If you start looking closely at plants there are always things that aren't plants. These are just the biggest and most obvious. Under a microscope there were a bunch more. All on a small part of one bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) in our yard. No ticks, though.

Beijing, on the morning of the first full day I spent in China, in 1998. Later that day, at the Xi'an airport, I met an early career scientist who I ended up collaborating with on more than 2 decades of research, highly productive of ideas and insights, not just publications, with lots of students.

Highest I see across the region. Waukesha County and Milwaukee sharing the worst air in the Midwest right now.

How high do these get?

Okay, will stay indoors

The plume has reached us in Madison. Also obvious just stepping outside.

This gradient in daily solar radiation corresponds fairly well with a gradient of air quality; they're getting much more smoke in the north than we are in Madison, but it's supposed to shift south. wisconet.wisc.edu/data/maps?se...

Drawings of timothy, probably by Agnes Chase, from Grasses of the United States.

Broken off part of the same inflorescence,and two of the little horned spikelets.

Wildly excessive closeup of timothy (Phleum pretense).

The old oaks include more than half of the trees visible in the center of this 1937 image. One of the busiest stretches of interstate highway now runs between them and the right side of the image. A gravel pit was later dug in the lower left corner, then abandoned, now overgrown.

Waiting for a contractor to come over, took a walk in the heat to see old and young oaks on the far east side of Madison. The old ones are in a pasture in 1937 air photos. Now surrounded by younger trees, between residential streets, a restored prairie, and I90/94/39. Constant roar from the highway.

Saw a bunch of grasses growing by an exit ramp yesterday. Got off the bus to look at them today, and was not disappointed though I had to walk almost a mile and a half home from there in the 95 degree heat

Southern Driftless Area, with deep gullies on steep slopes hidden by trees and then uncovered. Looks like the drainage areas of the gullies above the woods were taken out of crop production in the last 25 years, and from the road I didn't see evidence of recent erosion in the gullies.

Bottlebrush (Elymus hystrix). Bristly spikelets. My phone camera is not up to this. Just imagine it as it would look with a good macro lens.

Geological Society of America field trip guide, 1956. For me, the most interesting part is the background discussion for Trip 3 on the growing number of radiocarbon ages from the Two Creeks forest, glacial sediment across the Midwest, and sediment of Lake Agassiz. Already enough to stir things up!

Patchy snow on gopher mounds, and the UNL Gudmunsen Ranch early in the morning on the same trip. What a place.

Nebraska Educational Television crew filming us coring with a geoprobe in the northwestern Nebraska Sandhills in 2006, to reconstruct Late Holocene dune activity and climate change. Some footage and an interview from this cold and windy day is in a NET documentary called The Price of Water.

Leadplant farther along. This one struggled for a couple years, I transplanted to a new spot, and it's really enjoying life.

Leaves stuck in my dad's copy of Vegetation and Flora of the Sonoran Desert, by Shreve and Wiggins. The kind of thing English majors might end up doing, later in life. Or a geomorphologist.

A good place to see red osier dogwood, though this is the only photo of it I could find.

Goose Lake wildlife area, east of Madison. No, not this week.

Dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) leaves lit by the sun just as it rose above rhe hill behind our house yesterday.

Federal agencies had a major role in promoting stream channelization across the US, leading to dramatic stream incision, wetland drainage, and other negative environmental impacts. Rep. Henry Reuss of Wisconsin had a major role in bringing those impacts to light, including these hearings in 1971.

Not to be too pedantic...okay, to be too pedantic about it, the lines across Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are bothering me. They're not glacial limits, for the last glaciation (blue on my map) or earlier ones (red). They're not old-school physiographic boundaries like the ones in Appalachia.

Leadplant (Amorpha canescens), in our front yard and on the remnant prairie at Frenchman's Bluff, near Twin Valley in northwestern Minnesota.

I'm still kind of fascinated by the emergency water chilling equipment that was quickly moved onto the Madison campus after a major chilled water line broke. The white cubes are fuel tanks, some being used and some in reserve. Lots of buildings partial or no cooling, for up to a month.

Blue grama, Bouteloua gracilis. Really a grass of the western Plains, but planted some of this beautiful grass in the sunniest part of our yard.

Apparently there are fleets of portable water chillers on flatbeds, waiting to go into action when a 4 foot chilled water line fails on a big Midwestern campus in a heat wave.

Illinois rose (front yard) and bottlebrush with northern red oak (backyard).