Friday Fabulous Flower - Little things in small packages

Nice little things come in small packages, but we often over look the small flowers around us because so many of our ornamental plants have been chosen and selected to have big flowers.  Here's a flowering shrub whose flowers hardly get noticed because even in axillary clusters they are a pretty small display. 

An individual flower is only 2-3 mm across.  This shrub flowers on new wood, this year's growth, and sequentially from bottom to top of the branch.  Long time readers have actually seen this before because TPP featured it way back in 2008, but in October when it's fruit display was at peak attractiveness, and long after it had flowered.  With summer flowering generally diminished by the drought, these flowers were getting plenty of attention from insects.  Fruit eating migratory birds like these shade tolerant shrubs' fruits a lot.  In the tropics you see more bright blue-purple fruit colors than in the temperate zone.  By now you've probably figured out or check the link to discover this is an azure beauty berry (Callicarpa dichotoma).

Friday Fabulous Flower - At the stage of seed dispersal

A fruit is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Fruits aren't something different, just those parts of flowers that undergo a post-pollination development. Here's a particularly interesting one of Paeonia japonica, a species new to our gardens, and what a cool fruit/seed display. The follicle-like fruitlets have an unimpressive dull green-gray to brownish color, looking a bit like a short pea pod, until they dehisce, opening along a lateral suture and then how colorful is that! The fertile seeds have a dark blue fleshy covering (aril probably, or fleshy seed coat) while the undeveloped seed are soft, fleshy and red, and makes you wonder if this is a plant making to most of an otherwise wasted resource (unpollinated seeds) as an attractant and reward because they are considerably larger than at the time of pollination. If not pollinated, most ovules abort their development. The inner fruit wall is purple. This display is exactly what you would expect for bird seed dispersers. Calling all cedar waxwings!

Fall Color - Winterberry

Most fall color comes from foliage, but a few plants produce colorful displays of fruit. Sometime back the Phactor featured the azure beauty berry, a terrific shade-loving, low care shrub. Another shrub that does well in the difficult continental climate of Lincolnland is winterberry, a deciduous holly (Ilex verticilliata), and since it drops its leaves, the display of bright scarlet fruits is all the more dramatic. Like all hollies, winter berry is also dioecious (di – two, oecious–housed), so you have to plant one pollen producer for every several female shrubs if you want fruit. And of course, the birds love such fruits, so expect your attractive display to disappear by way of helping them along on their migrations.