pinned post: FAQ

welcome to BSP! i’m quill, i love plant science, we are all here to have a good time.

BEFORE SENDING AN ASK:

-i do not do plant identifications. this is because plant ID down to the species can be pretty tricky and takes time, and its best to have the plant in front of you while you do it, not to mention that i’m only well-versed in iowa plants (my home state). if you’re in the USA, it’s likely your local/state DNR or USDA office will have a key to local plants up on their website. i’m in the process of compiling a resource list for plant ID state-by-state in the US and US territories, I’ll get that up as soon as i can

-plant care stuff is similar, mostly because even though i know a lot about plants on a scientific level, im TERRIBLE at taking care of actual plants. i’m actually best versed in commercial greenhouse care and diseases/plant pathology on a wider scale. at some point i’ll try to get a basic resource list for better plant care stuff up, too

-i don’t check my dms unless you send me an ask specifically pointing it out; i do, however, read every ask i get, although i get enough that i can’t respond to all of them!!

-because i started this blog in high school, some of the older posts on here can be inaccurate or poorly worded; typically my newer posts are better sourced and executed and stuff imo.

THE BEST POSTS ON THIS BLOG (under construction as i remember more i really like):

- “Can u tell me about moss“ (moss crash course post)

- ”what's the dumbest piece of plant anatomy. where do you look at a plant and you're like "why did evolution do this instead of literally anything else"” and (similar topic) ”so when i see museum paleobotany illustration like especially pre-cenozoic most of the plants look intuitively 'simpler' to me; more cartoonish than modern plants, even modulo the overall realism of the illustration. i vaguely assumed this was because they were based on degraded fossil evidence, but lately i was thinking it's not inconceivable that morphology actually tended simpler in the past. any insight?”

- ”Whats a lichen if not a plant“ and (similar topic) “What exactly IS a lichen?? Pls im just an artist who only knows that plants are pretty” (closest current post to a lichen crash course)

- ”A little while ago you made a remark about ferns along the lines of "God really left you unfinished huh?". Can you please elaborate on that?”

- ”OH! about double fertilisation: bls explain the polar nucleii”

theres a part in my fern textbook where it talks about fern 'spore banks' in the soil where fern spores land on the ground and instead of germinating get buried and can stay viable for several years and sometimes i think about it bc although they didnt elaborate on why this might be useful, if i was a fern-- a little guy who's survival strategy is notoriously to be the first to colonize any disturbed new places so i dont have to bother with any competition-- this would be a pretty sick deal.

like this is unconfirmed fern lore but like, if im a spore sittin several inches to feet underground and something happens thats bad enough to rip up the soil and expose me to sunlight and water again, its probably also bad enough to rip up all my competition and let me do whatever i want on a clean slate with all the nutrients i could wish for in the ruins of the ecosystem i was buried under. like, via a terrible natural disaster or landslide or something. and im already adapted to the environment because i came from a fern that was there the last time the land was ripped up and recolonized with ferns. rip to the other plants but im different lmaooo

mosses growing in the cracks in heavily used pavement cars rolling over them 76 times a day nothing but respect for our troops

the first lesson of science is humility actually. like hubris is cool but only if you can take the L

plants be like oh the creatures around me do not want to carry my seeds elsewhere but they DO like little treats and helpful times…..if only

the plant ‘blindness’/plant ignorance phenomenon is genuinely tragic for so many reasons but at the same time plants get away with so much more because of it. like it’s actually very funny

i hate to be a seed analyst on main but it could have been a secondary epicotyl? peas have a thing where if their terminal bud (area of the stem with the leaves) gets damaged, they can send up a second one, but in my experience it looks a bit wonky in comparison, like kind of stunted and stiff and not really as stem-like. according to the AOSA rules for peas (might be different depending on which rules youre going by), each seedling needs to have at least one strong epicotyl with good leaves to be considered normal, and a damaged primary with a good enough secondary epicotyl with those characteristics can pass as a normal seedling if they have leaves at the top and a nice root and looks...fine, but if its just a pale peg thing, it's not considered enough to make up for a missing stem. id call it abnormal (wont make it to adulthood or if it does, wont be a normal productive plant).

alternatively, if it genuinely was growing two roots, no epicotyl/damaged shoot would be my official reason for saying it's abnormal. unofficially i would say Damn Thats Crazy.

(also, a note on pea anatomy-- in the case of peas, the cotyledons are most of the seed itself that stays below the soil, and then the plant sends up a stem and just uses it as a food source. so the little guy DID have cotyledons, it just...was not putting out an actual stem + leaves. the no chlorophyll part doesnt surprise me, a lot of newly germinated seedlings take a minute to get their chlorophyll and look pale at first, then develop actual green coloration in their leaves and stems as they get to be around a few days old-- especially if theyre being grown in low/no light-- but if it stayed with no chlorophyll it would be albino, which is very possible and an abnormal condition in most rulebooks).

AOSA rules for testing seeds volume 4: seedling evaluation 2022 edition page 35 figure 2b. little guy jumping

the small beans…. crownvetch, alfalfa…. just little guys, really

so uh. does anybody else not know what theyre doing in life at age 23 because man,

love doing something I call ‘the big leaf test’ where I put my hand on a leaf and if the leaf is bigger than my hand I go damn that’s crazy

trying my hand at writing a video about fern sex again and I’m obsessed with the alternation of generations diagram on the American fern society’s website that (in addition to the typical bio textbook life cycle of just one fern drawn so it looks like it’s inbreeding) also depicts a girls’ night of ferns sitting near one another having sex on a blank background, thus contextualizing the dynamics a group of girlies usually has instead of just trying to show only one. it just brings me joy