Friday Fabulous Flower - Episcia

International travel and the recovery rom it has left the Phactor day and date disoriented. Almost let Friday slip away without posting a fabulous flower, not that there haven't been lots of nice flower posts of late, but TGIFFF. Today's flower, Episcia lilacina is a close relative of a couple of well known house plants in the gesner family. It's sort of funny; a plant like this is hard for many people to grow, and this species has not been used as a temperate house plant to my knowledge even though it has a larger flower than the two cultivated species in our greenhouse, but down in Costa Rican rainforests this lovely plant with it's pale lavendar flowers and varigated leaves with purple on their undersides grows upon bare clay banks in the dark understory. The problem with growing such a plant is quite simply the difference in humidity, and the arid winter air in our houses is just too dry for many tropical plants.

Friday Fabulous Flower - A Gesneriad

How frustrating to have obtained a fabulous flower picture from my prairie study site only to have e-lost it somewhere, so when your well designed plan fails, punt. While still field season here in Lincolnland, plans are being finalized for this year's tropical field work in Costa Rica, so with a bit of fast forward thinking, here's a fabulous flower, a gesneriad, which means a member of the Gesneriaceae, a largely tropical family of herbaceous plants, best known for the domesticated house plant, the African violet. This wonderful plant is Chrysothemis friedrichsthaliana, a species mouthful, and in terms of growth it seems most like a Gloxinia because it produces tubers and periodically goes dormant. The display is a combination of showy and persistent calyx tubes, and the yellow-orange corollas. The calyx tubes hold water (just barely visible in this image) that protect the flower bud and young fruit, a not unusual condition among tropical plants.

Attractive display for dispersers of tropical plant

It's been awhile since blogging about the tropics. Those of us who study flowers are used to seeing diverse displays to attract pollinators. This is also true for fruit displays attracting seed dispersers. Now of course both of these are floral displays, but at different times in the flower's functional life, and most people just aren't used to thinking of fruits as flowers at the time of seed dispersal.

What is truly unusual is to have the same display being used for attracting both pollen and seed dispersers because they are almost always at different times and for different organisms. This a member of the Gesner (African violet) family from Costa Rica, Columnea purpurata, and the leaves are arranged to make a flat array along a stem forming a canopy over its flowers and fruits. So this is photographed from below as this branch extends out over your head (it grows as an epiphytic shrub). Both the flowers' persistent calyx and the subtending bract are bright orange and hairy, and the entire cluster of flowers, at both dispersal stages, produces a single display. At the right hand end of the cluster you can just see a yellow corolla tube and at the left hand end an orange berry is visible (arrows). The reason one display works for both dispersal stages is that birds are the dispersers of both pollen (hummingbirds) and seed (diverse frugivores), and such a large, bright display is needed in the shady understory.