Holiday floral display - tropical version

OK this isn't actually a holiday floral display, but it is quite the flowering extravaganza, a rather large Clerodendron doing its thing is a study in red and green our druidic colors of the season.  This is really quite an amazing display because you would expect the flowers at the bottom to be older and further along in flowering, but they all appear generally to be at the same stage. Sorry about not snipping the image, but it isn't mine and if you don't click over Garden Tropics you'll miss the other flower pictures.  You may want to bookmark that page.  Enjoy.

Rainforest Field Trip - Friday Fabulous Flower - Angelic Orchid

You would think nothing could be easier than finding a candidate for the Friday fabulous flower when you're in the rain forest, but the actual fact is that a lot of flowers are pretty small although interesting in their own right. Big and gaudy is rather unusual, but a few flowers do make a pretty good impact on their own. Another thing about rain forests is that the only bright place is on top of the canopy, and this particular primate doesn't do high well, although it is actually the sudden descent and abrupt stop that worries the Phactor, so some flowers have a display well adapted to the dim light of the forest understory. Here is an angelic orchid (Epidendrum eburneum) that seems to be whiter than white. The plants do not produce many flowers and they last many days unless pollinated where upon they wilt almost immediately. The actual pollinator is unknown to me, perhaps a hawkmoth, which means is might operate in the very dim light of dawn and dusk, or even those nights when there is a bit of moonlight, otherwise it's very, very dark out there.

Rainforest Field Trip - Forest Decor

Rainforest is a high diversity ecosystem; there's a lot of green out there and most of the plants have the same problem of making your presence known. Since individuals plants are at a low density, the plant must have a means of signaling their presence to pollen dispersers who must then move to the next individual of the same species if pollination is to be achieved. Plants whose flowers are small have to find ways to advertising and one strategy employed by quite a few is to group small flowers together and put something big, gaudy, and colorful right next to them, usually a modified leaf, a bract. This plant (Warszewiczia coccinea) is called the wild poinsettia but it is a member of the coffee family (Rubiaceae) not the euphorb family of the true poinsettia, which is another neotropical plant. That's the trouble with common names; you just can't trust them. But they do both use this mechanism of placing a bright red bract next to a cluster of small rather nondescript flowers, so you don't miss this one out in the forest.

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.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow-fringed Water Snowflake

The yellow-fringed water snowflake (Nymphoides geminata) is one of quite a number of tropical and subtropical species in this genus. Nymphoides means "like Nymphaea", like waterlilies, and while sort of like waterlilies in the growth pattern of some species, they are not closely related at all. For small, shallow water gardens these can be quite nice, easy to grow, showy plants, and while growing this plant for reasons now forgotten the Phactor noticed the fringed petals. Now anything that increases the size of a floral display is generally interpreted as enhancing its ability to get visited and pollinated, and this was how the function of the fringe was explained. Quite by accident, the ever observant Phactor discovered that the fringe had a second function. Experimentation demonstrated that the fringe interacts with the surface tension of water, the same principle that allows a water strider to walk on water, and rather than rising water drowning the tethered flowers, it closes the petals, and when the water level recedes the flower reopens undampened, a useful adaptation for a plant growing in shallow water subject to rapid and brief changes in water levels. That was some real "fringe science", but without question it's a fabulous flower.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow Coneflower

The sweltering heat and humidity of the midwestern summer season are upon us, and many of my exotic babies, natives of milder climates, suffer, while a few plants hailing from more southern climates, rejoice. But the plants that do best, year in and year out, are natives. So this friday's fabulous flower is a native of the tall grass prairie, the yellow coneflower (Ratibida pinnata). Some people confuse the yellow coneflower with the black-eyed susan, which is in another genus altogether. Both are members of the sunflower family, so actually this isn't a fabulous flower, but a fabulous inflorescence composed of brown radially symmetrical disk flowers centrally and yellow bilaterally symmetrical ray flowers appearing like petals (as in "she loves me, she loves me not") around the periphery. The yellow corollas of ray flowers droop downward (as shown), while the corollas of black-eyed susans are held more or less out at right angles (there are other differences too). The disk flowers in the center (top) of the button haven't opened yet. Inflorescences like these present the appearance of a single flower because that's the point, to cluster a bunch of small flowers in such a way as to present a bigger display. Pollinators always looking for the biggest reward are attracted to bigger displays, and inflorescences like these are one way plants with small flowers enhance their attractiveness and reproductive success.