At the Yellow-and-Red Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

"In celebration of the 100th anniversary of ecologist John T. Curtis' birth on Sept. 20, 1913..."

"... we share some moments from a recent early morning spent exploring Curtis Prairie at the UW-Madison Arboretum."

Today is the 19th, of course, but the idea of the linked photo essay is to inspire you to plan to visit Curtis Prairie tomorrow. (There's also this on Saturday.)

For old posts of mine featuring Curtis Prairie, see "A prairie walk" and "A prairie reverie."

At the Garlic Harvest Café...

... get to the root.

At the Movingly Succulent Café...

... please settle down.

(Motion added to my image by Chip Ahoy, who explains it here.)

At Succulent Café...

... any juicy stories?

At the Late Afternoon Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

At the Confetti Café...

... it's a swirling mass of whatever you want to talk about.

At the Green Waterfall Café...

... settle in.

At the Omorika Café...

... you can talk all night.

Just another rainy Tuesday.

At the Lungwort Café...

... splatter your words.

At the Sunlit Café...

... you can talk all afternoon.

At the Hosta Hotel...

... it's not too early to settle in for the night.

Plantsportation.

Things we got today, at The Flower Factory.

"Mosses Make Two Different Plants From the Same Genome..."

"... and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference."

[W]hat if, immediately after sex, meiosis was postponed, and a multicellular diploid organism grew as it does in animals. But then, instead of making haploid eggs and sperm that must fuse to form another diploid organism, the diploid creature made a haploid reproductive cell called a spore that simply grows asexually into a multicellular haploid organism? When mature, this haploid multicellular organism would then make eggs and sperm by mitosis (instead of meiosis, as in our ovaries and testes), and voila! The circle of life is complete.

Via Metafilter, where the question is asked: "Astonishing secret or dry old factoid freshman level biology professors tell a classroom of kids who aren't listening?"

At the Bloodroot Café...

... you can talk all night.

Genetically engineering trees so they will glow in the dark and replace street lights.

Research by "a small group of hobbyist scientists," funded through Kickstarter.

What a dilemma for environmentalists! All the fossil-fuel burning that could be averted, and yet.... Frankenstein!

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site....

At the Trout Lily Café...

... there's a new golden tinge to the brown-gray forest floor.

"The pollen piece looks like a yellow painting... but it’s much, much more."

"It’s not a yellow pigment, which is very important for me. It’s the potential beginning of millions of plants. It’s the semen for the plants. And this I was interested in. It has an appearance, maybe, like a painting, but the sun is not a round ball. It’s much, much more. The sky is not a blue painting. For me, these things were somehow very important. I would have stayed as a doctor, if art was only about this color or that color."

At the Sunroom Café...

... we can wait out the winter.