Traditionally, our ancestors boiled mushrooms in water to make a soothing tea. Boiling served several purposes: killing contaminants, softening the flesh, and extracting the rich soluble polysaccharides.
Although the trends are promising and reishi mushrooms exhibit a number of interesting medicinal properties, modern scientific techniques have yet to affirm its traditional 'panacea polypore' status.
Chaga is one of the weirdest mushrooms you may ever see. A fungal parasite found on birch trees, Chaga is a hardened, blackened, crusty formation that looks like a bursting tumor.
Stunted varieties were generally chosen, particularly if they had the side branches opposite or regular, for much depends upon this; a one-sided tree is of no value in the eyes of the Chinese.
The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon.
The plants are principally kept in large pots arranged in rows along the sides of narrow paved walks, with the houses of the gardeners at the entrance through which the visitors pass to the gardens.
The plants which stand next to dwarf trees in importance with the Chinese are certainly chrysanthemums, which they manage extremely well, perhaps better than they do any other plant.
This may be done by grafting, by confining the roots, withholding water, bending the branches, or in a hundred other ways which all proceed upon the same principle.
We all know that any thing which retards in any way the free circulation of the sap, also prevents to a certain extent the formation of wood and leaves.
We are told that the first part of the process is to select the very smallest seeds from the smallest plants, which is not at all unlikely, but I cannot speak to the fact from my own observation.
As a German citizen, as a German professor, and as a political person, I hold it to be not only my right but also my moral duty to take part in the shaping of our German destiny, to expose and oppose obvious wrongs.
In the span of my own lifetime I observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living.
It's one of my strongest dance pieces - having just done Play Without Words which was veering away from a lot of dance - I thought it would be nice to go back to something with almost the most dance I'd done.
You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
I try to be respectful about getting an honor or recognition, but I don't really know what the Rock Hall actually is. In my experience with the people who run it, I don't see it having to do with anything other than them making money.
Nature is a numbers game. We need all the support we can get as our immune systems and health are under assault from pollution, stress, contaminated food and age-related diseases as our lifespans increase.
I like recording by myself wherever I can, just because then I feel like I have ultimate freedom, and I can just control whatever I want to put down. There's something about going into your own little world.
WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your h...
For me, triathlons were something that was down to me and my fitness. Now, I really enjoy the pain in the triathlon of chasing someone down. It's a bit like chasing down Nico Rosberg in the last few laps at Silverstone - it makes you feel alive.
There is a moment when you get older when your metabolism slows down and you don't feel like working out any more, so you don't want to keep yourself fit any more, but that's your decision. Why should you be judged for it?
Fitness of a top-class squash player is very important, and talent only can't do the job. They have to get training regularly for at least eight hours a day so that they could put some good show in a two-hour match.
