Every so often I discover something out of the blue that I never expected and that I haven't seen before. A few weeks ago I was tidying the backyard when I noticed an unusual looking plant with several large buds trailing down on my fence from a neighbour's garden. Right at the end was a beautiful and unusual flower. I tracked it down online - it was a Passionflower and I took a pollen sample for examination.
Most pollen looks fairly ordinary under a microscope and is most often coffee bean shaped. But this was different. The best way to describe what I was seeing was a bunch of golden tennis balls each with the typical curved furrow pattern found on a tennis ball! The grains are large. Large enough to get some good images and so I made several sets of images and aligned and stacked them in Photoshop and I'm pleased with the results. Posting them online I got several tennis jokes as I expected so I created an image of a tennis racket substituting tennis balls for pollen grains!
Most pollen looks fairly ordinary under a microscope and is most often coffee bean shaped. But this was different. The best way to describe what I was seeing was a bunch of golden tennis balls each with the typical curved furrow pattern found on a tennis ball! The grains are large. Large enough to get some good images and so I made several sets of images and aligned and stacked them in Photoshop and I'm pleased with the results. Posting them online I got several tennis jokes as I expected so I created an image of a tennis racket substituting tennis balls for pollen grains!
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