This week I finally got back out in to the garden and went on my morning walks, getting as much from this summer as I possibly can. I went paddleboarding on Friday and saw a White-tailed Kite with its two babies, a Great Blue Heron, and two Turkey Vultures! Hope you had a lovely week, too.
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design
Very on topic for Portland this week is the redesign of our airport. People in Portland loooove PDX Airport. When they did a design change a few years ago and replaced the carpet, there was a public outcry about the removal the teal, 80's graphic carpet. Independent makers started getting scraps of it and making memorabilia. It was a whole thing.
But this year we got a gorgeous, newly designed terminal with over 5,000 plants, indoor trees, and some of the most stunning ceilings I've ever seen. They even brought back a patch of the iconic Portland carpet.
The ceilings are mass timber, and this material has had a surge of use in sustainable development recently because it's less carbon intensive to produce than cement or steel, smaller diameter trees can be used which helps thin out managed forests to better manage fire risks, and wood from diseased trees can be used for non-structural applications so there's less waste.
nature
Just as people are working to make buildings more sustainable, there are people working on hybridizing different foods both to protect the genetic diversity and longevity of our plants, and to alter the taste of our food. In a previous newsletter, I talked about how the most widely distributed commercial banana got wiped out in the 1950s, to be replaced with a different, and more robust strain.
What I learned from researching that article is that the plants we eat are constantly being evaluated, hybridized, and changed. So in the last few years when I started realizing the jalapeños we were getting weren't very spicy, I took to the internet and found that scientists have been breeding the spice out of jalapeños to make them more predictable.
Sixty percent of jalapeños go to producers for items like salsa. And if you're a producer making a mild, medium, and hot salsa, you want to be sure that your mild jalapeño is, in fact, mild. Because producers buy up over half of the produced jalapeños, they have a lot of sway within the industry. So when scientists figured out they could grow a low heat, high flavor pepper, the producers preferred to get that and add capsaicin (the compound that makes peppers hot), on their own. That way it's controlled.
So if you're like me and want a spicier variety, a bit of small scale pepper farming might be in your future.
reimagine
Since this week's been about different ways to use plants, I want to highlight Carly Rogers Flowers, who does floral installations and botanical sculptures at museums and events like the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK. Her work mixes a little bit of the ethereal into the reality.
