The Last Rose of Summer is a poem by Irish poet Thomas Moore in 1805 while at Jenkinstown Park in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Moore’s poem starts out ” ‘Tis the last rose of summer, Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions, Are faded and gone;” and this the wild rose has long faded and is gone from sight.
Wild roses bloom from June through late summer. The petals come in varying shades of pink, with yellow stamens decorating the flower’s center. The rose has been around for about 35 million years and grows naturally throughout North America. The petals and rose hips are edible and have been used in medicines since ancient times.
This old building looks worn and weathered just like everything else that is withering in the long stretch of heat. With the doors and windows in front, this might have been some kind of store. I wonder how many people passed through its doors to make purchases.
How a Sunday morning at church over the years would have seen different types of vehicles in the parking lot, from the horse and buggies in my grandmothers time to the current day cars and everything in between. And although the brands are familiar; like Rolls Royce, Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge, these cars have a different look than today’s vehicles.
A weekend didn’t mean the end of work for farmers and with the oats ripe, the day might be filled with the threshing crew to separate the oats from the stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. The invention of the thrashing machine or thresher eased the burden of farmers, from the small units to the large ones that often worked in tandem with the steam tractor.
Numerous belts and pulleys turned the gears and conveyors and if everything was working right, the oat kernels would be auger into a wagon and the stalks would be blown on the straw pile. I know I won’t want to be the one figuring out how to put all the belts on and on which pulleys. Or having my fingers any near them when turning!
This newly opened sunflower is smiling in the sunshine and many others are smiling because it is Friday and the weekend is near.
The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an annual plant native to the Americas. The earliest known examples in the United States of a fully domesticated sunflower have been found in Tennessee, and date to around 2300 BC.
What is usually called the “flower” on a mature sunflower is actually a “flower head” (also known as a “composite flower”) of numerous florets (small flowers) crowded together. The outer petal-bearing florets (ray florets) are sterile and can be yellow, red, orange, or other colors. The florets inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into seeds.
The flower petals within the sunflower’s cluster are always in a spiral pattern. Generally, each floret is oriented toward the next by approximately the golden angle, 137.5°, producing a pattern of interconnecting spirals, where the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. Typically, there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other; on a very large sunflower there could be 89 in one direction and 144 in the other. This pattern produces the most efficient packing of seeds within the flower head.
(And for those who haven’t had math class is a while, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …, where the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. And the sunflower uses 34 and 55 or 89 and 144.)
What a difference sitting in this old Ford car to a new Ford car. No SYNC, no MP3 or CD player, no cruise and all the other gauges. No bells and whistles in this car as it doesn’t even have a cup holder! The dash has the ignition key and the amp gauge and nothing else to clutter up this nice old car.
(And another old Chevy truck to enjoy too even if through the dirty window.)
