Friday Video: Bearded irises through time

I'm fascinated by how plants change through time in the hands of human breeders and gardeners. So I decided to make a little video to better visualize it. I went through the American Iris Society Wiki (http://wiki.irises.org/) and grabbed images of 189 varieties introduced in the last century, more or less distributed evenly across the decades. String them together in a video, and you can watch how breeders have modified bearded irises over the last 100 years. Most dramatically, the falls get shorter and rounder, and the petal edges get ever increasingly frilled and ruffled.

It is pretty cool, if you are a breeding nerd like me. I'm sure the flowers are getting bigger as well, though you can't see it in this video, since the flowers are not to scale. I'm also realizing that I think I like the mid-century varieties better than the super frilly modern ones. Which did you like best?

Spring 2011: The Official Theatrical Trailer

Happy Friday! I've got another video this week... Celebrating the arrival of spring, if it ever decides to actually get here.

Friday Music Video: Somebody Changed the Name

I had so much fun with my last music video that I had to do another one... This time it is a song of frustration about scientific names of plants that keep on changing... Enjoy!


BTW,I should add that I'm not serious at ALL here... as a plant breeder, I actually totally love better taxonomy -- name changes give us a much better idea of how plants are related and what might cross with what. But sometimes those new names ARE annoying to learn to spell and pronounce.

Friday Music Video!

No cartoon this week... Instead I made a music video. It is, as you might expect, rather awful -- my singing recorded on a $10 microphone generally used for skyping with the family, the video recorded with my regular point-and-shoot camera, and the audio is dreadfully out of sync with the video (tip: Don't change the lyrics AFTER you shoot the video...) BUT: it was fun. So now you have to listen to it. And like it.

This idea started in a conversation with The Soil Sisters in Buffalo last summer. The lyrics started with ideas from Jan (I think? I don't remember now) then changed significantly by me. My friend Rachel was videographer, and that's my incredibly sexy boy friend Jason playing the guitar shovel. If you aren't familiar with the original song, it is here.
As I said... it was lots of fun. Now I want to do Lady Gaga and Mika