by Doctor Science
When I’ve had a garden, they’ve been shade gardens. I like to plant a lot of perennials, especially native plants, but for summer-long color to break up the relentless green my go-to plant has always been the common impatiens .
This era has ended. A fungal disease, impatiens downy mildew, is infecting most impatiens in the US and Europe. Because mildew spores can overwinter in the soil and persist for years, even if you could get uninfected plants you couldn’t trust that you had a place to put them. US gardeners are having to face the fact that we’ve probably bought our last flat of this species of impatiens, and we’re going to have to think of something else for summer color in the shade.
This is the kind of thing that happens with globalization, I guess: you get emotionally attached to a plant that’s native to Kenya, it spreads easily around the world, and then its disease spreads around the world, too.
It’s kind of the flip side of invasive alien species, that spread really easily when they *don’t* have a disease following them. Like, say, Asian carp, which have spread throughout the Mississippi River basin. If they become established in the Great Lakes, they’re likely to devastate the ecosystem and the fishing industry there. The question is whether the only way to keep them out of the Great Lakes would be to close the connection between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi basin, at Chicago. This would cost billions of dollars, seriously disrupt shipping, and might not work if the fish already have a toehold (finhold?) in the Great Lakes.
Have a good couple of days, guys: I’m a pollworker for NJ’s Primary Election, tomorrow. I’m pretty sure the number of voters at my district will get into double digits, but I doubt it’ll be triple. The only real vote is over the choice of Democrat to be ritually sacrificied go up against Christie.
What we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.
The American Chestnut
The American Elm
Two enormously valuable native trees, extirpated or greatly reduced by imported pathogens — just a couple of those “externalities” that are not accounted when economists explain the world.
Now we’re losing the ash trees to the ash borer, and white pines to blister rust.
Which began in 1492 when Columbus reached the Americas. Pangaea, once split asunder, rejoined.
(It began) Much much earlier, when during the last major Ice Age humans walked into the Americas and wreaked havoc (similarly in Australia when the ancestors of the Aborigines landed.
And The Plague rode into the West on the back of Mongolian horses.
Wait, that’s not a new thing.
Once upon a time, a group of hominids strode/loped forth out of Olduvai Gorge…
I like the pretty color of flowers as much as the next guy but I love the relentless green of trees and the shade gives me great comfort.
It’s not just the globalization of pests to be of concerned but also global warming. Apparently those fungus carrying bark beetles don’t much care for cold weather.
Those bugs are now deforesting my ‘City of Trees’ along with millions of acres of pine forest out here on the left side.
and i bet the soft-bodied critters of the Cambrian oceans were bummed when the first armored and toothed carnivores started sniffing around.
I’m starting to see more and more carp down here in Texas. They’re good to fish for, but bad for the overall ecosystem.
Oy, every year my wife points out her garden and the impatiens, and always I can’t see them. Hell of a blind spot (the rest of the garden is notable, even by my limited perception of such things).
I bet I see the parking lot, though.