- 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.
Naturally naturalized bulb
In the far dim wilderness recesses of our gardens, our property abuts properties on both the east and west in places where no human foot has tread for decades. The Phactor has been thinking of contacting the discovery channel when exploring back there. In such places the surviving plants are generally weeds or cultivars that have a tremendous ability to naturalize, and so late in April a few years back, a patch of flowers appeared in a quite shady area of long-time neglect, and they looked great, a shade-loving (or at least tolerating) plant that is attractive in flower and clearly requiring little care or maintenance. What's not to like, so what is it? Now that poses an interesting problem. Unless it capable of escaping cultivation completely, it will not be in field guides that stick to natives or escaped, naturalized exotics. Since the Phactor had never seen it before, it was not one of these. It was clearly a liliaceous (OK, someone did scale the fence to get a closer look. So what?), spring bulb of some sort, but an unfamiliar one. That does not narrow the possibilities very much, and it took some time for a positive ID to be made by chance while thumbing through one of those big bulb catalogs. A more definitive check with encyclopedic reference books (that do not have ID keys!) the following spring confirmed that this was Ornithagolum nutans, sometimes called silver bells. Our lawn and gardens are littered sparingly with the more common species O. umbellatum, star of Bethlehem, which is a tad invasive, if not a down right pest if you are one of those monocultures of grass types. However, these silver bells showed no sign of being so invasive having stayed in one patch for decades, so a few dozen bulbs were purchased and planted in patches here and there around some of the shadier recesses of our gardens. This spring the new silver bells look quite nice, flowering after the earlier bulbs, although a bit understated with a perianth more of a pale green-white color than the bright white of umbellatum, and borne laterally on a taller raceme rather than in a flat topped, pseudo-umbel. Still best to plant in a cluster to have a visual impression of any impact.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment