In a hasty attempt to appear more conventionally garden-focussed, allow me to call your attention to this eye-opening post at Gardening Gone Wild about plant nomenclature. Actually, the plant part was fascinating enough (and made me totally want to shell out $3 US for the Chiltern Seeds catalogue for what sounds like some terrifically entertaining prose), but what really caught my eye was the revelation that
Soils have names too, but the current system of soil taxonomy is a whole lot more straightforward than plant taxonomy. There are six levels: order, suborder, great group, subgroup, family, and series. Each one of these represents quite a lot of information, and a bit of each level goes into making up the name of any soil.
I did not know that! Handy timing, too, as I've just started reading Amy Stewart's book The Earth Moved, which has me thinking about the contents of the dirt below my feet. I've been looking forward to reading the book since I first learned about it, and I'm only on chapter one so I don't have much to report yet, but I certainly share Amy's provocative observations in the "prologue" :
... I realized that I understood very little about the plot of land under my own house. Do I even hold title to this ground twelve feet down? What about twenty, fifty, a hundred feet? .... Is this little piece of earth mine, all the way down to its red hot center? ... And who lives down there, under my house? ... Millions--no, billions--of organisms inhabit my little piece of land, and it shocks me to realize how little I know of them.
I've been thinking mainly about those unseen inhabitants, but I now realize that even the soil itself has a complex identity, one that reaches far beyond such categories as clay (that's me), sandy, and loam.
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3 comments:
Nice post! I guess music and planting would really come together perfectly. And oh, about the taxonomy of the soil, I hope you could post some good information about their differences. Thanks in advance!
Thanks for the compliment, Greenfingers! Alas, I don't have any info on soil taxonomy beyond what I found in that Gardening Gone Wild post--and I see you've read it, too, because you posted a comment there as well.
The only additional clue I can think of is found in the photo credit: the image Nan used comes from a book called Soils: Their Origin, Constitution and Classification by Gilbert Wooding Robinson, so I'm guessing that it would provide further discussion. Happy hunting!
Yeah, there are a few books on this. I really should read one, but my geekiness does not yet extend that far, sadly.
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