26 Comments
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Murray Foster's avatar

Well done Diane. I particularly like your microscopy efforts that being a particular interest area of mine. Would you care to share information about your techniques?

Diane Porter's avatar

Thank you Murray.

I use a Leica dissecting microscope: EZ4 W. Because the depth of focus is very shallow, for most pix I hand focus a series of shots at varying distance and then photostack them in Photoshop. Is there anything else I can tell you about?

Murray Foster's avatar

Neat! Does Photoshop have the ability to perform deconvolution in it's stacking algorithm?

Diane Porter's avatar

I don't know what deconvolution is.

Diane Porter's avatar

I'll check it out. Thanks.

Murray Foster's avatar

Another program that you may want to consider to do your stacking is Zerene Stacker by zerenesystems.com. It is free to try and the author is very supportive.

Laura Belin's avatar

Belatedly commenting: I agree with Lora, a fascinating article! If you are willing, I would be honored to publish this at Bleeding Heartland.

Diane Porter's avatar

Thank you Laura. I'd be very pleased if you did that.

Lora Conrad's avatar

A fascinating article. I learned a lot. Appreciate your microscope detailed views especially.

Carmine Hazelwood's avatar

Thank you for spotlighting this golden being and telling us its ways. Lovely. xo

Diane Porter's avatar

I appreciate your taking the time to make that comment, Carmine. Very satisfying to me.

Cathy R. Payne's avatar

Great information, Diane! I have this plant flourishing and spreading in my rain garden and shade garden. I love it! I didn't notice the fertile frond until this year when I stumbled in it a couple weeks ago. I looked it up to confirm what I saw then. I'm in the piedmont area of northeast Georgia. It's a lovely little fern!

Diane Porter's avatar

How delightful to discover a fellow admirer of grape ferns! I'm pretty impressed that you have this fern in a garden. I haven't ever seen them for sale from nurseries. Did it predate the garden, or maybe did you transplant it from a nearby source, or did nature herself plant it there for you?

Thanks for sharing!

Mary Dansak's avatar

Fascinating. Thank you.

Juliet Wilson's avatar

I studied the ferns around Edinburgh as an honours project for my undergraduate degree, so I'm delighted to find out about this beautiful fern.

Diane Porter's avatar

How fine a thing it must be to study ferns around Edinburgh. Well, around anywhere — but Edinburgh must have a magnificent array! Thank you for commenting.

Juliet Wilson's avatar

We do have a lovely selection of ferns in and around Edinburgh and across Scotland. I very much enjoyed my honours project!

Moni's avatar

Fascinating information!! Thank you Diane for sharing and doing the research, so we all learn!! Your posts are enjoyable to read! What a fun way to learn about our amazing natural world we share with so many plants and critters!

Patty Matherly Dolllive's avatar

Thank you! Thorough, and as always brilliant exegesis on something so tiny one could easily have missed it. Keep on informing us!

Diane Porter's avatar

Thank you Patti. Ah, the Coulter Pines we lived under, those many decades ago. And we were young. I didn't even know yet what I would come to care most about at the other end of life. Did you?

Gary Spangler's avatar

Your post, Diane, was remarkable! I’d like to pose a question. I take images of fungi that grow near my home in north FL. Armed with my IPhone 15 Pro Max, I recently captured a few images. On returning home I checked Siri’s ID of them. Zero. Nada. Not a single attempt. As Siri brokers input to Apple’s AI building efforts I expected better. Is the bottleneck just the vastness of the Fungi Kingdom, compared with the Animal and Plant Kingdoms? I would think the opposite.

Thanks ever so much, Diane.

Diane Porter's avatar

I suspect the science is far behind birds, insects, and wildflowers. It's hard to find any information, let alone consistent information. But there are some Facebook groups that focus on fungi.