Ray's Thought for the Day - Spurges

There are a great many spurges. Most of them, you can eat once. After you eat one, generally you will purge yourself thoroughly. Then, if you were a glutton, you may turn up, sincerely dead.

Spurge is associated with two other spells then, purge and expurgate. Another spell that falls in with spurge, is splurge, maybe.

The spurges that have milky sap are quite diverse in these parts. Most are small plants, compared to trees, but bigger than Arenaria serpyllifolia, although a few of the littlest ones do rival pearl sandwort in diminutiveness. The best time to go looking for spurges in these parts is summertime and fall before frost.

Many of the Druidry in these parts have been queried on the subtopic, spurges. Generally, what the ignorant and vulgar want to know is, "Whut er they good fer?"

This is an easy question to answer. Spell,

Spurges have a very great entertainment value. Ha! Ha!

Ted's ASS idea motivated me, Ray to actually go to the cabinets this morning and extract the cached spurge sheets. We have a good many spurge sheets, which are newspaper pages with spurges pressed flat inside. Not all of them have any seeds, but a great many of them do, have seeds. I also noted that some little beetle or vermin of one sort or another has got in the sheets and selectively et up all the "snow on the whatever"* specimens. He, she, it, even et up the newspaper the stems were pressed up against. Either that, or a chemical reaction occurred due to the no doubt complex excretory enzymes produced by a vermin capable of consuming latex. (Dang, I wonder if those vermin might eat up the shiver preventers).

See how interesting, are the spurges!

In any event, anon, Crumby is fixing to take some pictures of one of these interesting spurges.
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Yepper do. The redoubtable Crumby Ovate has now arrived fairly expeditiously with the pictures. How ye a doin', Crumby?

All righty then, Ray.

Here we have some pictures of what's liable to be Euphorbia stictospora vintage September 11, 1995 and collected in the near vicinity of the great Marshall Johnston hisself, who in point of fact, may have identified this very specimen in the field, hisself, since at that time, this very specimen may have been a lifer, fer me. On the other hand, we have two or three specimens from the Pantex Reservation so this may not be that very one the great Marshall Johnston field identified, fer me.

We have two pictures fer the presumptive ASS here, maybe. One of a dang little seed, and forgive me but I don't note the punctate, mottled surface, but this particular dang seed is blunt on one end and acute on t'other end. And a second picture of the female flowers and some leaves and capsules showing off the vestiture and many other key characters.

Why thankee Crumby. Let's load 'em up.
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*"Snow on the whatevers" refers to E. bicolor and E. marginata, two "species" the Cow Barn Druids gave up on a good while back.

The Arkdruid
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That's right Arkdruid. And good riddance to them specimens, too.

The Crumby Ovate