A somewhat interesting weed (Purslane)

[TheLostVertex]

While weeding some of my plants, I noticed one weed that seemed to look some what interesting. The underside of its leaves sort of looked like fine packing foam, like the type that packing peanuts are made out of. So naturally I photographed it


The suspect in question.



Here is the top of one of the leaves. You can clearly see the structure of the leaf. But more interesting, the cells appear to be pretty clearly visible even with out cropping. Taken at just a hair over 5x on aps-c using bellows and a 50mm lens.



Further down the leaf, everything appears more even a bit more clear. I am not sure what the left most edge is. If they are specialized edge cells, or if it is a layer of mucilage, or perhaps something else.

I found it surprising how clear the cells of this plant are as such a moderate magnification. I almost would expect to see visuals like that from something around 20x or more. These images also would appear a little sharper, however I neglected to sharpen the raw files before exporting to tiff then stacking

An interestign side note, appearently this type of weed is eaten in some parts. As explained here. I think I will skip though

[ckatosmith]

Super cool!

Carolina