JUMANGI!!!
The “True” Jimangi
Back in 1995, Robin Williams starred in a rather bizarre movie, Jumangi. The rhinoceroses charging through the living room and the crazed, great white hunter caused more terror than did the bizarre plant that kept threatening Robin Williams. After all, rhinoceroses and great white hunters, even crazy ones, are real enough, but that plant surely had to be no more than a moviemaker’s fantasy. Well, let me tell you, that odd looking plant bore an eerily strong resemblance to a real plant.
Jumanji
A WELCOME TOUCH OF GREENERY
Beauty, Beer, and Aroma
What more hopeful way to go into winter than with a plant named wintergreen? Wintergreen. The word conjures up an image of lush greenery against lily white snow, a congenial juxtaposition of the living and the nonliving, both pristine.
Wild wintergreen in Maine
If the word wintergreen brings to mind, instead, a refreshing aroma or flavor — yes — that’s the same plant. Oil of wintergreen has been used as flavoring for teas and beers, both alcoholic and nonalcoholic, as well as straight up, as a leafy nibble. The plant’s berries also provide a nibble, one that might make you start moving your feet. Wintergreen is also known as teaberry, the flavoring in a chewing gum that was featured in popular TV advertisements in the late 1960s that showed the gum inducing a jiglike dance, the “teaberry shuffle,” to a catchy tune. Read more
UGLY WORD, NICE PLANTS
What’s a Variety
Mmmmm, how I like to bite into a cultivar. And look at the beautiful petals of a cultivar. And admire the autumn foliage of a cultivar.
A “cultivar?” What an ugly word for a plant with so many qualities.
Actually, a cultivar is any cultivated variety of plant. Get it? “Cultivated variety” contracts to “cultivar,” a word that was originally conjured about 100 yers ago, then codified in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) in 1959. Some horticulturalists, myself included, avoid the word. As I wrote, the word is just too ugly.
Brassica oleraceae var. botrytis, B. oleraceae var. gemmifera (with Homo sapiens), and B. oleraceae var. acephala.
Before the word “cultivar” was invented, gardeners used the word “variety,” but some people objected Read more
