Late bloomers and multicolored fruit

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Mid-October isn’t a season of riotous color in the meadow and woodland. It should be, with autumn leaves ablaze. But due to the "unusual" weather the trees are being conservative so far. So we have to be satisfied with a sparkle here and a glint there, mostly in flowers and fruits. The Evening Primrose persists in showing off, while little white unidentifiable (at least by me) asters hang on. But where flowers fail, the fruits of various plants offer some color, some vibrant, others subtle.

Fruits designed to attract birds as their seed dispersal agents are usually colorful, while wind-dispersed seeds tend toward brown. Why should they spend energy producing colorful pigments? Wind is blind. So apples, moonseeds and rose hips do serious organic chemistry, while Japanese Knotweed, Milkweed and Joe-Pye-weed just stick with brown or white. They pour their energy into making wings, parachutes and other paraphernalia that catch the wind and carry their babies (seeds) far and wide.

If you want to enter into a whole new world, that of botanical terminology (not recommended for the faint of heart), take a look at the classification of fruits. Is it fleshy or dry? Dehiscent or indehiscent? A pome, drupe, berry, hesperidium, pepo, multiple, aggregate, capsule, pod, achene, samara? And on it goes, all to the delight (or possibly despair) of every botany student.

But why should we worry about the technical jargon? The birds don’t care—they just eat. And the wind doesn’t care—it just wafts. So if the intricacies interest you, indulge yourself. Just don’t let the daedal lexicon interfere with your appreciation of the Creator’s wonderful engineering that enables the integration of all living elements of the biosphere, as well as wind, water and soil, into a system that keeps going and going, season after season, year after year.

Even as we appreciate the complexities and mechanisms of the biosphere, we must not fall into one or both of two traps: naturalism and/or deism. Not only is the living world inexplicable without the existence of an Intelligent Designer; it is also unthinkable that it is self-sustaining.(Genesis 1 : Colossians 1:15-17).

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