Friday Fabulous Flower - tropical springiness

It's been awhile since there's been a FFF posted. Tropical plants do something sort of strange each year.  A lot of them flower in late February or March in the glasshouse, yet most of them are thought to be day-neutral for flowering.  This means that they don't need long nights to stimulate flowering, yet that's just how they act. Of course the glasshouse is also warming up a little and getting a lot sunnier.  At any rate here's a member of the Bignoniaceae, a family of largely tropical trees, shrubs, and lianas, a family with fairly large, pretty colorful flowers. The trees and shrubs also tend flower in a big-bang of blooms making for some pretty spectacular displays. This shrub is called the Cape Honeysuckle (terrible name that points to the wrong family), Tecomaria capensis, a fairly common ornamental, in fact probably in the category of UTF, ubiquitous tropical flora. But it's just so cheerful, so bright, such a welcome relief from the bitter cold and bleakness outside. You should be able to guess that such flowers are adapted for bird pollination based on the color, the lack of odor (scratch & sniff), and the exserted stamens and stigma.  Enjoy!

Tree Diversity Day - some days past

How can they do these things without alerting TPP?  October 11 was Tree Diversity Day and who knew?  Biodiversity International didn't put anything on their webpage until Oct. 18th.  Nothing would please this blogger more than to support Tree Diversity Day, but someone needs to figure out PR because clearly the information highway was moving pretty slowly on this one.  Well, better late than never.  Here's a tree that might be new to you, a celebration of diversity, the candle tree.  The long (up to 1 m), fleshy, many-seeded, yellowish fruits are quite distinctive (and unusual in this family) and supposedly edible, but TPP cannot verify this.  Like many tropical trees Parmentiera cereifera (Bignoniaceae) flowers on old wood.  The flowers are large, white and open at night, and that along with the floral shape, and other features (thick flower stalk, buldge on lower side of perianth to hold nectar) clearly indicate pollination by nectar-feeding bats. 

Friday fabulous flower - a Bignon

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.

Cat's Claw Vine - Greenhouse juggernaut

More years ago than any of us want to admit, the Phactor used to travel to LSU to do some collaborative research with a colleague during our spring breaks. The logic was simple, Louisiana has better weather that time of year, my field work hadn't started yet, and then there's the seafood so the 1st two really didn't count. In addition to bringing back crayfish for friends in the seafood reciprocity pact, one year a bit of cat's claw vine (Macfadyena unguis-cati) was brought back and placed in our university glasshouse because it's not hardy up here. It promptly climbed a nearby tree, Dillenia indica, grasped onto the central support framework of the greenhouse, and has lived their ever since surviving several attempts to eradicate it. Now each spring its shoots droop down and cheerfully flower and although one would think it requiring of a pollinator, it selfs and produces numerous fruit whose winged seeds drop into everything around. Cat's claw vine is so named because the terminal leaflet of the trifoliate leaf is a 3-clawed grappling hook that snags any irregularity and is set in place by the weight of the vine. Later adventitious roots take over the task of holding the vine in place. The flowers are large and quite handsome, clearly a member of the Bignon family (both the fruit, which is flatter, and seeds are similar to Catalpa). This vine will probably exist living in the inside peak of the greenhouse, a most hostile location with both winter and summer extremes, until the entire structure is taken down at some future date, probably by just hooking a truck onto the vine and pulling, and maybe someone will wonder who in their right mind put that vine there in the first place. Dunno!