Friday Fabulous Flower - an unusual newby

TPP is a plant collector, and oft times pushing the envelope on cold hardiness.  This winter the low temperature was -15 F (-26 C), and several plants surprised TPP with their cold hardiness.  This one is included in the list of uncertain cold tolerance, but the smallish shrub emerged in damaged and is now flowering for the first time.  TPP has seen it in flower before at the Missouri Botanical Garden, but never north of that.  So this is really a special flowering event here in northern Lincolnland.  There are a number of genera that are disjunct between eastern North America and eastern China.  Calycanthus floridus, Carolina sweet shrub, and Sinocalycanthus chinensis, Chinese sweet shrub both are now placed in the same genus by some taxonomists; they are in their own family.  The hybrid between these two species if becoming more familiar in horticultural circles, and TPP has all three.  The flowers have many parts, spirally arranged, and sometimes grading into one another (see link above).  At any rate here's the somewhat rare Sinocalycanthus flower showing both pinkish and yellow waxy tepals surrounding stamens and pistils.  Count us as a happy camper.

Ludicrous Flower Friday

Difficult it is to describe my mood. The semester is over except for posting of the grades. The many student achievements please me, and the missed opportunities sadden me. Relief is certainly a prominent reaction. So what better to improve my mood than to provide you with a cool flower to ogle, a hybrid with a rather interesting geographic background. Quite a number of plant genera are disjunct between eastern China and eastern North America, and although the two parents bear different generic names, Calycanthus and Sinocalycanthus, they are so very similar they are now often considered a single genus. Like other magnoliids of which the Phactor is so fond, all the floral parts are numerous, spirally arranged, and gradually shift from green sepal-like parts, to petals, to stamens, to pistils. Fully open the flowers are a bit over 3 inches in diameter and so make for a quite a display. The fragrance is a fermented fruity odor. Our native species, C. florida Carolina allspice, has dark purple flowers; the Asian parent white flowers.