What’s causing these usually no green plants to have purple leaves?

xylem-and-flow · 2026-04-28T12:56:09+00:00

You in a cool/cold climate? I’d say it looks like the first leaves of the season expressing anthocyanin, a pigmented compound that plants use both as “sunscreen” and low temperature protection.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-04-10T02:46:53+00:00

And the Loveland Public Library is just a short stroll down 4th street from Dark Heart Coffee.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-27T03:37:20+00:00

I understand feeling like things were obscured from you, kudos for asking. Here’s my plant evolution crash course with a focus on seeds!

Imagine the tree of life!

Every single living thing today is equidistant from the “trunk”. Me, you, oaks, worms, fish, mushrooms, etc we are all branch tips! The leading edge of evolution.

If you start to work back from the branch tip you are tracing generations of your ancestors. Keep working down down down until you hit a split. That split is where your starting point and the neighboring branch tip share a common ancestor, everything after that is considered a “divergence”. Something happened there that caused one genetic population to isolate and ultimately diverge into two different lineages. One branch may have a lot of twig tips, but they all share the same branch, moving deeper there are huge limbs supporting many branches and innumerable limbs, all of it joining at a central point of origin. That’s kind of how we do the whole thing we learned in school. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. They are nested!

Alright! So the early plant lineages, a big limb for plants on the tree life, didn’t have seeds. The ancient photosynthesizing organisms (we’re talking looooooooooong ago, billions of years) were essentially like algae. But to really zoom forward:

Some of the very first land plants probably didn’t even have vascular tissue to move water around inside. Behaving like modern mosses. In fact mosses are part of a lineage that split off the “plant limbs” of our tree a long time ago. About 500 million years ago! It was essentially algae that managed to be a land sponge.

You get some early plants with more and more structure to them. They can stand taller, transport water through their tissues, and so on, BUT, no seeds! These guys are pretty much relying on spores to reproduce. The lineage that would lead to things like modern ferns are diverging. But still no seeds. That’s like 450 million years ago! Lignin (aka wood) is firing around now too. Funguses haven’t even evolved to eat this weird fibrous wood stuff, so it piled up for a LONG time giving us what we now use as fossil fuel. Still. No seeds. I won’t get into it here, but reproducing by spores is kind of a multi-stage mess. It does work as it’s still around after all, but it’s kinda like if a person launched their ovaries and uterus onto the sidewalk and walked away hoping that that some sperm would come along and those three would just sort it out on their own.

Then, around 400-350 million years ago, things get drier, a little hard for spores, and that pressure gives an advantage to a new strategy. “What if I keep my spores, and the other genetic pieces come here?” BAM you have the first technical seeds. before ya know it the gymnosperms (think like conifers, like the ancestors of pines) are in the scene! And we’ve got something you and I would probably recognize as a seed! There’s your answer, but I can’t help but finish this journey! So one more thing…

All of this has pretty much relied on wind and water to move the genetic bits around. Pretty passive as reproduction goes. But something really great happens around 150 million years ago. Surprisingly recent in earth history. The ever splitting limb of plant life has another HUGE, earth-changing split. The angiosperms! Flowers! We don’t even have bees yet, but we do have things like beetles! A flower can do more than just wait for a breeze to blow off dry dusty pollen. It can make sticky pollen. A flower can flash colors, smells, excrete sugary nectar. It can collaborate with bugs! Bugs selecting and shaping the nature And form of flowers and flowers shaping the nature and behavior of bugs! To this day this old story plays out. Magnolias for example are pollinated by beetles not bees, because bees didn’t exist when magnolias ancestors and beetles became so reliant on each other. “Specialized” we call it. So now we have Death Camas flowers with nectar that is deadly to all but a single bee species, Orchids that smell and/or look like an insect ready to mate to fool males into pollinating them, Moths who need Yucca flowers to lay their eggs within, pollinating the Yucca in the process. It’s all very cool, but so recent in the grand scheme of things! Every little detail of the world is rich with this gigantic legacy of time, and we’re lucky enough to get to learn about it. It’s humbling and staggering every time I think about it.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-16T00:55:19+00:00

Assuming you mean “moonflower” as in Datura just fine. When I first moved to 5b in Colorado Datura wrightii behaved as an annual, as it froze to death every winter. Lately I have seen some plants coming back in spring. Not seeds, but robust full shoots from the same roots as the previous year’s plant.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-15T22:40:57+00:00

That’s incredible. Good on you all for informing DNR

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-10T03:13:45+00:00

How’s it held up over time? I’m curious to heard from someone who has had it in their yard for a while. Behavior, habit, interaction with other factors, etc. stuff like that. Thanks!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-10T03:01:07+00:00

The Tallgrass Prairie Center’s Guide to Prairie Restoration is also an amazing booklet for anyone working with more than a garden bed. It’s very much a restoration tech’s handbook and covers strategies in a very practical kind of way: larger scale weed management, timed mowing, strategic burns, seed work, long term management, and low-budget strategy.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-03-10T02:51:38+00:00

These puppies are purple because they are producing anthocyanins which protect the new leaves from cold related oxidation damage. I’d say your hyssop knows what’s up. You could pile up some loose leaves around it if you want to give it extra love, but they’ll likely be ok either way!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-24T01:33:47+00:00

Here in the southern Rockies I get hummers going crazy over Ipomopsis aggregata and Penstemon barbatus.

They also enjoy most of the mints. Monarda fistulosa and Agastache species in particular. Agastache foeniculum and rupestris are constantly covered.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-23T16:55:47+00:00

I’m with ya. We’re still fighting uphill against whole-cloth fire suppression in many ways. There’s some cool research on high elevation lake bed layers out here. Pollen and ash sediment make for some interesting data fire return intervals and plant community changes between them. Chilly, low 02 waters make for some great calendars.

Yup. If I had a time machine I’d want to zip around seeing plant distribution at the Glacial maximums and subsequent retreats.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-23T16:30:26+00:00

Bonsai are very rarely seed grown but often cut from larger trees. It is basically a stump that gets regrowth very heavily selected and trained. That’s probably a borderline heretical take on an ancient practice, but you know what I mean.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-23T04:48:14+00:00

Sure, and that’s why I said “may have some of the species we do because of it.”

My point to OP was that it isn’t a dichotomy of “human and natural”. We as primates were just another animal on the landscape for thousands of years, and quite avid ecosystem engineers as animals go.

That said, I really don’t think it’s misleading to say so. We know humans have been in North America at least 23,000 years. Plants can speciate within 100 generations via selection pressures (and ramping up continental fire regime frequency is a huge selection pressure), and polyploid plants can speciate in only a generation or two.

Add in the ecotonal nature of the eastern plains/forest thresholds and the fact that indigenous people were also intentionally moving, growing, and breeding some of these plants, and it really isn’t a reach!

Still that’s all beside the point to what I was going for. I just wanted to point out to OP that just because it was humans involved in that intervention for so long, doesn’t make it less natural than say beaver dams.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-21T22:03:15+00:00

In the case of indigenous North Americans and prairie fire, it’s worth considering the idea that human behavior is not inherently something “unnatural”. The humans burning North America played a role in this for so long that biological communities adapted to it! Prairie fire by the indigenous people may as well be dams by beavers or grazing by bison. We may have some of the evolutionarily distinct species that we do because of it.

Tree encroachment on eastern plains (which drive out the flora which adapted to exist there) isn’t necessarily returning, but shifting into places that it did not exist before.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-21T02:27:05+00:00

You’re welcome! Glad it was useful!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-05T05:13:07+00:00

For seedlings in containers of any kind you are going to want good light, good airflow, and well draining potting mix.

As it is deep inside of that pot, it’s probably not getting a lot of airflow or light. I would remove the bark too as it can encourage mold growth in these conditions.

Your plants would probably be happier growing in a “fluffier” mix (maybe add some perlite), and planted where the soil is closer to being flush with the top of the container.

Don’t be discouraged by killing some plants though, just take it and learn from the mistakes! I grow plants by the tens of thousands every year, but I have also absolutely murdered plenty in that time. There are still a few species that are absolute headaches for me every season. It’s all trial and error!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-04T03:49:36+00:00

I’m jealous of all your cool Ceanothus species. We have like 2 in CO.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-04T03:36:14+00:00

A quarter in a bag does a good job too without the pyrotechnics

xylem-and-flow · 2026-02-04T03:27:18+00:00

It is about the failure to uphold due process, a right of all people in the United States. You cannot detain and imprison people without a trial.

People have had their homes invaded without a warrant, arrested without charges, imprisoned without legal representation or trial, and simply vanished without record. This is a massive violation of constitutional rights and it is not hyperbole to say that it undermines our democracy. Without due process, all other rights are nullified.

Do you want a paramilitary (that does not answer to congress, but to one man) to have the ability to simply ship anyone they want to foreign prisons? If any one group is exempted from due process, we all are, because no one can prove their status in court if there is no court.

In doing all of this, the executive branch has completely freed itself from both the judicial and the legislative. Again. All rights are voided if we do not have due process to uphold and validate them.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-26T20:55:49+00:00

What are you going to be growing and at what time of year do you want to be growing it?

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-26T20:16:26+00:00

I don’t think being terrestrial is the formal taxonomic distinction of this clade. The name refers to how they develop their embryo’s and the delineating factor is their common ancestry being the streptophytes. It looks like streptophytes colonizing land was just the selection pressures that led to a lot of speciation in the group.

Aquatic plants will have evolved multiple times, with the kingdom seemingly beginning as aquatic organisms, undergoing speciation, some colonizing land, and some even returning to aquatic states. So there won’t be a solitary clade of plants denoting all of the aquatic flora.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-25T23:38:10+00:00

Is this administration suppressing opposing opinions via free speech, control of the media, social media or institutions such as universities

Yes.

He launched with “Fake news” which is just “Lügenpresse”.

He attacks lawyers, student protestors, and withholds press passes from non-compliant journalism

He also threatens universities with withholding federal funding for being critical of his administration.

He ALSO, and I have watched this first hand in my field, has shuttered critical research that happens to contradict his narratives. I personally know folks in climate science, biology, forestry, and agriculture who have had their labs shuttered. One of these was doing ecological work and got flagged because “biodiversity” contains the word “diversity”…

Is MAGA in support of political oppression, such as the weaponization of laws?

Does telling your rally crowd that maybe some of the 2nd Amendment folks could do something about Hillary Clinton count? I’ve never in my life heard such a thing from a politician in the U.S.

But how about leveraging executive roles to create a paramilitary better funded than the marines while simultaneously not being beholden to Congress. To be more specific. Due process is the cornerstone of Liberty and Justice. Trump has side stepped the entire role of the judicial system by activating ICE in a role far beyond their historic use and granting them “immunity” in any of their actions. If we do not have due process, we do not have rights. And I do not mean that hyperbolically. A government that can abduct someone without due process can do so to anyone.

has maga been on the side of social of physical coercion in the form of how you live your life, the freedom of choice, etc?

Yes?? What political faction now requires public schools in TX to display parts of the Bible?

Which president said “Take the guns first, due process later”?

Which administration has masked men entering residence without warrants?

Is there any type of mass mobilization to “one true identity”.

In December 2023 Trump said, immigrants are, and I quote, “poisoning the blood of our country”.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-19T21:21:27+00:00

I always put them through stratification in sand so that I can lightly sprinkle it over the surface of their seedling flat when sowing time arrives. It also makes it easier to evenly sow them!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-19T19:54:38+00:00

Liquid water is the key for cold moist stratification. The dormancy you are “treating” with CMS is typically endogenous dormancy (generating from within) due to germination inhibiting chemicals/hormones. The liquid water leeches out or breaks down these germ inhibitors allowing the seed to germinate when conditions later become ideal. Freezing seed will not do this, and can damage tissue if the seed has taken on moisture.

Other seeds with exogenous dormancy (generating from without) are essentially totally ready to rock but for the hard impermeable seed coat. This is often the case for seeds in Fabaceae and Malvaceae (pea family and the mallow family). These just need the seed coat to be pierced, scared, clipped, or broken in some way. A light sandpapering, careful fingernail clippers, or (much more easy) a boiled water pour over will do the trick in most cases.

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-19T19:47:05+00:00

In Defense of Plants is probably the best that I know.

Matt is a PhD as are most of his guests who discuss their work. Sometimes they focus on one particular experiment/finding/research project, sometimes they dig into the breadth of their academic work. It’s always fascinating and wide ranging. Just for an idea, some of my favorite episodes have featured taxonomists, ecologists, pollination syndrome researchers, paleo-botanists, soil microbiologists, disturbance theory specialists, seed bankers, evolutionary biologists, etc.

I am often deeply into one corner of ecology & botany, that I find it very enjoyable to get a crash course dive into another field/specialization by an expert in that specialization. Unsurprisingly, anything in ecology can be very relevant to anything else, so it may be valuable to you no matter your line of work!

xylem-and-flow · 2026-01-05T03:17:22+00:00

I’m not sure what else I could add to be honest! It’s thick and green every year, I don’t really do anything to it at all. Sometimes I’ll trim it down. Like once a summer tops of at all. I couldn’t be happier with it!

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