Friday Fabulous Flower - Waterlily

With so many summer flowers withering in the heat and drought, it stands to reason that the only flowers that are looking good are aquatics.  Our waterlilies are just cultivars of Nympaea odorata, which is a pretty good looking wildflower.  So these have just been flowering and flowering throughout the July.  As the Phactor has mentioned before, these flowers have lots of parts and rather than being in discrete and separate whorls (e.g., sepals, petals, stamens, pistils), waterlilies have a continous helix with one type of floral organ grading into the next.  In addition waterlilies occupy a basal grade and this means they have one the oldest common ancestries with the rest of flowering plants.     

Friday Fabulous Flower - Galphimia glauca

Wow, almost missed the fact that today is a Friday, and that just wouldn't do, would it? Here's another denizen of our glasshouse, one of the most prolifically flowering shrubs in the collection: Galphimia glauca. This is another member of the Malpighia (Barbados cherry) family; you may recall the miniature holly of about a month ago. One of the factoids presented then was that Malpighia was an honorific taxonomic name; so is Galphimia but in a very unusual way. See if you can figure it out before reading any further. Any puzzle loving people out there get it? Galphimia is an anagram of Malpighia so maybe it's a fonichori. This genus also displays the "stalked petals" common in the family. This shrub has some limited ornamental value in warmer climates and is a popular non-component of homeophathic remedies for hayfever, but that's good because the leaves and twigs are poisonous and extracts used as an insecticide. The flowers are about 1.2-2 cm in diameter.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Blue Ginger

In a shady tropical grotto of our greenhouse, a number of tropical plants thrive, and one of most handsome is the blue ginger (Dichorisandra thyrsiflora), which while quite blue (leaning toward purple) this is not a ginger (Zingiberaceae) at all but a member of the spiderwort family (Commelinaceae). It has a rhizome, aerial stems that reach 4-6 feet, and a helical arrangement of simple leaves, and that describes a large number of tropical monocots. This particular plant just started flowering (only one flower is open), so the display is quite large and fairly dramatic. While easily grown, and therefore fairly common, in glasshouses, blue ginger is too big and likes too much humidity to be an easy house plant.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Swamp Milkweed

Well, just like that the Phactor is two days late on posting a new fabulous flower. How does that happen? Milkweeds are much under appreciated as having beautiful flowers. The individual flowers aren't big, but they grow in some huge clusters and in some great colors too. As a native wildflower, one of the best is swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). The native plant is quite handsome and a number of pretty vividly colored cultivars are in the market too. It's a bit of a struggle for our garden because of the late summer heat and accompanying drought. As its name suggests, swamp milkweed like a wet setting. This one was growing on a shore. And few flowers attract more butterflies than do milkweeds.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Spiderwort

Several varieties of spiderwort (Tradescantia, named after a botanist of the 1600s) are flowering in our gardens, and they are quite charming, trouble-free plants. Funny how they look more purple to the eye, but always photograph more blue. Anyone know why? The spider part comes from the hairly stamen filaments. Now go get yourself a microscope. Put a few of those hairs on a slide in a drop of water, putting on the cover slip so as not to trap any air bubbles, and have a look. The hairs look like beautiful purple pop beads. Each bead is a cell largely filled with a big vacuole (think water balloon), so the cytoplasm is displaced to the edges and margins of the cell, sometimes looking like strands pressed between the vacuole and the cell wall. This is a good place to see cytoplasmic streaming. And this was the first place a biologist ever saw a nucleus in a cell! Oh, this is a good trivia question! Who was the biologist?

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow Wax Bells

Well, a day late and a dollar short, but that's because the Phactor was on the road, on the town, and out of touch. Here's a nifty herbaceous perennial called yellow wax bells (Kirengeshoma palmata), a native of Japan. In a partially shady area, this plant forms a large clump 3-4 feet tall. The nice thing is that it produces these 3 cm long yellow flowers in the late summer when not so many other things are flowering especially in a shady border. The corolla is quite thick and fleshy, although compared to some flowers, not especially waxy looking, and although this picture doesn't show it, mostly the flowers are pendent. Hardy to zone 5, it's a nice addition to a perennial border in front of shrubbery.

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 - Black Cohosh

As the garden season winds down there are fewer choices for Friday's fabulous flower, but then a favorite plant decided to bloom, so here you go, the black cohosh, or black snakeroot, or black bugbane, none of which make this native of the north eastern North America sound very nice. In a bit of a twist, modern molecular studies have determined that this plant belongs in the genus Actea (A. racemosa), where good old Linnaeus placed it all those centuries ago based on pure morphology; for the past century it had been in the genus Cimicifuga. But no matter the name, it's the same plant, and a member of the buttercup family, which surprises people who aren't familiar with its diversity. What you actually see is an inflorescence where the floral display is largely composed of stamen filaments and a smallish single perianth whorl, a bit like mimosoid legumes. Small flowers arranged like this in either "bottle brushes" or "powder puffs" function as diverse pollinators move over the outside of the inflorescence. Once established, and this must be said, they are slow, these are great perennials under the shade of hardwood trees.