Human Flower Project


Orrington, MAINE USA

flag flower bed
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA

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Princeton, MAINE USA

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Spanish Moss…You Don’t Say!


A Southern Belle changed the rules of radio and put seven wispy seconds between “live” and “broadcast.”


image

Tillandsia usneoides – Spanish moss— sways from oaks

on St. Simons Island, Georgia

Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

The thin, dangling, curly wisps of gray Spanish Moss draped over huge branches of multi-trunked live oaks (Quercus virginiana) are a stunning landscape feature of the southern U.S. coastal low country. But walking in the beautiful squares of Savannah, Georgia, last week and driving along roadways on Sea Island and Jekyll Island, I kept thinking of Kentucky radio reporter Fred Wiche. Few know that Spanish moss—neither a moss nor lichen, but an epiphytic bromeliad, relative of pineapple—changed radio protocol forever far inland, in my hometown of Louisville.

I got very confused on Wiche’s Saturday morning radio show in September 1994. I blame it on Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). I was sitting four feet across the table from the beloved WHAS radio personality. We were talking about powdery mildew on phlox. The trouble was I was hearing him again through the ear piece on a small, radio walkman that he had handed me just before the show began. The annoying echo of my own response—seven seconds later – was driving me nuts. At the first break, I asked what was going on. Fred muttered something about Spanish moss. He said I was doing fine and he’d explain at the end of the program.

Fred broadcast the “Weekend Gardener” remotely each week from his back deck, overlooking the orchard, vegetables and flowers on his beautiful farm near Simpsonville, south of Louisville.  Fred and I chatted on the air about durable perennials for the Ohio Valley and callers asked good questions. I never got adjusted to the weird echo. I was listening to the radio while he was tuned into the studio’s direct feed. He wasn’t bothered by the seven second delayed re-play.


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Posted by Julie on 10/04 at 11:42 AM
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