What your mom {probably} never told you about mulberry plants is that you can get high from ingesting the white sap in all parts of the plant except the ripe fruit.
Mulberries – Red, Black & White – WARNING: Do not eat the unripe fruit and leaves because they may be mildly hallucinogenic. Ripened fruits are very edible.
Native American Medicine: Alabama [Indians] infused roots and drank as a stimulant for increased energy.
Unripe fruit and green parts of the plant have a white sap that is intoxicating and mildly hallucinogenic.
This weekend was so good, even though I left my laptop’s power supply at the office, and spent only 1hr online on Friday evening! Pity I couldn’t blog, but it was a good weekend with NO time online
We went for a “hike” to the Wonderboom Fort, cave & waterfall yesterday. Can’t really be classified as a proper hike since the paths are “built” all the way up the mountain, though it was still good exercise for those of us who don’t hike that often. We have been to the fort a couple of times before, but this was the first time we went to the cave, waterfall and the fort.
Click on the image below to view the album, with subscripts on each photo when you hover over it with your cursor.
I also searched for information around this fort, and the other four which were built around the same time in Pretoria. Have a look at the Wikipedia article if you are interested.
Every two years people can admire the carpet of flowers on the Grand Place in Brussels . This year, 700,000 begonias form the largest tapestry of a Savonnerie carpet in the world: a tribute to the French presidency of the European Union.
Since 1971, it is the 16th carpet of flowers on the Grand Place in Brussels . In recent years, the flower carpet has become one of the biggest attractions of Brussels . This year, the flower carpet designed by floral architect Mark Schautteet is inspired by the tapestry of the French Savonnerie, which dates from the 17th century. 700,000 begonias form a colourfum motif on which appears the patron saint Saint-Michel and the iris of the Brussels Region. One hundred volunteers have brought flowers on the Grand Place. For the floral carpet of flowers to be perfect, the design is fully represented in size on a transparent plastic perforated to create a micro-humid climate which must keep flowers fresh and colorful. The official opening will be accompanied by music created specially for the occasion by the composer Gregory Dune.
I would even consider taking a holiday in Brussels just to see this amazing floral expo – if only the flights were cheaper!
The classical natural wonders are huge and hard to miss – vast canyons, giant mountains and the like. Many of the most fantastic natural phenomena, however, are also least easy to spot. Some are incredibly rare while others are located in hard-to-reach parts of the planet. From moving rocks to mammatus clouds and red tides to fire rainbows, here are seven of the most spectacular phenomenal wonders of the natural world.
SAILING STONES
The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades. Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.
COLUMNAR BASALT
When a thick lava flow cools it contracts vertically but cracks perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity – in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions that almost appear to be made by man. One of the most famous such examples is the Giant’s Causeway on the coast of Ireland (shown above) though the largest and most widely recognized would be Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water.
BLUE HOLES
Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation – leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths.
RED TIDES
Red tides are also known as algal blooms – sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean or beach into a blood red color. While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals. In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides though no human exposure are known to have been fatal. While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are not harmful in small numbers.
ICE CIRCLES
While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation, other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups at different sizes as shown above.
MAMMATUS CLOUDS
True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers – appearing around, before or even after severe weather.
FIRE RAINBOWS
A circumhorizontal arc (properly a circumhorizon arc and never the recent uninformed and misleading term ‘fire rainbow’) is an optical phenomenon. It is not a rainbow, it is an ice-halo formed by ice crystals in high level cirrus clouds.
The complete halo is a huge and beautiful multi-coloured band running parallel to the horizon with its center beneath the sun. The distance below the sun is twice as far as the common 22-degree halo. Red is the uppermost colour. Often, when the halo forming cloud is small or patchy, only fragments of the arc are seen.
There is a myth that the halo is rare. How often it is seen depends on location and in particular latitude. In the United States it is a relatively common halo seen several times each summer in any one place. In contrast, it is rare in mid-latitude and northern Europe.
