They paved paradise
I tuned into NHK World-Japan, the English-language current affairs TV channel headquartered in Tokyo. By chance I caught an interview/documentary with the landscape architect/designer Michio Tase. He was showing and describing a 20-hectare botanical garden in the Minato area of Tokyo.
The botanical space is surrounded by high-rise corporate buildings and concrete and asphalt. Emerging as a small fishing village and even up to the overthrowing of the last shogun in the 1860s, Tokyo was still quite forested with native flora and fauna. Change is inevitable and most often gives rise to accompanying unintended consequences. This struck a note with Joni Mitchell who expressed in her 1970 song “Big Yellow Taxi”: “They took all the trees, Put them in a tree museum, And they charged all the people, A dollar and a half to see ‘em, Don’t it always seem to go, That you don’t know what you’ve got, ‘Til it’s gone, They paved paradise, And put up a parking lot.”
The botanical spaces within the Tokyo cityscape give people the chance to change their scenery and surroundings. It lets people get out and interact with nature directly which can promote positive thinking and support overall well-being.
I have a bit of the same botanical space surrounding my house. As a result of stay-at-home orders, self-quarantine, and social-distancing that officials are imposing, cabin fever sets in.
But, wandering about in the yard that surrounds my house provides an outlet. I even searched the lawn patches of white clover (trifolium repens) for a “good luck” one. Unsuccessful, I e-mailed our in-house botanist, Dr. Witiak: “Hi Sarah, I have many patches of trifolium in my yard, but I can’t find a 4-leaf clover; do only certain species produce them? What is the genetic prevalence?” She replied: “Hello Bill, I don’t know about 4-leaf clover frequency. Sounds like a good summer project. I don’t usually find them either, so maybe it has more to do with the searcher’s genotype than the plant’s…Smiles, Sara Melissa.
Well, upon her amusing answer I decided to google it because I want to do anything that is time-consuming now other than snacking and napping. In short, what I learned was that you may find one four-leaf clover in 5,076 three-leaf clovers www. sharetheluck.ch. I definitely need more clover patches to find my one good luck piece!
I’m eccentric and am now examining every tree and plant in my yard. I have one water oak tree (quercus nigra) in which some leaves are sort of bubbled-out in the center. It was obviously not supposed to be, but I didn’t ask my friend Witiak about this.
Again googling, I learned that the bulges in the leaves were caused by a fungus(taphrina). The condition is called oak leaf blister and it is not considered a significant threat to tree health, but a cosmetic disease. That means the oak will produce acorns again, although they are only 10-14 millimeters long and broad and mature about 18 months after pollination in the fall of the second year. So, just maybe, we will have homemade dotori-muk (acorn jelly) this fall if the ground squirrels do not glut themselves!