Mothers day and photographing plant sections

Mother's day in the United Kingdom. In our country, the tradition has been linked to the 16th Century Mothering Sunday, when apprentices and maids were given the day to return to their Mother Church by their masters and there to also be reunited with their mothers.

Modern Mother's day in other parts of the world received it's inspiration from the campaigning Anna Jarvis, at the start of the 20th Century in the United States of America, and many countries have adapted it to their culture as comprehensively described in the Wikipedia page on Mother's Day.

In Germany, Mother's Day was adopted due to the dwindling birth rate in the 1920's. The Third Reich took this further and awarded fertility with medals. My mother recounted how, as a child, she had implored my grandmother to give her another brother or sister so that my grandmother would receive a Gold medal!

My sympathy is actually with the philosophy of some Moslems, the mothers should be recognised and respected every day, and not just on one. Mrs T. did however receive her recognition today.

The evening was spent at the microscope, perusing Mr McDougals's box of plant sections, sent through by the venerable Postal Microscopy  Society. This was a remarkable first boxed contribution by Mr McDougal, with the sections generally being of good quality and ultra-thin throughout. Some commentators in the accompanying notebook referred to the weak safranin staining, however the samples more than adequate for study.

Where detail was not obviously apparent, I endeavored to enhance the visibility of features through additional lighting techniques. Some slides benefited more from the use of polarised light, others from using a method developed by Reichert, namely Anoptral phase-contrast. I took numerous photographs of each slide, changing the focus slightly, in order to obtain a so called focus-stack of images. Success will be judged when the photographs can be viewed and edited on a larger computer screen. All in all, four hours were taken up, late into the night, in this engrossing pursuit.