The pineapple is a tropical plant with an edible fruit called a pineapple, the most economically significant plant in the family Bromeliaceae. The pineapple is indigenous to South America; the introduction of the pineapple cultivation to Europe in the 17th century made it a significant cultural icon of luxury. Since the 1820s, pineapple has been commercially grown in many tropical plantations. Further, it is the third most important tropical fruit in world production. In the 20th century, Hawaii was a dominant producer of pineapples for the US. Pineapples grow as a small shrub; the plant is propagated from the offset produced at the top of the fruit, or from side shoot, mature within a year. The pineapple is a herbaceous perennial, which grows to 1.0 to 1.5 m tall, although sometimes it can be taller. In appearance, the plant has a stocky stem with tough, waxy leaves; when creating its fruit, it produces up to 200 flowers, although some large-fruited cultivars can exceed this. Once it flowers, the individual fruits of the flowers join together to create a multiple fruit.

After the first fruit is produced, side shoots are produced in the leaf axils of the main stem. These may be left to produce additional fruits on the original plant. Commercially, suckers that appear around the base are cultivated, it has 30 or more long, fleshy, trough-shaped leaves with sharp spines along the margins that are 30 to 100 cm long, surrounding a thick stem. In the first year of growth, the axis lengthens and thickens, bearing numerous leaves in close spirals. After 12 to 20 months, the stem grows into a spike-like inflorescence up to 15 cm long with over 100 spirally arranged, trimerous flowers, each subtended by a bract; the ovaries develop into berries, which coalesce into a large, multiple fruit. The fruit of a pineapple is arranged in two interlocking helices, Typically there are eight in one direction and 13 in the other, each being a Fibonacci number; the pineapple carries out CAM photosynthesis, fixing carbon dioxide at night and storing it as the acid malate releasing it during the day aiding photosynthesis.

The pineapple comprises five botanical varieties regarded as separate species: Ananas comosus var. ananassoides Ananas comosus var. bracteatus Ananas comosus var. comosus Ananas comosus var. erectifolius Ananas comosus var. parguazensis In the wild, pineapples are pollinated by hummingbirds. Certain wild pineapples are pollinated at night by bats. Under cultivation, because seed development diminishes fruit quality, pollination is performed by hand, seeds are retained only for breeding. In Hawaii, where pineapples were cultivated and canned industrially throughout the 20th century, importation of hummingbirds was prohibited; the first reference in English to the pineapple fruit was the 1568 translation from the French of André Thevet's The New Found World, or Antarctike where he refers to a Hoyriri, a fruit cultivated and eaten by the Tupinambá people, living near modern Rio de Janeiro, now believed to be a pineapple. In the same English translation, he describes the same fruit as a Nana made in the manner of a Pine apple, where he used another Tupi word nanas, meaning "excellent fruit".

This usage was adopted by many European languages and led to the plant's scientific binomial Ananas comosus, where comosus, "tufted", refers to the stem of the plant. Purchas, writing in English in 1613, referred to the fruit as Ananas, but the OED's first record of the word "pineapple" itself by an English writer by Mandeville in 1714; the wild plant originates from the Paraná–Paraguay River drainages between southern Brazil and Paraguay.. Little is known about domestication but it spread as a crop throughout South America, it reached the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, where it was cultivated by the Mayas and the Aztecs; the first European to encounter the pineapple was Columbus, in Guadeloupe on 4 November 1493, by which time cropped pineapple was a distributed and a stable component of the diet of native Americans. The Portuguese took the fruit from Brazil and introduced it into India by 1550. The'Red Spanish' cultivar was introduced by the Spanish from Latin America to the Philippines, it was grown for textile use from at least the 17th century.

Columbus brought the plant back to Spain and called it piña de Indes, meaning "pine of the Indians". The pineapple was documented in Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World in 1516 and Antonio Pigafetta's Le Voyage et Navigacion.. of 1526, the first known illustration was in Oviedo's Historia General de Las Indias in 1535. The pineapple fascinated Europeans as a fruit of colonialism but it could not be cultivated in Europe for several centuries until Pieter de la Court developed a greenhouse horticulture near Leyden from about 1658. Pineapple plants were distributed from the Netherlands to English gardeners in 1719 and French ones in 1730. In England, the first pineapple was grown at Dorney Court, Dorney in Buckinghamshire, a huge "pineapple stove" to heat the plants was built at the Chelsea Physic Garden in 1723. In France, King Louis XV was presented with a pineapple, grown at Versailles in 1733. In Russia, Catherine the Great ate pineapples grown on her own estates before 1796; because of the expense of direct import and the enormous cost in equipment and l

Astoria is a grand houseboat, built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno and adapted as a recording studio in the 1980s by its new owner, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. It is moored on the River Thames at Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. Gilmour purchased the boat in 1986, because he "spent half of life in recording studios with no windows, no light, but on the boat there are many windows, with beautiful scenery on the outside"; the boat was built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno who wanted to have the best houseboat on the river permanently moored alongside his hotel, the Karsino at Tagg's Island. He designed it; the boat is framed in mahogany and has Crittall windows with taller, wider windows towards one end. It is topped by ornate metalwork canopies and balustrades. Gilmour bought the boat after seeing it advertised for sale in a copy of Country Life magazine in his dentist's waiting room, just a short while after admiring it while being driven past its moorings. Parts of each of the last three Pink Floyd studio albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, The Division Bell, The Endless River, were recorded on the boat, as were parts of Gilmour's solo album On an Island.

His most recent solo album, Rattle That Lock, was mixed and recorded there. It was used for mixing the Pink Floyd live album Pulse as well as the Pulse film, Gilmour's Remember That Night DVD/Blu-ray and his Live in Gdańsk live album/DVD. Bob Ezrin has mentioned, that the floating studio posed a few problems when it came to engineering guitar sounds for A Momentary Lapse of Reason: It's not a huge environment So we couldn't keep the amps in the same room with us, we were forced to use smaller amplifiers, but after playing around with them in the demo stages of the project, we found that we liked the sound. So a Fender Princeton and a little G&K amp became the backbone of Dave's guitar sound for that record. A video of Andrew Jackson, sitting at the mixing console of the Astoria Studio, is available online. Numerous photographs taken in 1993 of the band recording The Division Bell on board the Astoria appear on the sleeve of the last Pink Floyd album, The Endless River. Dara Ó Briain, Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath visited the floating studio/house while rowing up the Thames for the BBC television programme Three Men in a Boat.

Gilmour's rendition of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, set to piano, was filmed on the Astoria. According to an interview with Phil Taylor, the studio on the Astoria was equipped with a DDA AMR 24 mixer console and UREI 813 studio main monitors with Phase Linear amps; the UREI 813s were replaced around 1990 by ATC main monitors. Customized ATC SCM150ASL active speakers are used for the main left and right channels with a standard ATC SCM150ASL active speaker used as the centre channel; the centre channel sits above an ATC SCM0.1–15 subwoofer. The surround monitors are two ATC SCM50ASLs. A variety of near-field monitor speakers are used including Yamaha NS-10s and Auratones depending on who happens to be working at the studio; the acoustic design was done with the assistance of Nick Whitaker, an independent acoustician, much of the equipment was recommended by James Guthrie and Andrew Jackson. Nowadays the Astoria has a Neve 88R mixing console, as well as three Studer A827 multi-tracks and Ampex ATR-100 tape recorders, which were modified by Tim de Paravicini, Esoteric Audio Research's founder.

The conversion to a studio required 14 miles of cables, which were sourced from Van den Hul cables of Holland. There are various compressors from Pye and EAR 660 tube designs, as well as EAR 825s for EQ. Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare

Sandra Jean McPherson is an American poet. Born in San Jose, California, McPherson received her B. A. at San Jose State University, studied at the University of Washington, with Elizabeth Bishop and David Wagoner. She considers her "literary mothers" to be Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer, Adrienne Rich, she has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Haystack Portland State University, University of California at Berkeley Spring 1981 or 1982 as Roberta Holloway Visiting Lecturer, the Art of the Wild Conference, she is a Professor Emerita at the University of California at Davis. Having been a featured poet on the poetry circuits of Ohio and Connecticut, she has read in most states: Washington D. C. Louisiana, Indiana, Texas, Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Arkansas and California, her father, Walt McPherson, was head basketball coach at San Jose State and commissioner of the West Coast Athletic Conference. A Pumpkin at New Year’s, Poetry online Black Soap, Poetry Eschatology, Poetry For Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry online Grouse, Poetry Lions, Poetry online Peddler, Poetry online Resigning from a Job in a Defense Industry, Poetry online Seaweeds, Poetry The Delicacy, Poetry online Triolet, Poetry Pisces Child, Poetry365 A Vigil, 2 a.m.

County Jail, Ploughshares In Her Image, Ploughshares Ridge Road, Ploughshares Sonnet for a Singer, Ploughshares Elegies for the Hot Season, Indiana University Press, 1970 Radiation, Ecco Press, 1973. The Year of Our Birth, Ecco Press, 1978. Sensing, Meadow Press, 1980. Patron Happiness, Ecco Press, 1983. Pheasant Flower, Owl Creek Press, 1985. Floralia, illustrations by Claire Van Vliet, Janus Press, 1985. Responsibility for Blue, Trilobite Press, 1985. At the Grave of Hazel Hall, Ives Street Press, 1988. Streamers, Ecco Press, 1988. Designating Duet, Janus Press, 1989; the God of Indeterminacy, University of Illinois Press, 1993. Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals, University Press of New England, 1996; the Spaces between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967–1995, University Press of New England, 1996. Beauty in Use, Janus Press, 1997. "A Visit to Civilization", Wesleyan, 2002. "Handmade Definition of Obscurity", Janus, 2005. "Expectation Days", Illinois, 2007. "Certain Uncollected Poems", Ostrakon, 2012.

"Outline Scribe", Ostrakon, 2015. "The Danger Is", Salmon Poetry Press, 2018 Journey from Essex: Poems for John Clare, Graywolf Press, 1981. The Pushcart Prize XIV: Best of the Small Presses, 1989-90, Pushcart Press, 1989. "Swan Scythe Press", founder and editor, 1999-2011. Poetry Editor, California Quarterly. Poetry Editor, The Iowa Review. Poetry Editor, Antioch Review. Ingram Merrill Foundation grants National Endowment of the Arts fellowships Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award Novel Guide Sandra McPherson, The Poetry Foundation Sandra McPherson, Harper's Magazine Sandra McPherson Papers at Special Collections Dept. University Library, University of California, Davis