Supreme Manipulators

Flowers are here on earth because they are very useful for modifying animal behavior. Plants lead sedentary lives without ever getting a chance to have a few too many drinks at the disco and subsequently mixing up their gene pool by breeding with strangers. Wind pollination served the conifers well, but getting an animal to do the work of moving your pollen around was the greatest single advance in plant breeding. Flowering plants are the most recently evolved major form of life we see around us and they haven't stopped at getting insects to do their dirty work.


In the Leutratal valley just south of Jena, beautiful flowers have harnessed the help of an industrial strength mammal, Man.


One of Hitler's Autobahns, the A4, crosses the Saale river at the southern tip of town and winds up the Leutratal valley, sandwiched between the little village of Leutra and the orchids of Thuringia's first botanical reserve. Most of the highway is 6 lanes, but in this valley of sacred cows it narrows to only 4 lanes. There is no room to widen the road without destroying much of the old village or tearing into the orchid meadows, and the villagers and orchid seekers don't like the noise and fumes that come with a major highway. So, even though the end of the age of automobiles is almost in sight, in classic German style, a solution was found in engineering. At the cost of 240 million euros a 3Km tunnel is being bored through the mountain, to bring calm to the valley and two extra lanes for the sake of speeding across Europe without having to slow down to 90 miles/hr through a pretty little valley. The flowers don't get torn up and will have a nice quite pastoral setting for their breeding. So, did the humans save the flowers or did the pretty little flowers manipulate us? It is impossible to discern, but one thing is certain, being pretty has served them well.


I'm not making this up. Here is the wiki. Men made huge machines from mined iron ore, transported them here and have been working for years to punch through the rock. Completion isn't expected until 2012. The resulting tunnel will need massive ventilation fans and lighting that will run constantly. I like the orchids as much as anyone, but this all seems more than a bit silly to me.

It's all Garrigue to me

The Garrigue biome of the Mediterranean is a result of thousands of years of human activity. Between overgrazing, erosion and wood harvest all that remains is a community of the very hardy. Here you'll find poor rocky soil, long hot summer drought, salt spray, harsh winter winds and lots of goats. If you are a plant and want to live here you better have spines, be unpalatable or have great chemistry.


It is good to have spines here even if most of you is dead.


Many of the world's great aromatic plants come from here. This is wild Rosemary in bloom.

Plenty of spurges with caustic latex here too, and that is a nice fragrant fine toothed lavender around the spurge.


Looking down. Can you tell which way it is to the sea from here?

Here is a bloomin` onion. It found the best way to live here is under a rock.

Move up and away from the sea a bit and you find yourself in a pine-oak woodland, very similar to Chaparral, except with more goats.


Here is Jonathan in what I think is a sumac, so it is also probably toxic.

There is one more strategy that seems to work here: being very small and very sexy. With eyes honed from years of orchid seeking around Jena, Jonathan spotted both of these beauties.


They are both small almost leafless bee mimics. Male bees see these hotties and can't resist trying to copulate, but only get hit in the head with pollen for their effort. The flowers have to be so sexy that the bees fall for the charade at least twice to make a pollen transfer. They look pretty sexy to me, too.

Being on the Mediterranean in spring was a perfect break for this plant geek!