Botany

On August 6, 1945, at a quarter-past 8 a.m., bonsai master Masaru Yamaki was inside his home when glass fragments hurtled past him, cutting his skin, after a strong force blew out the windows of the house. The U.S. B-29 bomber called the “Enola Gay” had just dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, at a site just two miles from the Yamaki home. The bomb wiped out 90 percent of the city, killing 80,000 Japanese immediately and eventually contributing to the death of at least 100,000 more. But besides some minor glass-related injuries, Yamaki and his family survived the blast, as did their prized bonsai trees, which were protected by a tall wall surrounding the outdoor nursery.

Gertrude Jekyll was an English landscape architect who was the most successful advocate of the natural garden and who brought to the theories of her colleague William Robinson a cultivated sensibility he lacked. Born of a prosperous family, Jekyll was educated in music and painting and travelled in the Greek islands, where she studied architecture and history. Her chief interest was in painting until 1891, when her sight gave her trouble, and she applied herself wholeheartedly to gardening instead. Her taste was for the simplicity and orderly disorder of cottage gardens.

Franz Junghuhn was a German-Dutch botanist and geologist.

Fasciation is a malformation of plant stems commonly manifested as enlargement and flattening as if several stems were fused.

Chartreuse is a French liqueur composed of distilled alcohol flavored with 130 herbal extracts. The liqueur is named after the Grande Chartreuse monastery where it was formerly produced, located in the Chartreuse Mountains. The liqueur is nowadays produced in a factory in the nearby town of Voiron under the supervision of monks from the monastery.