Hey Martin! I enjoyed your video debut a lot and loved hearing your Yankee accent. Gives me a dose of "Up Home" talk I need every so often to keep from getting homesick. I hope you will make more videos and maybe one with you singing to your fig trees. That would be great. noss

Finished a rather fun read of Love Among the Butterflies by Margaret Fountaine, a collection of her diary entries which detail her wide travels across the world collecting butterflies (and sometimes men). [grin] Fountaine was a vicar's daughter (I think) who grew up at the tail end of Victoria and the beginning of Edwardian days, and as she was not married, she found herself somewhat unoccupied. She started to collect butterflies, and after a while, became a serious entomologist and traveled across the world adding pieces to her large collection. (Lots of overlaps with Edith Holden here.) So - clearly, this is an unorthodox woman for the times: she travels widely to countries not familiar to a lot of people back then, she ends up having a long-term relationship (and traveling with) a man from Syria, she becomes an expert in butterflies... It's quite admirable just how far she pushed acceptability in female terms back then, but it did come with a price. She really struggles to reconcile her love of freedom with the cultural expectations of the time with regard to spinsters and marriage and "suitable" partners. Despite all her travel experience, she stays curiously unhappy throughout her life (at least as told in these entries). She is very defensive all the time, but was heartless to those who kept her close to their hearts. Her Syrian lover could not be publicly acknowledged for many years, and although they travel and work well together, she insisted on them having different rooms and standards (despite their relationship), and she could never grasp that he was in love with her for realz. In their rather frequent seperations, she would drive herself to distraction imagining various horrible scenes involving him and an accident or another woman etc. Fountaine does acknowledge in her diaries that she adores her freedom, but anything that seems to threaten that state of affairs immediately puts her into a tailspin of being mean to her family, friends and lovers, of acting selfishly and generally being a bit of a pinhead. However, just because she was rather an unkind person doesn't make this book any less fascinating. The illustrations taken from her diary pages are intriguing to look at: her writing is immaculate with very few errors and she justifies her handwriting on every page. (Goodness - how to do that without making a crossing-out every now and then, who knows?). She had volumes of diaries and numerous boxes of butterfly specimens that she bequeathed to a museum, but only with the condition that the museum administration do not open the diary box for 40 years after her death. This agreement was stuck to, and so they waited for the correct time. Thus were found the diaries. So - good read overall. Woodnymph - you mentioned earlier that you had a copy but it was only a paperback and had type that was difficult to read. Would you like me to send you this copy? It's only going to the library book sale otherwise,...

Thanks, Martin! I'm relieved you that you consider that an acceptable shot lol And yes, that was a bit of fur from Hodor the cat who likes lying down on my haworthias. Macro photography (and my battle to learn it) is what got me into plants in the first place. I am a firm believer in splurging on lenses and prioritizing it over a camera body upgrade. Also, other than the fact that my old D60 has extreme sentimental value, the reason I have been successful at talking myself out of getting a d3300 is because I shoot almost exclusively on manual mode anyway and have no use for bells and whistles. Although I could certainly use the 12k ISO with that yummy 25k ISO boost. I also have this crackpot idea of getting a cheap D3200 and having the block filters removed so I can shoot in UV. I'm told my D60 is so old its IR/UV built-in filters are weak anyway and can probably do this already but I haven't tried. I need to get a UV black filter to test it. And a xenon flash. On and on and on. Bottom line, it's really the D810 I want. And I just confessed to my real hobby, to which plants are only incidental.

The pruning of a portion of the leaves would be to reduce/slow growth, stress and transpiration of the plant while it puts is energy into producing new roots. Cutting of the leaves in half on a plant not going through the rigors of root pruning can also slow particular branches on a specimen down, allowing others to grow. Done at times on all leaves to allow more light into the center of the plant. By cutting the leaf in half, is known to stimulate hormone/auxins to assist in root growth. Rick