Painting Rhizomes and Amphiuma

#NatureTwinning Part 30:  Brought to you by cold-weather blazers

Pink Water Lily Close Up--Thursday, 2/1/18

I have been so pleased with this velvet blazer.  When you have winters as long as we do, you...well I...get tired of dark, drab wintry colors, so it's nice to have something that is completely appropriate to the weather but a bit more bright and spring-y.  I'm not 100% sold on this blouse/blazer/scarf combo, but this jacket + skirt duo is putting the win in winter.

Outfit cost per wear (OCPW): $10.43

Huzzah for more bright pink flowers.  Looking at this photo, I realized that I'd had no idea what the center of a water lily looks like.

So I looked up water lilies and laughed my way through the "description" of Nymphaeaceae in Wikipedia, which I will share here for your edification:

"The Nymphaeaceae are aquatic, rhizomatous herbs. The family is further characterized by scattered vascular bundles in the stems, and frequent presence of latex, usually with distinct, stellate-branched sclereids projecting into the air canals. Hairs are simple, usually producing mucilage (slime). Leaves are alternate and spiral, opposite or occasionally whorled, simple, peltate or nearly so, entire to toothed or dissected, short to long petiolate), with blade submerged, floating or emergent, with palmate to pinnate venation. Stipules are either present or absent. Flowers are solitary, bisexual, radial, with a long pedicel and usually floating or raised above the surface of the water, with girdling vascular bundles in receptacle. Sepals are 4-12, distinct to connate, imbricate, and often petal-like. Petals lacking or 8 to numerous, inconspicuous to showy, often intergrading with stamens. Stamens are 3 to numerous, the innermost sometimes represented by staminodes. Filaments are distinct, free or adnate to petaloid staminodes, slender and well differentiated from anthers to laminar and poorly differentiated from anthers; pollen grains usually monosulcate or lacking apertures. Carpels are 3 to numerous, distinct or connate. Fruit is an aggregate of nuts, a berry, or an irregularly dehiscent fleshy capsule. Seeds are often arillate, more or less lacking sperm."

That clears up any lingering questions, right?

I clicked on the link to rhizome and learned that they are also called "creeping rootstalks," which is a term I just love for a thing I don't really understand.

I'm pretty much like: Plants, what the hell?

Missouri Botanical Garden

Two Toed Amphiuma--Friday, 2/2/218

More olive and navy, which makes me feel like it's fall again.  Spring, fall, any season but winter, I guess.  I tried my olive T + olive blazer combination for the first time, and I approve.  It seems appropriate that I followed up my velvet blazer with my corduroy blazer as I work through my small collection of "jackets it will eventually get too warm to wear."

OCPW: $10.63

From water lilies to slippery aquatic salamanders of the southeastern US is a bit of a leap.  But the amphiuma won't be leaping himself, since he has four tiny, useless little legs.  Apparently these guys are commonly called "congo eels" or "conger eels" even though (1) they are amphibians, not fish (eels are fish), and (2) the actual congerA eel is a marine (ocean-dwelling) critter, whereas these salamanders live in stagnant swamps, bayous, and (eek) drainage ditches.

Cincinnati Zoo

In other news...another Half-Assed Book Review.

The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos by Dominic Smith

After reading a lot of genre fiction lately, it was nice to read a bit of literary fiction again.  The story is suspenseful, but it is not a whodunit in which you feel obligated to figure out what happened.

This book flips around among 3 settings:  Holland in the 1600s, when Sarah de Vos is doing her thing; 1950s NYC, when an art history PhD student encounters the panting; and 21st century Australia, when the student-now-professor encounters the panting again.  The switching around among the settings and points of view is not at all abrupt or difficult to follow as can often be the case--even if every transition is not immediately smooth-feeling, it quickly becomes apparent why the story is told in the order it is.  I liked the way the story was structured very much.  I preferred the 1600s and 1950s parts of the story to the modern piece; while the latter was necessary for making the story cohere, less time could have been spent there, I think.

Both the female protagonists are likable.  The painter character is better developed than the art historian.

The mood of the story goes like this:  Very sad, interesting interspersed with bits of kind of dull, interesting-er, kind of sad again.

To compare it to its obvious counterparts, I liked this book better than Girl with a Pearl Earring and not as much as The Goldfinch.  Still, I would recommend it overall.