Amorous pollen messengers, clematis flowers and bioremediation

Overnight showers and brisk winds presented an unwelcome morning rhinitis. Despite regularly taking the cetirizine tablets, the recently released wind blown pollen, most likely from Oak, initiated the runny nose and sneezes marking the return of the hay-fever season for me. It is perhaps ironic that the chemical messengers carried on the surface of pollen grains, whose aim is to ensure that an amorous conjugation only occurs when the grains fall on the receptive stigmas of the same plant species, also elicit a response with the noses of us unfortunate allergy sufferers; our suffering comes from misplaced floral love.

As symptoms abated during the day, it seemed safe for a short outing, past the pure white blossom of Mr Cooper's clematis plants. Most of the flowers conformed to the quadri-petallate structure of the species but a few had five petals instead of four. In all other respects the flowers were perfect, arguing against a reaction to damage perhaps. Clematis species can have anything between four to eight petals, so presumably the genetic control of clematis flower development is relaxed sufficiently to allow the occasional sport with a different number of petals, compared the majority of flowers on a given plant. It would be interesting to take cuttings from the branches featuring the sports and seeing if the pheneomenon was stably maintained, that is a genetic mutation, or not, in which it would be a physiological variant.

Our gentle stroll down to the river and back was mimicked later in the afternoon, as we sipped our tea on the garden bench. Mrs T. caught some movement on the lawn that translated into a toad taking a leisurely stroll in full view from one end of our lawn to the other.

The evening's entertainment on television featured a recapitulation of the historical explosion of the Isle of Thera in the Mediterranean that lead to the rapid decline of the millenium old Minoan civilization. The facts were visualised by a parallel theatrical fiction, to give a human dimension to the immense volcanic explosion, the pyroclastic flows and Tsunami that followed. It brought back memories of an excellent book by Clive King, better known writing for Stig of the Dump. The children's novel “The 22 Letters” captured my imagination as a child and still resonates as an adult, with its weaving together of The Chaldeans, the Minoans, the Ancient Egyptions and the introduction of the first alphabet.

The second educational program of the evening was on the seas around the British shores and contained an item on the treatment of oil collected several decades ago after the Torry Canyon oil disaster and dumped in a Guernsey quarry. The new solution, initiated only last year, was to use bioremediation, that is, the use of micro-organisms to digest and remove the otherwise recalcitrant waste. Dealing with oils spills is still a current topic, ever since the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, so I was curious about further information on the micro-organisms involved and their efficacy.

On the latter, I could not get clear answers apart from that it was important, however, the following site gave a very detailed listing of marine micro-organisms that could be beneficial through their ability to digest oil and its intermediates: http://www.metamicrobe.com/petroleum-microbiology/oil-bioremediation-bacteria.html.

My own microbiological culture, the marine hay infusion, was showing first signs of turbidity today.