Friday fabulous flower - star anise

Star anise doesn't just have fabulous flowers, but they are the flowers that are basal to all other flowering plants.  As explained in blog this links to "basal" means that this lineage has a very ancient common ancestry with all other flowering plants, the so-called ANITA grade of ancient lineages where the I stands for Illicium the genus and family name-sake of star anise.  The fruitlets and seeds used as the spice are part of a whorl of pistils that look a bit like a crown in the center of these flowers. TPP almost decided to study this genus many, many years ago, and has a certain fondness for it ever since. This genus has what botanists call a disjunct distribution with species in SE Asia and SE North America and adjacent Mexico and Caribbean.  Prior continental positions account for such distributions, so yes, very old. 

Leafy fun!

This isn't the best image.  These leaves are fresh from our glasshouse as of a couple of hours ago, and then scanned as opposed to photographed for this blog.  Naturally you wonder what plants have these leaves.  Now here's the challenge, one of these leaves is different from the other three in a very significant way.  One of these leaves comes from a basal lineage of flowering plants - star anise.  Two of them are from magnolialean families - nutmeg and eupomatia.  The other leaf is from a gymnosperm - Gnetum.  Isn't that something?  Did you ever figure it would be this tough to pick out a gymnosperm from a group of angiosperms?  Look how similar they all are in terms of shape; same apex, same base. They all have short "stumpy" (not a technical term) petioles. TPP will deliver an answer after we see if anybody out there is very perceptive.  BTW all four plants are dicots, but none of them are part of the "true dicot" clade of flowering plants.  How crazy is that? 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Basal Angiosperm Flower at the stage of seed dispersal

An old, but very sturdy TV antenna tower (remember those?) stands at the corner of our house, and it seemed like a good idea to plant a vine next to such a good climbing structure. The vine is Kadsura japonica, magnolia vine, and it occupies an interesting phylogenetic position that you are probably not aware of. Angiosperm taxonomy used to be easy: monocots and dicots. Monocots are still pretty easy, but not dicots. At the base of the flowering plant "family" tree are three lineages that have the most ancient common ancestries with the rest of the flowering plants. And one of these three lineages includes the Schisandraceae, the Schisandra family, which has two genera: Kadsura and Schisandra. The flowers of this species have either lots of pistils or leafy anthers, but not both, surrounded by a perianth not differentiated into petals and sepals, and all the parts are spirally arranged. Each pistil develops into a red fruitlet borne upon a much elongated receptacle (think long skinny strawberry). In the two flowers shown, at the stage of seed dispersal, you can see both the mature fruitlets and abortive ones that didn't get pollinated. The red fruitlets are edible, although pretty tart, and if enough of them could be reached (the vine is now 15+ feet above the roof of our house) some basal angiosperm jelly would be in the offing. Soon a flock of cedar waxwings, or some other dinosaurian relative (how appropriate for such an ancient lineage!) will appear, and the fruitlets will disappear. Although sensitive to late spring frosts, the vine is hardy in zone 5 and probably in zone 4 too. Just the thing to hide that old antenna tower!

Geeky primitive flowering vine

Who doesn't like big showy flowers, but small strange flowers are really cool to especially to us botanical geeks. As a result the Phactor tends to grow some less common plants for his own amusement. Here's a close up of a small (~1 cm diam) flowered vine that occupies a couple of stories of an old TV antenna at the corner of our house. You many notice several unusual things about this flower: one - the perianth consists of a helical whorl of 8-9 parts that start smaller and greener on the outside and turn whiter (and a bit pink on the inside base) as they spiral inward. The plant is monoecious and this flower only has 5-6 stamens, spirally arranged, and where the anther is rather broad and there is no filament to speak of. Higher up on the vine other flowers will look identical but with ~24 spirally arranged individual pistils. Most people don't know this genus, or its family, or its unique place in flowering plant phylogeny. The vine is Kadsura chinensis (Schisandra family - Schisandraceae) and it now resides phylogentically among one of the basal grades of flowering plants indicating an ancient common ancestry with all the rest. Sometimes this species is called magnolia vine, but it doesn't remind me of magnolias very much.

Friday Fabulous "Flower" - A Basal Angiosperm

Here's a not very awesome image of a "flower" of Trithuria submerse (Hydatellaceae). As the name suggests this is a monogeneric family of small, aquatic "grassy" plants that were long classified as monocots. The word flower is in quotes because like some of the oldest fossils of flowers, e.g. Archaefructus, it brings into question what should be called a flower. In this case what you actually see is best referred to as a "reproductive unit", which can vary in the number and ratio of subunits, in this case consisting of 4 simple pistillate flowers (C = carpel; H = stigmatic hair) each associated with a bract (B), a modified leaf, surrounding a single stamen/flower (A-anther, F-filament)(Bar = 0.5 mm). The morphological features do not suggest any close relationships, but molecular data surprised everyone by showing them to be a sister group to the waterlilies (Nymphaeaceae) and part of one of the basal lineages of flowering plants, those plants that have the most ancient common ancestry with the rest of angiosperms. These basal lineages are referred to as the ANA grade where the N stands for waterlilies now including this little vestigial (?) waterlily. The image is compliments of a recent study of the reproductive ecology which find that mostly it self pollinates, probably a mechanism for rapid reproduction in its ephemeral shallow-water habitat. That such plants look monocoty is not a surprise; basal angiosperms, basal monocots, and magnolid dicots all tend to have flowers with parts in multiples of 3s and often numerous. Others are very few-parted and simple. Water lilies also have only one cotyledon, but remember that several gymnosperms also have 2 cotyledons, so this sure does mess up the old traditional monocot-dicot taxonomy. The Phactor will save that lesson for another time.