This week's Friday Fabulous Flower is the fire pink (Silene [sigh-lean-ee] virginica), which isn't the only plant to have this common name. Pink isn't just a color, or a minor league celebrity (something you learn when you do a search on "pink"), but a flowering plant family that includes carnations. You can recognize pinks by their opposite leaves, knobby nodes (where leaves are attached), and 5-parted flowers whose petals are apically notched, toothed, or "chewed" looking. This particular species has bright red flowers, a nice mid-summer addition to a perennial garden, and some people may think the name "fire" refers to the color, but actually the name comes from the fact that certain plants tend to show up, brightly, after a fire has removed dense understory vegetation. But species in this genus are also called by the common name "catch-fly". The reason for this is that the leaves, stems, and calyces are covered with glandular hairs each sporting a gummy drop of exudate. While this leaves the plant feeling sticky to us, these hairs are deadly to small insects as the picture demonstrates. Wow! Every now and then plants win one (mine even caught a Japanese beetle!). Way to go!
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
Don't tell me they found Tyrannosaurus rex meat again!2 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
-
Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Wow, all the silenes tend to be lovely but that is a particularly striking one that I have not seen before.
I remember reading lately that a lot more plants are carnivorous than had previously been thought.
Post a Comment