Nothing Happens At Ten

We found a disconcerting guest in our basement….. a woollybear taking a nap next to a former SPOTH.

The decapitated plant in the pot used to be a SPOTH. Here is a closer look.

On the left, you can see part of the plant with the bite marks in it.

On the right is the miscreant taking a nap….. or perhaps recovering from a tummy ache.

And all those little black dots all over the floor…. well….. droppings.

Ick

At least, according to the wide brown band on the bear, it is going to be a mild winter. Look on the bright side.

We have a volunteer SPOTH growing in our Alpine Garden. This is our Alpine garden:

The Alpine Garden is basically a pile of rocks that contains plants that usually grow on rocky mountain tops.  They are very hardy plants that grow on rocks in cold places. That’s nothin’ to sneeze at.

We had a volunteer plant show up in it. See it? No? There is a clue in the photo below. It’s under the tree, inside the white circle.

A closer view.

It’s a ‘shroom. We didn’t plant it, but it is strange enough to qualify for a SPOTH, so I blogged it anyway.

Actually, it’s kind of pretty.

I have no idea what its name is. So we can just call it “Fanny”.

No, wait. “Fanny Fungus” might be misinterpreted. How about “Farquhar”? Nah. Too hard to spell. OK. We’ll just stick with “Fred”.

We have the world’s tallest SPOTH growing in our house. Check this out. Here is the pot that it is growing in.

So we look up to see where the top of the plant is.

Keep looking up.

Look up even higher.

Not there yet, so keep looking up.

Almost there. One more look.

There ya go. The top of the world’s tallest SPOTH.

OK. If I take out the drama and delays, here is a photo of the whole plant.

That isn’t quite as exciting as the Long Look Up, but even so… that is a 13 foot high ceiling. It’s nothing to sneeze at.

The name of the plant is “Dracaena marginata“, and while this one is probably not really the tallest Dracaena in the world, these house plants are usually a bit shorter than ours.

Anyway, thanks for looking….. and looking….. and looking……..

It has been a while since I have posted a SPOTH, so I thought I would add one today.

If you are new to this blog you might not know what a SPOTH is, so I have supplied a link in the previous paragraph to my glossary (of sorts) to explain it.

In fact, I provided a link in the second paragraph as well. So all you need to do is click on the word SPOTH, and your questions will be answered.  Oh shoot, there’s another one. Dang. I sense an infinite regression coming on.

Well If you haven’t yet figured out how to find out what a SPOTH is, you might have some internet issues.

Just sayin’.

Cutting to the chase, here is the SPOTH.

That is a Tillandsia Cyanea, also called a “pink quill” plant. The quill in the middle is actually a “bract”, which is a modified leaf where the flowers grow.

The neat thing about this is that if you rotate the plant 90 degrees, it looks like this.

Pretty cool. The quill is flat. It is so skinny in this direction that it almost disappears.

I thought that this was so cool, I expended an enormous effort to create a gif to show the plant rotating so you can get the full effect. Check this out.

To emphasize the trauma that I endured while making that gif, consider that the turntable it was turning on has a music box in it that was playing Edelweiss the whole time.

We suffer for our art.