I’ve mentioned this before, but it constantly surprises me when yellow continues to be yellow in UV. I have to imagine that there’s something weird with either the visible light filter or the sensor in the modified camera. Whatever causes it, though, I like the effect.

The monkey puzzle tree is so-named because in 1850, barrister Benthamist Charles Austin saw one and said “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that.”

Yes. The truth is really that boring.

Welcome to English botany.

I wonder if any psychology studies exist around biased selection of flowers for “loves me / loves me not” decisioning. I would be unsurprised to learn that our brains pick out odd- or even-numbered petal counts based on the end result we desire.

There is a story about how having a common language helped humans to work together, achieving anything they imagined. The common belief is that the threat of these achievements caused their downfall. This is untrue.

It was really the comment sections.

Unlike the IR and visible range, normal camera sensors aren’t super sensitive to ultraviolet light. Additionally, glass blocks (most) UV, so you need a special lens to gather the light and focus it on the sensor. This results in a situation where you are always shooting at a higher ISO and smaller aperture than you would select for more standard photography, as well as working with a much smaller colour palette.

So, in a lot of cases, if you don’t have a dedicated UV studio (which I do not), you wind up with a grainy, tinted monochrome look.

I think it works though.

This chir pine thought audition went extremely well but due to a typo by central casting, someone else was awarded the role of Steve Trevor.

In universe 614, Peter Parker got bit by a spider that was only γ radioactive, on a wavelength of 10-400 nm, and gained the proportional power of glowing at raves.

Plants spend most of their time baffled over the presence of a species that spends the majority their intelligence inventing technologies to both destroy themselves and to thoroughly understand and document how bad the period leading up to the widespread devastation will be.

This plant wanted to be a Communications major at Hogwarts, only to learn (unsurprisingly) that no one at the school had any interest in clear and concise communication.

This plant then transferred Beauxbatons where, due to their lack of focus on defense techniques, was cursed into his present form in his last year.

I originally got the UV lens to look at birds and maybe lizards, but it turns out to be more useful for flowers. There are many reasons for this, primarily that animal-made UV reflective pigments seem to break down too fast to be biologically useful and UV refractive feather structures seem to be more rare than expected. UV is used in the animal kingdom, but it’s mostly through UV fluorescence into the visible spectrum – so, while it’s not quite a failed experiment, it is a camera and lens combo that is more useful for plants.

Here we can see that one side of a flower petal is more reflective than the other, likely because the flower forms with the more reflective side on the inside of the bud, likely so that the reflective pigments are only exposed once the flower is mature.

And here’s the inside of a greenhouse. While I was there, they had an aerialist performing in the center. Apparently Londoners need more than just plants to want to fill a greenhouse on a hot day.

The Kew greenhouses look interesting in IR

Wood’s cycad, like the vine yesterday, is very rare. Originally, there was a single plant found in oNgoye, South Africa, in 1895. That plant has since died, and all twelve living plants in the world are clones of that one and are housed exclusively in botanical gardens.

When I traveled to London last year, I was exhausted from the flight and made the questionable decision to visit the Kew Gardens with only an infrared and an ultraviolet camera. So I hope you like weird looking plants, ’cause that’s what I’ll be posting for the next several weeks.

This is the Three Kings vine – a vine discovered in New Zealand in 1945, from a single solitary plant. All the other members of this species are believed to have been eaten by goats. No other such vines have been discovered in the wild.

Today, you can see it at Kew as well as in some gardens throughout New Zealand that, presumably, lack goats.