Are you growing parsley? I do. But, I generally only plant the flat leaf variety - since the curly leaf parsley is used mainly as a garnish. Parsley is a member of the Umbelliferae family, which also includes celery, carrots, dill, cilantro, caraway, cumin, and the poisonous hemlock.   Brevities #OTD On this day in 1838, the botanist Asa Gray resigned from the Wilkes Expedition.  Gray was frustrated by all of the delays. He also disagreed with Captain Charles Wilkes.   Gray and Wilkes disagreed about the Latin descriptions of the new taxa. In addition, Wilkes wanted to work with Americans only. Gray recognized that the work could not be done with his usual level of excellence unless European herbaria and experts were included. Instead, Gray accepted a position at the University of Michigan. But, before he could officially start, Harvard wooed him away. Gray established the science of botany and guided American botany into the international arena. It was Asa Gray who said,  “Natural selection is not the wind which propels the vessel, but the rudder which, by friction, now on this side and now on that, shapes the course.”      #OTD  Today in 1949, a 79 year old botanist, Dr. Melville Thurston Cook, his wife, and their pilot were rescued by an Air Force helicopter after a week in the Alaskan wilderness. Cook reported they survived on 90 dozen eggs after their plane was forced down in the rugged Brooks Mountain range. As luck would have it, the 1,080 eggs were aboard the plane as cargo. Cook shared their ingenuity with the world; telling how they had not lacked for variety in their preparation of the eggs, enjoying fried eggs, boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, shirred eggs and omelet. Naturally, when he wasn't eating eggs, Dr. Cook collected specimens. Dr. Cook, who would be 80 in September, and his wife had been vacationing in Alaska. In newspaper accounts he said he never doubted the party would be saved. But the crash had impacted their priorities. Following the accident, Cook and his wife moved to be closer to their children. One of their four kids followed Cook's footsteps to become a plant pathologist; Dr. Harold T. Cook. Before the accident, Cook was finishing up his career by working as visiting part-time professor of plant pathology at Louisiana State University.  During his prime, Cook had gone botanizing with Nathaniel Lord Britton and  Elizabeth Gertrude Britton in Puerto Rico. He had also worked with Henry Allan Gleason at the New York Botanical Garden.     #OTD   Back in 1977, Ethan Allen and Elvin McDonald of House Beautiful (ww.housebeautiful.com) gave a presentation called "Decorating with Plants." McDonald revealed many new decorating-with-plant ideas. Keep in mind, this was three decades before Instagram. Otherwise, McDonald would have no doubt share photos of the over 300 plants in his apartment. In the newspaper promotions for his presentation, McDonald was quoted as saying, "Take a pill if you will I say take a plant to cope with everyday stress."       #OTD  A 1983 newspaper headline on this day in The Town Talk in Alexandria, Louisiana said, 'Rare Plant Halts Road Work'. Turns out, a $15 million highway widening project near College Station was stopped because it threatened a tiny, rare, and unusual orchid plant. The Spiranthes parksii (ii = "ee-eye"), also known as Navasota Ladies' Tresses because it grew along the Navasota River, is only 6 inches tall with white blooms. First discovered in 1945 and described by Donovan Stewart Correll in his 1950 book, Native Orchids of North America North of Mexico, It became the 54th U.S. plant species to be classified as endangered.        #OTD In 1988, British plant explorer Roy Lancaster revealed that a thriving black market for plants was threatening rare Chinese orchids.   In the same way an art collector might buy stolen works of art underground, elite plant collectors are the wealthy clients of orchid smugglers.  Lancaster shared