Have You Ever Walked Through An Evergreen Forest To Clear Your Mind? Eaten A Nice Warm Vegetable Stew?

Have you ever walked through an evergreen forest to clear your mind? Eaten a nice warm vegetable stew? Received flowers from someone you love? Well... thank our hidden hero:

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi!

Hidden beneath your feet, nestled away inside the roots of 80-90% of vascular plants, there is a complex network of hyphae working in tandem with their plant buddies to keep our ecosystems alive and thriving!

Essentially, these microscopic fungi give plants Super Tolerance. Hyphae are much smaller than roots, which means that they can reach out farther while expending less energy and worm their way into places that are normally inaccessible to plants. This allows vascular plants to access more mineral nutrients than they normally could on their own. These fun-guys are so effective that some plants can even live their lives completely achlorophyllic (without chlorophyll)!

In return, plants will partition some of the carbon and simple sugars produced from photosynthesis to give to their buddies. This is done through vesicles formed by hyphae in the plant cells.

This isn't anything new either! In fact, you might even thank AMF for plants migrating onto land at all. A popular hypothesis for the colonization of land by plants is that the first vascular plants formed from an ancient partnership between algae and fungi, where essentially the fungi would act as the algae's roots to collect nutrients not available to the algae alone outside the water. If you'd like to see a cool example, look up the Rhynie chert!!

Thank you for letting me ramble a while at you about my favorite organisms on this planet :•) I encourage all of you to do some more research on your own, there is a TON that I haven't covered here! If you have access to a microscope, you can even dissect and stain some common garden roots to say hello to these little buddies yourself!

[This piece is directly inspired by the work of @/byjacobparis on Instagram! Please go give him a follow :•) ]

Turkey fluff is SUCH a tedious stitch but it has to be one of my favorites!

This little goober is for sale on my KoFi :•)

Another boy transformed into a being of thread. Heartwarming!

A patch to celebrate the launch of Viscera Objectica :•)

CIRCUS KITTY #1 IS DONE 🎉✨

Lady Trudy got BEANIE'D??????

Psst... do you like handmade custom stuff? Well my commissions are OPEN AYYY check my pinned post for more info!

A brooch I made for my dad this Christmas :•) he's really been helping me though a lot this year, and I hope this shows even a fraction of how grateful I am towards him.

Thank you also to my friends and mutuals who got me through the year. Every single kind message I receive matters the world to me, and I don't know if I would be nearly as passionate about art if it weren't for all the nice people in my phone. Happy Holidays to those who celebrate, and a nice, lazy day to those who don't 🧡