A Neotropical Savanna

Ian Ramjohn of Further Thoughts has posted edition #20 of the plant carnival, Berry Go Round. It’s a collection of interesting posts, put together in such a thoughtful way (no wonder his blog has “Thoughts” in the title!) that you’ll really want to read each one. Do visit.

There are times when one must simply let life, which can be pretty insistent, take over. So it has been for more than a month now and it looks to remain so for the near future. When I can, I will resume posting but will not go into the identification detail that I usually do. Not, at least, until life eases up some.

Here are two overdue announcements.

1. Sally at Foothills Fancy has a put up a great collection of plant posts for Berry Go Round #18. I enjoyed reading her “potluck,” as she called it, awhile back, but today I’ve had the time to follow some of the links and read the originals to which she refers. Do make a visit. It’s an excellent selection.
2. More than a year ago I began a project in which I did some online digging about some specimens that Darwin collected and which had been newly re-discovered. The names were completely unfamiliar to me, so I decided to find out what they were and to see whether I could find any mention of each of them in his Voyage of the Beagle. I’m afraid that during this frenzied time I let the domain name for that project – The Accidental Botanist – expire. My plan is to rescue the posts and take them over to Wordpress, and when I do so, I’ll announce it here.

So for now, do enjoy your visit at Berry Go Round #18 and leave a comment for Sally.

Two blog carnivals about plants are well worth reading this month: Festival of the Trees celebrates flowering and blossoming this season at Orchards Forever, and Berry Go Round #16 features mutualism, evolution and other interesting plant posts at Quiche Moraine.

While the a broad swath of the US experiences storms and flash flooding, the dry season still has a firm grip on our part of Panama. We now have a weather report for April 2009 based on data from our relatively new weather station, put into some context by looking at the 16-year rainfall record of Ricardo Espinosa from Potrerillos Arriba.

While I’m teaching myself more about complexly compound leaves, go read Festival of the Trees #34 at The Marvelous in Nature. It’s an amazing issue, setting a new standard for presenting information in blog carnivals.