Sunday, July 30, 2017

two varieties of grass flowers

there is still a disparity of growth in the corn field by the supermarket....the plants in the deep shade have finally made it to knee high in july ( first photo ) while the plants deeper in are over my head ( second )...the field is a sea of cornflowers ( third ) which all have a structure akin to the flower in the fourth photo...ears have irrupted ( fifth and sixth ) complete with tassels...( i have made a serious effort to put across the difference between corn flowers and tassels to an individual i know with little success...they are definitely in symbiosis and can probably be easily confused...they serve distinct purposes in the growth of field corn though ) which bodes well for the corn crop...there are also structures that telegraph the formation of more ears ( seventh ) so the process is in its early days...by contrast the northern tepehuan teosinte in my back yard is, perhaps, pushing four feet in height ( eighth )...it too has flowered ( ninth ) with a significantly different male flower head ( the tenth photo is the filed corn flower again as a contrast...it is far too early to go looking for silks and ears on the teosinte...in the next month or so perhaps...still there is a lot of morphology to observe...we will get into leaf structure as the teosinte matures...the ancestor and domesticate are as alike as they are different.

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