Cayuta Lake is a relatively small lake tucked into the hills of Schuyler County in a region that is either the top of the Southern Tier or the southern edge of the Finger Lakes. The lake covers 588 acres, is two miles long and has a maximum depth of 24 feet. The shoreline is largely [...]
Archive for the ‘As Landscape’ Category
Dating With Lichens
Posted in As Landscape, As Object, tagged lichen, moraines, tombstones on March 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A visit to an old graveyard, particularly one that has not been cared for, will generally reveal tombstones covered in lichens. Lichens are composite organisms; they are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a green alga (or a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides the physical infrastructure and the algae do photosynthetic duty to supply sugars. [...]
Why Plants Are Where They Are
Posted in As Landscape, tagged biogeography, climax, succession on March 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Why are there different plants in different places? If you revisit a place decades later, will the same plants still be there, only having grown larger? How do plants get where they are? All of these questions (and more) are asked by plant biogeographers. Many students of biology who pursue the subject in school out [...]
The Plant Succession Debate
Posted in As Landscape, tagged Clement, Gleason, pollen, succession on March 15, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The ecologist community of the 20th century divided over the nature of plant succession on both an ecological and a geological timescale. During the last glacial advance of the Pleistocene Epoch ice sheets covered nearly all of Canada and the northern third (more or less) of the United States. Beginning approximately 18,000 years ago, these [...]
Making a Meadow
Posted in As Landscape, tagged Meadow, wildflowers on September 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
My wife and I have a bed and breakfast in a small upstate New York village. She is trained in horticulture and landscape architecture and decided that we should convert part of our lawn into a “meadow garden.” Part of the motivation was to create a supply of cut flowers for the morning breakfast table [...]
The Lungs of the City
Posted in As Landscape on March 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The urban parks designed and built by Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm were described as the “lungs of the city” and as “public pleasure grounds.” Olmsted completed Central Park, his first project, in 1873, having begun it in 1857. One of his last park designs was Jackson Park in Chicago, which was constructed in [...]
