Swift Fish Net

Back when I was still going to school, I took Organic Chemistry, and in one of the labs we had to do a project. I don’t remember the details of my project anymore (I probably still have the lab notebook somewhere), but it had to do with studying citronella essential oils. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get an actual citronella plant, but I did manage to get a Citrosa geranium which produces one of the fragrant essential oils that is so distinctive in citronella oil. I held onto one of the Citrosa plants I used after the project ended, and for the most part, it has been very easy to grow. It is really quite weed-like; it doesn’t bloom much but has plenty of rather pleasant foliage. I just cut it back once in a while, water it every now and then, and it grows just fine.

This summer, however, it started to fade out.

I think the stems had just become too old and thick. I hadn’t gotten around to taking a new cutting as I have done previously. When I brought it inside for the winter there were only a few live branches left, so I finally took a couple of cuttings to hopefully start a freshly rooted plant. The first couple of cuttings never developed roots. At this point there were just two specks of green left on the entire plant. The rest had completely shriveled up. After having the same plant for 10 years you get kind of attached to it, so although I doubted that these last two tiny remaining live branches would make it, I had to at least try. I stuck them in a little shot glass with water with some rooting hormone and left town for the holidays in the middle of December. I was thinking that they would probably be dead by the time I got back, because I wouldn’t be able to replace the water as it evaporated during my absence of 10 days.

Sure enough, when I got back, one of the cuttings was completely lost, and the other was out of the water and appeared severely wilted. However, it still had some green to it, and it even looked like it just might have something that almost resembled a root starting to stick out from the bottom. I added some water, and the next day, the remaining leaf and a half actually perked back up. I kept it in the water for the next couple of weeks but didn’t really see much change with the leafy parts. The root was definitely developing, so I planted it in some potting soil in a make-shift pot made out of a GladWare container with a few drainage holes cut into the bottom. It still didn’t look like it was growing from above, but it did still seem to be alive, at least. It was now over a month since I had taken this last cutting. I decided to set up my camera to do a time-lapse to see if I could detect any growth.

At first I had some issues with my camera. The camera could not focus in the dark. Hence, I lost all of the first night’s photos and had to start over. This time I added an old small fluorescent spotlight for 24 hour illumination. This worked well, for the most part, although I still lost a couple of frames every day to auto-focus failure for unknown reasons. Then my light bulb surprisingly failed one day while I was at work, so I lost a few more frames there as I got home a few hours after sunset. Even so, I managed to capture over a weeks worth of images taken at 15 minute intervals. A few of them had registration problems where the camera shifted when I reset the time-lapse each day. The Canon G3 I was using for this only takes 100 intervalometer exposures at a time. Just walking past the camera on the carpet and watering may have caused some of the more minor shifts.

The more noticeably shifted images I edited using Pixelmator by moving the original layer to the correct alignment and pasting in missing background from the surrounding correctly aligned images. The out of focus images I just left out completely. I assembled the individual images into a movie using iStopMotion. I didn’t bother adjusting for the intermittent over-exposure from the hour or two of direct morning sunlight. I find that it is a nice time reference for the passing days. The final stats for the time-lapse movie are as follows:

• 12 frames/second
• 60 second length
• 720 total frames

The time-interval covered with 15 minutes/frame:

• 10800 minutes or
• 180 hours or
• 7.5 days

Actually the time interval from the first frame in the movie to the last frame is over 8 days. I lost or left out approximately 70 frames because of focusing failures and other issues. Toward the end of the time-lapse, the images took more space because of the extra leafy green parts, so I ran out of space on my memory card and missed an image or two before I could download them to my computer and restart the time-lapse. At any rate, here is the completed movie on YouTube showing the first new leaf sprouting out of my citrosa cutting…

I ended the time-lapse about a week ago. Since then, another new leaf has developed, and it is starting on a third.