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Good news everyone! The latest Berry-Go-Round blog carnival is up over at Moss Plants and More. Click on over and see what nice botanical and plant related blogs you may have missed this month. Leave a nice comment for Jessica to thank her for doing the carnival. If you have a plant related blog, think about submitting one of your blogs for next month's carnival.
The great state of Lincolnland has banned smoking in public buildings, and as a result all the addicts retreat to the out of doors, just barely, to feed their habit, thus creating a smoky corridor for all to pass. Sometimes air intakes, doors, and windows pull the smoke back inside. New signs have appeared at our buildings' doors: "NO SMOKING WITH IN 15 FEET OF DOORS, WINDOWS, OR AIR INTAKES". OK, but rather tricky around some of the entrances where a combination of all three exist, in multiples, unless assisted by someone with a tape measure and marker pens inscribing arcs to show smokers the nearest OK to smoke area is. And another pet peeve: litter; all the filters flicked into the gardens and landscaping.
Bignoniacae, the bignon family, are largely tropical trees and lianas, and most of them have large showy flowers adapted to different pollinators. Catalpa trees and trumpet creeper are our temperate members of this family. Here's one of my captive tropical bignons, Tecomaria capensis, a species widely used as an ornamental in warmer climates. This is just such a classic example of a flower adapted to hummingbird pollination. It's fairly large, it's oriented laterally, it's bright red, has ample nectar, and is scentless. The corolla is highly asymmetrical with the lateral and lower corolla lobes folded back and an over arching upper corolla lobe. The stigma is exerted to contact the bird's head as it arrives, and as the bird moves in closer to get it's beak and tongue down into the corolla tube, then the head contacts the two pair of anthers picking up more pollen. It's a great showy plant and a cheerful mid-winter display.
Orchids, more precisely, orchid flowers are fun. Who can argue? First a couple of caveats. Most orchids have pretty small flowers; only a few have big, really gaudy flowers, and people are more familiar with these for the obvious reason that they are the ones most commonly cultivated and pinned on prom dresses. Second, a lot of cultivated orchids are hybrids, artificial things, and therefore no matter how fantastic looking the flower, it's a flower that only exists as a curiosity; it doesn't function in nature. What could be duller to a floral biologist? People's fascination with the unnatural contrivances has always puzzled the Phactor because real species have some truly fantastic floral forms, and these are shaped by natural selection to be functional, to interact with their pollinator is sometimes a very specific manner. This is one of the reasons why making hybrids is so unchallenging; pollinator specificity and pollinator behaviors are the isolating mechanisms that keep even closely related species from swapping genes, so without other isolating mechanisms it's easy for humans to hand pollinate them and generate hybrids sometimes with fantastic floral forms, but forms not adapted to do anything. The photography displayed here is enough to make you envious, but you don't expect less form National Geographic. (Prosthechea fragrans is shown here.)
image after image, and the F1 shots pictures like this too. So even though my technology allows it, the Phactor still finds it impossible to blaze away taking picture after picture. It would not be a boast to say that the percentage of my pictures that turn out good is much better than the digital gun slingers, but the sheer volume of shots generates many good results as does the ability to get immediate quality feedback rather than much later disappointment. While known and understood, the habits of a lifetime are hard to change. Of course, children of the digital age should understand that even though you obtain 2,000 images during an afternoon's walk in a park, no one wants to see them all, just the hand full that are really good. This dinosaur's struggle to adapt will continue and one personal pledge was to grab more images of interesting things that the Phactor just happens upon to take advantage of the convenient size of today's cameras. The walk home the other day provided an opportunity to take a further step into the digital age.
On miserably cold bleak days, a reminder of the tropics is always welcome. Although squash flowers can be pretty big, members of the gourd family, generally called cucurbits, are not thought of as having very many attractive flowers. Here's Gurania makoyana from Costa Rica that makes a pretty dramatic display to attract pollinators, in this case butterflies for certain. The sepals are the orange part of the display; the yellow corolla doesn't open very wide making sort of a tube and doesn't contribute much to the display. Since the vine is often scrambling through the rainforest understory along dense and dim edges, this inflorescence really stands out. Greenish-white, finger-sized cucumbery fruit follow.
more money you have the more speech you can buy. Why aren't people outraged when they can see how sleasy the whole business is when someone is right up front about it? Hand over the fund to a buddy, who does your dirty work, while the candidate disavows all knowledge, all connections, and all responsibility for the attack ads. Why is it taking a couple of comedians to bring up serious issues that threaten our democratic process? At least the USA isn't so far gone that it resorts to censoring such political satire, and this is the best since Pat Paulsen sort of ran for president with his flag-lined suit. And Paulsen might be the only person as hard to interview as Colbert.
Gesneriaceae is best known for African violets, but many other members are showier and even easier to grow, of course, my F1 grows better African violets, so the Phactor is not the best authority on their cultivation. This neotropical species, probably Kohleria eriantha, grows as a very vigorous, almost constantly flowering, sub-shrub in our glasshouse. The reason people like this genus is obvious; the flowers are fairly large, bright in color, fuzzy, and the corolla has very bold nectar guides. Nectar guides like this usually absorb UV light and the areas between reflect it, so in those wavelengths, they are very bold. This tells you they are not adapted for human eyes. Numerous hybrids exist, but in general they are avoided in our use as real species are prefered for teaching botany. If you wish to learn how flowers work these are a nice example of how a "bisexual" (bisporangiate really) flower uses movement of floral parts and sequential functionality to promote outcrossing. When this flower first opens the two pair of stamens are positioned at the top and front of the corolla tube thus ready to daub pollen on the back of any visitor, which based on the floral size and features, will be a bee. The style is above and below the anthers, out of the way, and the bilobed stigma remains closed. After a day of dispersing pollen the spent anthers fold back, and the style takes their place with an open stigma, thus changing the flower to pollen accepting. It's a good exercise to assign this to students for them to figure out how this flower works.
My daily walk through the student ghetto that surrounds our campus provides many examples of landscaping that meets the minimum municiple requirements placed upon the slumlords. One of the requirements is a sight barrier for parking areas and here's an excellent example of the bad, ugly landscaping that results. This is their 2nd try to grow a row of arborvitae here (the one on the far end alone survived the 1st planting). It would appear a 2nd one survived this time! So how many more plantings will have to be done? Probably none unless the town holds their feet to the fire. Now you can all guess what happened here. First, no thought went into the landscaping at all. Dull, dull, dull, and probably not the best choice of plant either. Second, the trees were just stuck in a hole with no attempt to tease out the tangle of pot-bound roots. Third, they put down a weed barrier & stones (so attractive - not) rather than organic mulch. Fourth, they didn't protect their investment during a hot, dry late summer by watering them. And this place is supposed to be upscale as residences go. Totally lame, what else is there to say? Next it'll be a fence because "trees just won't grow there".
The library used to have tall, decorative (?) architectural fixtures studded with big, glowing incandescent bulbs that were expensive (and hard) to replace and as incandescent bulbs get phased out, impossible to replace. Since they were decorative in function, it's pretty hard to argue that they weren't a big waste of energy. So what do you do? This is no idle problem. The plant dryer, a box that holds plant presses, in our herbarium is heated by the tremendous inefficiency of four 100-watt incandescent bulbs. Now what? Trying to find just the right heating element is a problem. One tech suggested just buying a case of 100w bulbs and putting the problem off a couple of years. Given this type of committment to energy savings and solving technological problems, it was quite a surprise to see new what look like LED light fixtures being installed. And as a bonus, they were designed in a double helix, the shape of DNA, except for the lack of the paired nucleotide bases between the two strands in four different colors (a necessity). OK, so they didn't consult with a biologist, but it does solve the bulb/energy/decorative problem with more imagination than usual. We gots a whole aging building of bandaid fixes. Good old low bid planning.
infected on their surface by molds. In particular molds form a protective rind on the surface of soft cheeses of the camembert type that prevent infections by other spoilage organisms and keep the cheese surface dry, but the interior moist, while the mold slowly consumes and alters it with its enzymes. This rind has some pretty fantastic qualities as a bio-coating, and once this protective coating is broken the cheese needs to be consumed pretty quickly. Biologists are now looking at such bio-coatings to determine if they can have other potential uses. Research supplies: flock of goats, big cave, lots of crackers and wine. Sounds like a project it would be easy to like. Here’s a heads up for readers: try Humboldt Fog cheese, a semi-ripe soft cheese with a layer of gray plant ash running through the middle. It’s fantastic! Image credit: Artisanal Cheese. HT to the Science line.
talked, nudged, cajoled, blackmailed, into teaching a new course - basic plant biology. How could this be a problem? Well, let's see when was the last time the Phactor taught general botany? Hmmm,let's think. OMG, 25 years ago!? Yikes! So now to come up with 40 some odd new lectures and a dozen or so new labs. To demonstrate his desperation the Phactor actually looked to see if any of the end-of-the-world predictions might bail him out. But no, May 27th is too late; that's nearly 3 weeks after finals. But what was that? You find new material in the funniest places. Plants were created in heaven and just transported to the garden of Eden! Well, let's grab that link and work it into a lecture. That doesn't explain a lot of things, actually it explains nothing, but when you're desperate, you do desperate things. So, first off, plants are not uniformly green; all the green is in itty-bitty green things that without a microscope you cannot resolve as individual points of green. It's a start.
As purveyor of plant identifications, the Phactor gets lots of requests and even urgent calls for help. Identifications require both knowledge and experience, and a good reference collection also helps a lot. Now we all make mistakes, but amateurs are going to make more mistakes than us pros. Making IDs gets harder the further away you are from your home base because you are less familiar with the flora. The Phactor would never offer his services to an emergency room in China, for example. Here's a story of a fatal mistake: a Chinese chef visiting Australia finds what he thinks are edible mushrooms and makes a delectable stir fry that kills both the chef and his assistant. Now this fellow was obviously not even a good amateur because major mushroom genera are quite widespread and much more similar around the world than seed plants, which suggests that mushroom genera are quite ancient. Death caps are in the genus Amanita, large handsome mushrooms with white spores, a persistent veil, and a cup at the base of the stipe, which isn't always this obvious. Any gatherer of wild mushrooms should know this, and that combination of traits should have warned them. A few years ago an emergency room asked me to identify some bits and pieces of mushrooms a fellow had collected and eaten, but then he felt flushed and had what felt like palpitations, so he got scared and headed for the hospital. The bits did not allow a certain ID by a long way, but they were not consistent with a death cap either. But it really didn't matter; if the mushrooms had been death caps the fellow would have been a walking deadman. The toxins can destroy your kidneys before you even feel ill. Fortunately this fellow recovered, but his enthusiasm for wild mushrooms was greatly reduced. Mycophobia can go too far too. A woman almost got physically ill after learning that the delicious mushrooms being served had been collected in my own yard (Carefully IDed.). But do be careful out there folks, some plants and some fungi don't give you a second chance. The image of Amanita phalloides (the destroying angel) is courtesy of Arvenzo and the Creative Commons.
Even though this January day feels like spring outside, it's still January, so there are limited pickings available even in our glasshouse. However, over on the succulent bench, one of the pachycaulous (thick-stemmed) succulent euphorbs is flowering, Jatropha podagrica, sometimes called bottle plant because the stem abruptly widens toward the base. While it is generally grown as a curiosity because of its thick stem even on a quite young, quite small plant, the rounded inflorescences standing out above the foliage are quite showy. Here's a close up showing the unisexual flowers characteristic of euphorbs (staminate flower to the far left, a slightly larger pistillate flower to its right with the 3-branched stigma showing prominently). The inflorescence i
s a cyme and the pistillate flower always occupies the terminal, central position. Even after the pistillate flowers get pollinated, drop their perianth, and begin to develop as fruit, the inflorescence continues to produce staminate flowers. This plant is easily grown if you have a warm, sunny enough window and can avoid over watering. The pachycaul image is courtesy of Bouba via the Creative Commons.
dichotomous key in Flora Francaise (1778), but seldom does that get mentioned as one of his scientific accomplishments. And now one of my colleagues (Lawrence Griffing) says that a botanist, Robert Waller, gave a talk to the Royal Society of London some 100 years earlier entitled: Tables of the English Herbs reduced to such an order, as to find the name of them by their external figures and shapes (27 March 1689). (The entire article may be behind a fire wall as it was just published, but us insiders can get the pdf file if anyone is truly interested.) This does not mean Lamarck got the idea from Waller, just that such a tabular approach was introduced earlier. Waller was very modern by linking his key to water color illustrations of the British flora and supposedly these illustrations are accessible online at the British Library (thus the origin of a previous post), but even after registering, the Phactor was unable to find the illustrations, or even get back in again, and not enough time to really fight with it. If anyone else is successful, do let us know.
