Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides
June 20, 2007
Louise was breathless with excitement and it didn’t help that Reba was pulling at the leash. As usual I was on my knees pulling out Swamp grass and clover from around the heather. She was so proud of her beautiful Labrador Retriever who had just found a trail hidden among the overgrown bushes at the end of an empty lot off Wilmot Road. It was just a few minutes from our hill-side homes overlooking Cowichan Bay. The lot was not really empty as it was completely overgrown with clover, daisies, Swamp grass, wild
blackberries and dozens of other plants many of which I had been battling as weeds for the last 18 months in the garden. Here they flourished and were stunningly beautiful swaying in the breeze.
Suddenly the quiet was broken with industrial size squawking. It reminded me of the sound of raptors in Jurassic Park. As we zigzagged through patches of thorny plants we could see huge heron nests that seemed to be balanced precariously atop Alder trees that were too thin and fragile for this weight and responsibility. The loud squawking seemed to increase and decrease in lulls which I thought at first was due to our arrival or maybe even an attack of an eagle. But as I stood silently watching I could see the adult herons incessantly leaving the nests and returning with food for their offspring. The young were rowdy and ungainly and the branches thrashed as they competed for food. One graceless young heron perched precariously on a branch that bent and swayed under his weight.
All around us underfoot were trunks of trees cut long ago to clear the land to the edge of this ravine tucked in behind Pritchard. The ravine meanders with branches leading into Cowichan Bay estuary somewhere near Wessex Inn.
Roger Tory Peterson1 reminded us that the majority of flowers that grow in vacant lots and along roads in North America are aliens. Hundreds of waysi
de plants came from Europe. Some came from gardens but most came unseen as seeds mixed in with shipments from across the sea. The first known station for a foreign plant is often at seaports or along a railroad track. In the prairies certain flowers came at first to airfields. In 1968 Peterson had already noticed that the best place to find remnants of the disappearing prairie flowers was along the railroad right-of-way. Roadsides are relatively poor because of mowing and plant-spraying operations. Even coastal marshes have lost their flowers through ditching and draining (1986:x11).
Flowers are rooted to earth, often separated by broad barriers of unsuitable environment from other ‘stations’ of their own species.
“Therefore over the centuries, subtle differences have often developed with strains that are so marked that botanists have given them varietal names. Others are ignored because they would overburden an already complex taxonomy. Or a flower, from the same seed, may be depauperate in a sterile soil or where lack of competition has favoured it in some way. Familiar flowers than can look unfamiliar. Some hybridize (Peterson 1968:xii).”
“What of the future of rare native wildflowers? Because of the attrition of habitat, some are in a precarious position. Bogs along the southern margins of glaciated country are becoming fewer and orchids requiring bog conditions are harder to find. When a forest has been cut, its shade-loving orchids may also disappear, and half a century or more may pass before succession makes the forest suitable again for them. How can they return? […] Can seeds remain viable in the soil for half a century or more, until succession renders their habitat suitable again? We know little about this (Peterson 1968:xii).”
We entered the trail that Reba had shown us and there was a third space of semi-tropical rain forest. This hidden treasure is tucked
away in the village of Cowichan Bay. A small stream, that dries up in the summer, winds through this hidden ravine. It is a corridor of towering douglas fir, cedar trees and arbutus trees with dense foliage that is tucked in between developed areas on either side. Sword and maiden-hair ferns and a wide diversity of wildflowers grow in the cool, moist mini-ecosystem. A few villagers have maintained a trail with an almost invisible entrance at the end of a clearing on Wilmot. I am not sure that it is precisely located on the Flickr map but the coordinates are (48°44’23.86″N, 123°37’39.45″ W).
This is linked to my Flickr and to my Google Earth Community and will be linked to Youtube, Facebook and Google Video.
Notes
1. I usually try to separate my own phrasing from that of an author whose works I am citing. In this case these words are a blend of direct quotations from Peterson’s Introduction and my own editing to shorten and summarize. His phrases and wording are so exact, poetic and appropriate that I wanted to enhance their metaphorical quality by keeping them intact. If I included all the “” the result would be too cumbersome.
Bibliography
Peterson, Roger Tory. 1968. “Introduction.” in Peterson, Roger Tory, McKenny, Margaret. 1968. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America: A Visual Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Peterson, Roger Tory. 1968. “Survival.” in Peterson, Roger Tory, McKenny, Margaret. 1968. A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America: A Visual Approach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
p. xii.
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides.” >> Speechless. June 18.
Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Taxonomy, empty lots, roadsides.” http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddp3qxmz_304fp4w32 June 18.
Digitage Web 2.0
June 14, 2007
Logos from Web 2.0 are caught in the web somewhere between NASA photos of deep space, science fiction landscapes of our inner space, the synapses of the brain, the virtual space that is not abstract, imagined or really real.
Web 2.0, is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 for a series of conferences on a revivified Internet. O’Reilly (2005) in what is now considered to be his seminal article claimed that, “If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005). He contrasted Web 1.0 with Web 2.0 by citing examples: DoubleClick vs Google AdSense, Ofoto vs Flickr, Britannica Online vs Wikipedia, personal websites vs blogging, domain name speculation vs search engine optimization, page views vs cost per click, publishing vs participation, content management systems vs wikis directories (taxonomy) vs tagging (”folksonomy”) and stickiness vs syndication. The conceptual map his team devised provides a sketch of Web 2.0 showing social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.
Although some argue that it does not exist as anything more than geek jargon, for this new user, it is a promising and surprising paradigm shift in the Internet and in software development. I began blogging using Web 2.0 freeware in September 2006. Numerous users like myself have access to sophisticated, ever-improving software technologies since the cost of development is shared among enthusiastic nerds and geeks (in a good way). Freeware on Web 2.0 is not proprietary by nature but is capable of generating huge profits because of the viral way in which users share in the development, marketing and growth of the product while improving connectivity and in content in the process.
Note: June 2007. This image was included in Weinreich’s slideshare album with a layer of text he added:New Generation Social Marketing. He had to resize the image to the PowerPoint format. It is credited to me in the transcript. It is fascinating how digitage such as this has a potential for producing offshoots. I am investigating the potential of slideshare for managing teaching, learning and research digitage (slides) in one place. I started to put them in my Flickr albums. Since I first created this image I have begun to use YouTube, Google docs, iGoogle and Facebook so there are several layers of text orbits to be added . . .
Key words: slideshare, academic, blog, blogging, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, slideshare, academic, collaboration, presentation, web2.0, powerpoint, slides, sharing presentations, Tim O’Reilly, wordpress.com, vastation, synaptic gasp, swicki, synapses, synaptic cleft, synaptic gap, rapture of the deep internet, photoshop, neuroscience, neural architectonics, mind-brain, googleearth, gather, frimr, flickr, digitage, delicious, cybernarcosis, cyberdelirium, cyberdeliria, creative commons, consciousness, bricoleuse, blogspot, blogging, art and science, technology, mind, Adobe Photoshop
Selected webliography
Tim O’Reilly, 2005. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. Uploaded 09/30/2005. Accessed January 6, 2007.
In my ongoing investigation of connectivity innovations in Web 2.0 I have uploaded shaky (longtake) videos to a YouTube oceanflynn account using the Canon PowerShot A550’s basic video clip capacity. As YouTube background I used a Flickr image adapting Escher’s rippled reflections and Davidhazy’s macro shots of water drops. Flickr images cannot be used directly with YouTube so I used the .jpg url of that image from my Speechless @ WordPress uploads. YouTube seems to limit uploads to one a day? The tags are limited and so are categories. I use travel. Uploading is very fast and easy. There may be fewer views of my slow world videos than on Google Videos. There is more room for descriptions on Google Video. I think the full upload time is longer. Both are seamlessly integrated with WordPress through a simple html-like code using [] brackets instead of <> youtube = and googlevideo =
I am using Google docs as a space for note-taking related to my YouTube and Google Videos. It allows me to add images seamlessly with no problems formatting. I appreciate the ‘remove coding’ icon so I can keep coding as plain as vanilla. It helps me keep track of bibliographies and webliographies although these are also on delicious. Google docs also allows for lots of tags (folksonomy is the key to connectivity). Although these docs are often a mess of collaged text, urls and images, they help me keep track of information such as First Nations preferred names for places, evidence of benign colonialism, etc.
I uploaded some digital images from our two excursions this weekend to oceanflynn @ the Google Earth community.
I have bookmarked the YouTube videos on the social bookmarking site, ocean.flynn delicious
googlevideoI’ve also subscribed to this at my Google Reader as .rss feed. http://del.icio.us/rss/ocean.flynn/youtube
del.icio.us/ocean.flynn/first.nations
The Mount Tzuhalem Ecological Reserve preserves an outstanding Garry Oak – wildflower stand.
It is here that we tried another shaky 44 second video of the panorama showing the Cowichan Valley, Duncan, Providence Farm, Lake Quamichan and the Garry Oaks with Mount Prevost in the distance. 48°47′ 10″ N, 123°38′ 18″ W
See also Spring Gold, Shooting Stars, Western Buttercup under Garry Oak Trees
Panorama of view from Mount Tzuhalem looking out spanning Sanich Peninsula, Cherry Point, Cowichan Bay village and the estuary of Cowichan River and Koksilah River at low tide. The cross on Mount Tzuhalem is visible in the last frame. 48°46′ 12″ N, 123°37′ 44″ W
See also Mercury on Mount Tzuhalem and here.
Panorama of view from Mount Tzuhalem overlooking Cowichan River estuary with view of First Nations Longhouse. See also Flickrphoto overlooking Sanich Peninsula.
See also Garry Oak
Speechless 
