I studied botany for a year at university. Specifically, I did research into Leptosiphon parviflorus, which is a tiny little pink (or white) flower that grows on sun-drenched hills in California's mid-coastal region.
Now, you hear botanical research and probably think 'Wow, I bet it was a lot of writing down how flowers are reacting to the sun, and drawing them in a notebook, I bet you're a swell lil chick with a big 'ol sunhat and loose buttoned-up shirt coated in sunscreen.'
- I was not those things.
- I wish that the research was as neat as that.
The research on its face was kind of interesting! Thusly, the main goal of my research was to study the growth characteristics of the flower. For unidentified reasons, some populations of the flower grew with pink petals, and some grew with white petals.
Here is a good example of the phenomenon:
(There are also some that grow yellow, but that's a variation that we weren't interested in.)
It's cool to have a flower grow different with unknown causal factors! We theorized it was due to soil variations and not genetic variations, but I digress. The annoying factor was building a functioning seedbank of the local patch of them. I went to school on the campus that has the 'architecture graveyard' (if you've ever seen the Tom Scott video on it, you know what I mean.
That is up a hill. A hill a solid mile from where I was living on campus.
Another note about Leptosiphon parviflorus: it takes FOREVER for its seeds to come to fruition, but when they do, they burst and scatter. This meant daily treks a mile out into a hot California meadow, all to stoop down and poke flowers until they were dry. Because they had such a wild development time, I did these daily walks for a solid MONTH.
Finally, I was able to collect those fuckers in tons of tiny yellow envelopes, but I swear my calves have never been more powerful.
Needless to say, this tiny flower was wonderful and also the bane of my existence. Then school got too busy to keep studying them as we grew them in the lab for genetic testing. I wonder if that ever came to fruition...
This was a very meandering post, but I am quite tired and writing is sometimes hard. Anyway, ask me about flowers! I think they're cool, and these ones were real neat. Unfortunately I never determined a correlative factor of soil-type to flower color.
See you tomorrow!