October 4

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Tomato on the vine.  In October.

Jet trails, in an otherwise clear blue sky.

Ornamental grass.

Just a few of what were tons of teeny tiny mushrooms.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  I'm guessing there used to be a BIG tree right here, which is currently being memorialized by multitudes of minuscule mushrooms.

Switching to the "all maple, all the time" channel.

Small.

Bigger.

Print on the sidewalk.  There are tons of maple-leaf prints on the sidewalks in my neighborhood just now, but rarely do you see a complete print of the leaf, including the petiole (leaf stalk, on a dicotyledonous plant).

I just finished a short MOOC (massive online open class) on plant biology -- Understanding Plants - Part II: Fundamentals of Plant Biology  I already knew that flowering plants are divided into monocotyledons and dicotyledons, and that monocots like corn have one seed leaf and parallel veins in the leaves, while dicots like maples have two seed leaves, and the veins in the leaves form a network.

I did not know before taking this class that monocot leaves wrap around the stems, rather than having petioles as dicots do, nor that the number of petals in a flower tend to be multiples of 3 in monocots, but 4 or 5 in dicots.

I also learned a lot about plant growth (cell division and differentiation....).

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