The wide variety of colors in flowers and fruits is largely caused by pigment containing organelles called chromoplasts. Chromoplasts belong to the plastids and they are responsible for the bright red, orange and yellow colors in many fruits and flowers.

A few years ago I saw that the ditch behind our garden house at garden park Nieuw Vredelust was completely covered with some kind of duckweed. On closer inspection it turned out to be a water fern, so not a duckweed at all. It was the first time that I saw this in a ditch.

The reason for writing something about aphids was a Willow Tree in our garden that was infested with these very small insects. Aphids mainly reside on young leaves and stems. With the naked eye there is not much more to see than small, slowly moving oval shapes that are a few mm in size. All the more reason to have a look at them under magnification.