Friday Fabulous Flower - A to Z

Last week's Friday Fabulous Flower was an Aster, so it only seems symmetrical to have a Zinnia for this week's FFF.  And they are both in the same family, the composites or Aster family.  This pot of Zinnia's caught our eye at the local garden shoppe, and is sitting on our patio table looking pretty and attracting butterflies  It has been watered when it shows signs of wilting.  What a great variety this; it just keeps flowering, and this pot is at least a month old now.  We haven't even picked off the oldest heads.  You cannot complain about such a pretty thing, and who knows what variety this is because there are so many. Actually TPP isn't sure it's even a Zinnia except the involucre bracts look like a zinnia's.

SYCs have master naturalists yelling "uncle".

Birders have long been familiar with LBJs before and even after he became POTUS.  The botanical equivalent has always been SYCs, stinking yellow composites, yellow-flowered members of the Asteraceae, formerly the Compositae, daisies, sunflowers, asters, and so on, and on, and on.  It's a big family, one of the biggest.  And in grasslands, and even old fields, a heap-ton of these flower in the fall.  Everytime you turn around, there is another one.  Some TPP recognizes by sight, but very often it takes a bit of time in the herbarium and with available field guides to determine what plant it is.  TPP is sort of over-seeing a couple of master naturalist projects, and even very diligent and hard working amateurs such as these can often "give up" on STCs. Toughies such as these take lots of practice and experience. Something that doesn't come in a book or bottle.  In particular TPP found that just the sunflowers, genus Helianthus, could be a problem, so using a scanner, he constructed some cheat sheets for our local area using a combination of fairly easy to observe features to document each species.  But clearly more such sheets are needed, and next week he will be in the field to help out documenting the plant contents of some restored prairie patches.  Hopefully, no LBJ will be seen perched on an SYC, although if so, birders usually don't notice the latter.  Hang on troops, help is on the way!

Friday Fabulous Flower - New England Aster

The Phactor does not object to taxonomists who attempt to correctly classify organisms, however it nonetheless is annoying when a taxon and a plant's name that you have been using for over 40 years changes. Aster is one of those "know your genera" taxons where the common name and the scientific name are the same, although as nearly always the case the common use of aster is a lot more loose than the botanical use. Aster used to have something like 600 species strewn across N. America and Eurasia, but taxonomists have decided that all but one of the N. American species should be transferred to a series of other genera. So it goes with today's fabulous flower, or rather as is the case with members of the Asteraceae or sunflower family, a fabulous inflorescence of tiny flowers presenting the image of a much larger flower to pollinators and gardeners, the New England Aster, formerly Aster novae-angliae, now Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. Symphyotrichum (sim-fee-oh-try-cum) rolls off the tongue well enough, but it just isn't as familiar as Aster. This is why taxonomists hide away in herbaria in universities, museums, and botanical gardens; people would be kicking them in the shins for messing with their favorite plant names. Ah, but asethetically a New England aster by any other name would still be a massive clump of royal purple color gracing the fall landscape.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow Coneflower

The sweltering heat and humidity of the midwestern summer season are upon us, and many of my exotic babies, natives of milder climates, suffer, while a few plants hailing from more southern climates, rejoice. But the plants that do best, year in and year out, are natives. So this friday's fabulous flower is a native of the tall grass prairie, the yellow coneflower (Ratibida pinnata). Some people confuse the yellow coneflower with the black-eyed susan, which is in another genus altogether. Both are members of the sunflower family, so actually this isn't a fabulous flower, but a fabulous inflorescence composed of brown radially symmetrical disk flowers centrally and yellow bilaterally symmetrical ray flowers appearing like petals (as in "she loves me, she loves me not") around the periphery. The yellow corollas of ray flowers droop downward (as shown), while the corollas of black-eyed susans are held more or less out at right angles (there are other differences too). The disk flowers in the center (top) of the button haven't opened yet. Inflorescences like these present the appearance of a single flower because that's the point, to cluster a bunch of small flowers in such a way as to present a bigger display. Pollinators always looking for the biggest reward are attracted to bigger displays, and inflorescences like these are one way plants with small flowers enhance their attractiveness and reproductive success.