Life of a Botanist ... is not only a bed of roses

“Kosovo battlefield was strewn with heads and turbans, similar to a bed of tulips”, is what a Turkish chronicler wrote about the battle between the Serbs and Ottomans in the year 1389. The comparison to tulips and turbans is an ancient one, and this is where we westerners get the name for this lovely flower. A gentler story is that fashionable noblemen in Istanbul were wearing tulips on their turban and when a westerner asked about the flower, the translator may have confused the name for the headdress with the flower. In Turkish, they are called ‘lale’, which in Arab character is spelled with the same letters as ‘allah’, and thus tulips became the symbol for god and all he represents. Tulips became the representation of paradise on earth. Later the House of Osman took the tulip as their symbol, as the divine rulers of the empire, and this resulted in synonymy of tulips with Turkey. Sure, there are native tulips in Turkey, but the fashion for growing tulips and the complex hybrids...

Spring is early this year. It is only early April and most late daffodils are already over, tulips are in full swing and magnolias are dropping its petals. It has been a better spring than other years, a little cold weather in winter helped the spring bulbs along and killed some of the insects and slugs that otherwise would devour the fresh green leaves and opening flowers of daffodils. It always puzzles me how slugs and snails manage to find the daffodil flowers. The leaves of daffodils are poisonous, so slugs are not interested in it, but the flowers, towering (to a slug) over the leaves, some 40 cm above, are often devoured while they are emerging from their protective bract. The result is unsightly, half-eaten coronas, broken petals and a sad botanist. Waiting all winter for these gems to emerge and then finding that a slug ate them over night is sad, particularly because somehow slugs seem to have a particular preference for the rare and unusual kinds of daffodils. The ones y...

Often I have thought about starting a blog, an online account of the many natural wonders I encounter and the botanical puzzles that come my way. But until today I lived more than I wrote and usually gardening is the best excuse not to write anything. Are you asking if it is raining? The weather is fine, spring is in full swing and there is lots to explore, which I shall do in a minute ( I can see this first blog becoming a short one). I will not promise to write something every day, probably not even every week. I have a big garden and travel a lot, but I promise to share some stuff from time to time. Life of a Botanist will be an interesting journey, and certainly will not be only about a bed of roses (but it can be of course, lets see).