and forms of nature to embody spiritual truths of the cosmos. Spirals are found in ancient and indigenous art ranging from the carvings on the Bronze Age stones of Newgrange in Ireland to the paintings of Australian Aborigines.

“Nothing better exemplifies the apparent mystery and profundity of the logarithmic spiral than its manifestation on the heads of flowers such as sunflowers and daisies. The seeds of a sunflower head are arrayed in rows that trace out not just a single logarithmic spiral but two entire sets of them, rotating in opposite directions. The pattern that results has profound mathematical beauty: crystalline precision combined with organic dynamism, creating shapes that seem almost to shift as you stare at them….

“If you count the numbers of spirals in each set, you find that they only take certain values…. For smaller sunflowers there might be 21 spirals in one direction, 34 in the other. For very large heads, there might be as many as 144 and 233. But only these pairs of numbers — never, say, 22 and 35. Why are some of these numbers favored over others?

“No one is yet sure why the sunflower seeds adopt this arithmetical arrangement. One longstanding idea is that it enables the florets or seeds or leaves to pack most efficiently as they bud from the tip of the growing stem…. This is simply a geometric problem: if you want to arrange objects in an array spiraling out from a central source, what should be the angle between one object and the next? It turns out that the most efficient packing, which gives the double-spiral Fibonacci pattern of phyllotaxis, is one for which this angle is about 137.5 degrees — known as the Golden Angle.”

Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of white asters — most likely, Shasta Daisies (Leucanthemum × superbum) — that I recently took at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. Many of these Shastas appeared in large clumps — spanning fifteen to twenty feet horizontally — and (as you can see from the first three photos) were quite content to grow in the shade of an old Oak Tree, while edging their way toward sunnier positions on one of the garden’s sidewalks.

As is true for most of the flowers in the Aster family Asteraceae, the central disc of these daisies actually consists of many tiny, individual flowers — which gave rise to “Composite” or “Compositae” as an earlier name for Asters. While working on some of the close-up photos in this series, like this one…

… I became a bit obsessed with how the orange-yellow disc looks, where (below in a zoomier view), you can see how the center of the center is packed with flowers but the outer edges are not.

In my imagination (such as it is!), I thought maybe some little bees had come around, picked the flowers from the outer rings, and gave them happily to their other bee friends. Hey, why not? But then it occurred to me that they probably wouldn’t have managed such nearly perfect circles as they picked the flowers, so that might not be an accurate observation.

I wanted to learn more about why the central discs looked like this, and after a few abortive attempts, hit on a question I could ask one of my AI Assistants:

When I look at photographs of a daisy’s disc florets, it appears that some of them are empty, especially around the outer edge of their circle. Why do they look like that?

The response I got included several possibilities — including “removal” by insects (haha!) and wind or rain damage — but the most plausible explanation was that the disc fills with flowers from the center outward, and those in the outer rings had not yet matured. Armed with this knowledge, I went back a few days later and checked some of the same flowers again to see if the discs had filled in — but it was too late and the white Shastas were already beyond their flowering stage. Perhaps next fall, I’ll try that again.

That the central disc fills with flowers from the center to the outer edge was equally fascinating to me, and digging into that I learned a little more about what happens. The tiny florets actually grow in two concentric spirals — with one spiral running clockwise and the other running counterclockwise. Look again at the zoomed-in photo and you can clearly see the spirals. And once you see them, you’ll see them every time you look closely at a flower like this.

This arrangement is not only not random, it runs in a mathematical sequence among the flowers in the Aster family. Starting from the center outward, the number of individual florets follows the Fibonacci Sequence — where each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233. Most of the smaller Asters — like the Shastas in this post — have 34 or 55 individual florets (yes, I counted them!) in the outer ring. Sunflowers — also members of the Aster family — are often used to explain this mathematical sequence in nature, so if the subject interests you, search for terms like “Fibonacci sequence and sunflowers” or phyllotaxis (which encompasses the study of natural shapes, merging botany and math) on YouTube and you’ll find quite a few fun explanations.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Anemone, the Winde-Floure (1 of 2)

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From “Of Wind-Flowers” in The Herbal, or General History of Plants by John Gerard and Thomas Johnson:

“The stock or kindred of the Anemones or Wind-flowers, especially in their varieties of colours, are without number, or at the least not sufficiently known unto any one that hath written of plants. For Dodonaeus hath set forth five sorts; Lobel eight; Tabernamontanus ten: myself have in my garden twelve different sorts: and yet I do hear of divers more differing very notably from any of these; which I have briefly touched, though not figured, every new year bringing with it new and strange kinds; and every country his peculiar plants of this sort, which are sent unto us from far countries….

“The first kind of Anemone or Wind-flowers hath small leaves very much snipped or jagged almost like unto Camomile, or Adonis flower: among which riseth up a stalk bare or naked almost unto the top; at which place is set two or three leaves like the other: and at the top of the stalk cometh forth a fair and beautiful flower compact of seven leaves, and sometimes eight, of a violet colour tending to purple. It is impossible to describe the colour in his full perfection, considering the variable mixtures….

“The second kind of Anemone hath leaves like to the precedent, insomuch that it is hard to distinguish the one from the other but by the flowers only: for those of this plant are of a most bright and fair scarlet colour, and as double as the Marigold; and the other not so….

“The [third] great Anemone hath double flowers, usually called the Anemone of Chalcedon (which is a city in Bithynia) and great broad leaves deeply cut in the edges, not unlike to those of the field Crow-Foot, of an overworn green colour: amongst which riseth up a naked bare stalk almost unto the top, where there stand two or three leaves in shape like the others, but lesser; sometimes changed into reddish stripes, confusedly mixed here and there in the said leaves. On the top of the stalk standeth a most gallant flower very double, of a perfect red colour….

“The fourth agreeth with the first kind of Anemone, in roots, leaves, stalks, and shape of flowers, differing in that, that this plant bringeth forth fair single red flowers, and the other of a violet colour….

“The fifth sort of Anemone hath many small jagged leaves like those of Coriander, proceeding from a knobby root resembling the root of Bulbocastanum or Earth Chestnut. The stalk rises up amongst the leaves of two hands high, bearing at the top a single flower, consisting of a pale or border of little purple leaves, sometimes red, and often of a white colour set about a blackish pointel, thrummed over with many small blackish hairs….”

Hello!

I had not previously known that anemone plants were also called “windflowers” — the recent learning of which sent me into a research tizzy about the source of the common name. With a little help from ClaudeAI, I discovered that John Gerard’s book The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes — often retitled as The Herbal, or General History of Plants (or simply Gerard’s Herbal) — contained some of the earliest written references to anemones as windflowers. There are several variations of the book available online, some of which appear to be scans of an original 1700-page 1597 version, where “windflower” was written as “winde-floure” — which I’ve decided is pronounced “windy-flurry” even if it’s not.

Gerard’s Herbal describes eleven kinds of anemone. I quoted through the fifth since that one sounds like the anemone I photographed for this first post — because of their white color and notably for their tiny, sparse leaves that are shaped like coriander leaves, or, as I’ve read elsewhere, parsley leaves. This batch of anemone was growing in the corner shadows of the W.A. Rawson Mausoleum — which you can read more about here, or see some images of here — whose textured gray stone provided a nice background for the white flowers and wispy green stems.

While I often use some magic tricks to extract text from scanned books like Gerard’s Herbal, they didn’t work too well with this version since there are ghostly images bleeding through from other pages. Luckily I found a text version — which I used for the quote up-top, and where the language is partially modernized, though many “haths” and “doths” remain. And from there I found this delightful explanation for the genesis of “windflower” as the plant’s common name….

“Anemone, or Wind-Flower is so called for the flower doth never open itself but when the wind doth blow, as Pliny writeth: whereupon also it is named of divers Herba venti: in English, Wind-Flower.”

… followed by some notes about the plant’s medicinal properties — called “The Virtues” — which include:

“The leaves stamped, and the juice sniffed up into the nose purgeth the head mightily….

“The root champed or chewed procureth spitting, and causeth water and phlegm to run forth out of the mouth.“

Good to know, I guess! 🙂

Across this post and the next one, the plants appear to be Japanese Anemones (Eriocapitella hupehensis) or Snowdrop Anemones (Anemonoides sylvestris) — both of which tend to be fall-blooming anemones in warmer climates, and I normally see them flowering here in the southeast from late summer through late September or early October. I took these photos on October 6th and October 19th — when many of the flowers had already bloomed yet there were plenty still preparing to open.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Black-Eyed and Brown-Eyed Susans (1 of 2)

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From “Rudbeckia (Asteraceae)” in Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury:

“The name [Rudbeckia] was bestowed by Linnaeus, in honor of his teacher at Uppsala University in Sweden, Olof Rudbeck the Younger, and his father, Olof Rudbeck the Elder. It is the dark centres to these golden-yellow daisies which draw us to them — hence, the common name black-eyed Susans (coneflower is another). There are 23 species, all rapidly growing herbaceous perennials and all native to North America, largely the midwestern and eastern U.S. states….

“Rudbeckias are generalists, growing in a wide range of both open and lightly shaded habitats, from virgin prairie to waste ground, but preferring moister and more fertile soils. Of the species in cultivation, Rudbeckia hirta and R. triloba are short-lived non-clonal perennials, often members of pioneer communities; the remainder are clonal and competitive, often strongly spreading, although not always persistent. Rudbeckias have had a minor role in Native American medicine, sometimes as a substitute for echinacea.”

Hello!

Last week I went hunting at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens for some of the tiny, colorful asters that I’ve previously photographed around this time of year (see, for example Autumn Asters (1 of 3), Autumn Asters (2 of 3), and Autumn Asters (3 of 3)). I was a little too early, as it turns out, finding only tiny buds not yet ready to open — but I did come across some substantial gatherings of the flowers featured in the images below. The first three photos will give you some idea of the flower volume: a bloom-forest teaming with moths, bees, and other wee pollinators bouncing among the “eyes” of these flowers.

Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) and Brown-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia triloba) are members of the Asteraceae family — so I guess I actually did find asters, just not the ones I was looking for. Wikipedia lists other common names for the plants, including Coneflower, Brown Betty, Gloriosa Daisy, Golden Jerusalem, English Bull’s Eye, Poor-Land Daisy, Yellow Daisy, and Yellow Ox-eye Daisy — and many of these names likely have some fun historical roots and local usages. I did asked one of the AI tools if the name “Susan” in “Black-eyed Susan” once referred to any specific person, and here’s what I sort-of learned from ClaudeAI:

There are a few theories about the origin of the “Susan” part of the name Black-eyed Susan, but unfortunately there is no definitive evidence pinpointing exactly who Susan refers to. Here are some of the main theories:

  • One belief is that it was named after an English woman called Susan who frequently handed out flowers, including rudbeckias. This may explain the flower’s association with cheerfulness and hospitality.
  • A common legend says it was named by European settlers for a native Algonquin woman who helped them learn wildflower names. This speaks to its native North American origins.
  • Some think it may be biblical in origin and refer to Susanna from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament.
  • There are unverified references to individual women named Susan in colonial America for whom the flower was informally named.
  • It may simply refer generically to the archetype of a strong, plainspoken woman, as Susan sometimes represented in folk culture.

Unfortunately there is no solid evidence for any of these possibilities over the others. The name was in use by the late 1700s, but the exact inspiration remains mysterious. So while the “Susan” in Black-eyed Susan is vivid, the specific person or meaning behind it has been lost to history.

It was an overcast day when I took these photos, which made the flowers glow against their dark green backgrounds, and the filtered light accentuated a color shift from yellow toward a more saturated orange. The “eyes” actually vary in color and include both black and dark brown, which helped me differentiate Black-eyed from Brown-eyed Susans.  The brown eyes reflect more yellow or orange shades from the flower than the black ones, on which you may see bits of blue color along with the black.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Amaryllis! Amaryllis! (3 of 3)

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From “Summer-Flowering Bulbs” in A Garden of One’s Own by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“There are two ways of determining the best plant material for a given location. One is to study the native flora, and the other is to experiment with plants from similar climates. Gardeners on the Pacific Coast have already discovered that their hot suns and periods of drought supply the conditions necessary for maturing certain bulbs from tropical and subtropical countries, and we are beginning to learn that many of them can be grown with equal success in the Southeastern states.

“Some of the Eastern catalogues list a few tender bulbs, but most of them must be ordered from California growers. Among the plants contributed to American gardens by the warm countries are representatives of the three great bulb families: the Amaryllidaceae, the Liliaceae, and the Iridaceae….

“The Amaryllis family is a major source of bulbs for mild climates. Their grace and charm is suggested by the poetic and mythological names of some of the genera: Lycoris and Nerine for sea sprites; Amaryllis for the nymph celebrated by Theocritus and Virgil; Hyacinthus for the unfortunate shepherd, beloved of Apollo; and Zephyranthes, flower of the west wind….

“Amaryllis, the genus which gives its name to the family, has only one species, although many closely related forms are known as amaryllis.”

From “A Memory of Amaryllis” in The Story of Amaryllis and Other Verses (1908) by Viola Taylor:

Have you grown old, or is the soul still young,
Within that body that was once so fair?
And has true silver touched the powdered hair?
While you have proved too well the song once sung
That rang so sadly, like a passing knell —
You will grow old, in the evening, by candlelight.

Have you grown old, and with uncertain touch
Do you now finger what you once forsook —
The dusty pages of a pious book?
You did not, dear, love praying overmuch
When you were young, but liked to smile and tell
You will grow old, in the evening, by candlelight.

No! rather say you passed in your full bloom,
With your sprigged pannier’s first more sober hue,
The mellow lights of autumn warm on you,
As in your rose-heaped, closely curtained room
You sang to some last love a last farewell —
You will grow old, in the evening, by candlelight.

Hello!

This is the last of three posts featuring photos of Amaryllis flowers that I took at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens this year. The previous posts are Amaryllis! Amaryllis! (1 of 3) and Amaryllis! Amaryllis! (2 of 3). In the final two images below, you can see a full view of one of the plants I photographed from various close-up angles for these three posts.

As this is likely the last of the amaryllis flowers I’ll photograph this year (though I am picking out some daylily, lily, and amaryllis photos for my black-background treatment), I thought Viola Taylor’s poem “A Memory of Amaryllis” fit pretty well. It’s from her 1908 book The Story of Amaryllis and Other Verses, which I puzzled mightily about in a post last year (see Red and Pink Amaryllis (1 of 3)) — when trying to figure out if the amaryllis poems in the book were about amaryllis flowers, about the life of a person known to her as “Amaryllis”, or even about Greek mythology associated with the plant family name “amaryllis”. But this year, since I have access to three artificial intelligence chatbots — see Easter, Madonna, and Regal Lilies (2 of 3) for more on that — I decided to give ChatGPT, Google Bard, and ClaudeAI a twirl to see if they could help me out. Maybe I should call them my Three AI-migos — though it may be premature to consider them friends.

Anyways! I sent this question to each chatterbot…

There is a book of verses called “The Story of Amaryllis” by Viola Taylor. Are the references to “amaryllis” throughout this book about a person named “Amaryllis” or plants in the amaryllis family?

… which both ChatGPT and Google Bard interpreted as a request for information about a living person, and gave an answer that sounded like “Us AIs don’t know nothing about no people” — with Bard actually getting a little snippy about it. ClaudeAI, however, seems to have nailed it, providing this nice overview of Taylor’s verses:

Based on some quick research, the references to “Amaryllis” in the book “The Story of Amaryllis” by Viola Taylor are about the amaryllis flower, not a person named Amaryllis.

Some key points:

  • The amaryllis is a flowering bulb plant that belongs to the Amaryllidaceae family. Common species include the belladonna lily and naked lady lily.
  • The name “amaryllis” comes from Greek mythology, derived from the name of a shepherdess who shed her blood to win the love of the shepherd Alteo.
  • Viola Taylor’s book is a narrative poem that anthropomorphizes the amaryllis, telling the mythological story of Amaryllis through the perspective of the delicate flower.
  • Descriptions of the “crimson gown” and “flower fairy” in Taylor’s verses match the appearance of the amaryllis flower, with its bright red blooms and delicate, almost human-like form.

So in summary, while the name Amaryllis has mythological roots as a woman’s name, in the context of Viola Taylor’s botanical poetry, the references are likely about the actual amaryllis flower itself, not a person. The personification gives the bloom a voice to tell its Greek myth-inspired origins.

Anthropomorphism — which really needs to be a word I can actually pronounce, like, say, “anthropop” — is, of course, the tendency to ascribe human characteristics to non-human entities… and, perhaps, an AI chatbot’s attempt to mirror human conversation by responding with phrases like “Based on some quick research”.

Anthropop (see! it is a word!) is deeply embedded in human culture, reflected in all the arts, and continually used to help us understand the world and communicate about it. But personally I’ve often wondered if (non-human) beings are capable of something similar, though we may be anthroppoping if we think they are. Does a dog ever pretend to be a cat? Mine seems to — sometimes sneaking around the house, peaking around doorways, and jumping at me like a puss on the prowl — so I think it’s possible. And it’s a well-established fact (not a fact) that Thesaurus Rex — the first speaking dinosaur — emulated human vocals before humans spoke (or even existed!).

So ClaudeAI’s interpretation fits the verses in Taylor’s book very well, as Taylor charts the flower/person’s progress from birth to death, and even after-death, through nine related poems. The verse I quoted above is the seventh poem in the book, positioning the flowers as a memory just before they’ve returned to the earth, as they’re fading from their summertime vibrance — and possibly while thinking they were glad not to be daylilies, which were already dead….

🙂

Thanks for reading and taking a look!