Big River Flower Shops

Big River NB News

Jul 6, 2018

The fleeting but spectacular bloom of Alabama's lotus

The lotus grows in great beds, some a quarter of a mile long, that hug bends in the big rivers. You'll find smaller patches in quiet waters, such as the cove in Meaher Park by the boat ramp. But it is the broad lotus meadows along the Tensaw River that I recommend for anyone wanting to feel the great flower's spell. Rounding Tensaw Point, for instance, coming out of the Blakeley River, thousands of lotus blossoms wave above a carpet of deep green pads. Now, if the word pad conjures an image of the classic lily pad floating on the water's surface, think again, for the leaves of the lotus are almost as remarkable as the magnificent flowers. The lotus pads stand nearly 2 feet above the water on stout stalks, which support the leaves, great green bowls of foliage that look velvety to the touch and repel water better than any fabric man has yet invented. The flowers rise a foot taller than the pads, making for a striking display. That display has captivated humans for eons, and you can see it in art dating back thousands of years. Most of those images would be of the Asian lotus, which is identical to our American lotus, save for the colors of the blossoms. Where our's sport yellow petals, the Asian variety features a pale pink flower. You can see lotus on the walls of the Egyptian pyramids, and the crowns of the columns at Luxor, and you can see them in ancient Chinese, Indian and Japanese paintings. In Tokyo, Japan, where the pink lotus make a famous and showy display in a pond in a city park, residents claim that the flowers open with an audible pop. Closer to home, our native species caug...

Sep 8, 2017

Refuge Notebook: How invasive plants invade the landscape

What’s troubling is that en route to the Brooks Range, the highway (and sweetclover) intersects some big river basins on both sides of the Alaska Range: Susitna, Nenana, Yukon, Kanuti and Koyukuk. Sweetclover seeds not only float well, but they prefer disturbed soils like those found on stream gravel bars, and so this becomes the means or vector by which this invasive plant can disperse across the landscape. In 2008, University of Alaska researchers fed sweetclover seeds to moose held captive at the Matanuska Experiment Farm in Palmer. Turns out that sweetclover seeds pass readily through the digestive systems of moose (and cattle) intact and so can be carried inland, away from streams or roads. This is how sweetclover spread from its initial introduction on a farm to roads to streams and finally elsewhere through wildlife.I was stewing about this dispersal chain as I drove over the Brooks Range and down onto the North Slope. The high Arctic is arguably the uber frontier in Alaska, a state often billed as the Last Frontier. Here, the flora are native and the ecosystems are natural. Yet, as the Dalton Highway swings towards the Sag River, 50 miles north of Atigun Pass, I spied a patch of bluish-purple flowers growing on a “restored” right-of-way that paralleled the road. Turns out these were the blooms of Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense), another Old World invasive also introduced to North America in the 1600s, probably as a contaminant in crop seed or ship ballast. Because it is not palatable to most livestock, Creeping Thistle is formally listed by several states, including Alaska, as a noxious weed. In fact, Creeping Thistle can be so problematic that control legislation was enacted as early as 1795 in Vermont and 1831 in New York. So how did it get there? The northern-most infestation previously found in Alaska was at Steve... (Kenai Peninsula Online)