Friday Fabulous Flower - Purple Lacecap Hydrangea

Although everything is pretty thristy right about now (our area of the upper midwest is dry, dry, dry), the mild winter and early spring were to a few plants liking.  Never before have the hydrangeas looked so good.  And take if from the Phactor, this is unusual.  Hydrangeas don't like it here very much; our soil is too heavy and not acid enough, and our summers are too hot and dry.  The hot dry part has just arrived with June, about a month early, but until now the hydrangeas have just been great.  Several 'Endless Summer' hydrangeas clustered in the front garden have been stopping traffic of all sorts.  Even a snowbell hydrangea that got eaten off by rabbits over the winter has produced a big display.  Here's one of the less gaudy ones, a purple lacecap (Hydrangea serrata 'bluebird') and it's never looked like anything before, so it was on the short list of perform or get replaced.  This year will get it a reprieve although not a pardon. In this area hydrangeas tend to the pink end of the spectrum (high pH), but application of fertilizer for acid-loving plants has shifted flower colors to blue, so they are looking pretty good for this reason too.

Little green and purple things

So many blogs and so little time. It's quite fun to see what fascinates other people enough to blog about it, and the more so when the blogger is biological and actually includes green (and purple) things. Phil often has won plant ID quizzes and a link is provided to his Digital Botanic Garden, but while my intentions have been good, his tiny, tiny things blog (Beyond the Human Eye) has never been mentioned. My bad. To start out, you may want to see why certain flowers are purple. The image is of petal cells before a sweet treatment. The Phactor loves microscopy, but his aged equipment, while optically just fine, is stuck in the now totally dead film era and no $$ are forthcoming to fix the problem and go digital. And speaking of microscopy and looking at the wonderous little things that abound (remember - mostly unicellular) the Skeptic Wonder provides a window on these little known and under appreciated beasties. This one features cryptomonads, little solar-powered, armoured battleships that have a distant common ancestry with the brown algae.

Jade vine - Another ludicrous flower to enjoy

The jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys) is a tropical liana (woody vine) from the Philippines. If you know your plant families, you’ll recognize these flowers as beans/legumes right away (1 standard petal, two lateral petals, and two petals forming a keel housing the stamens and pistil) except what a color! This pale blue-green color is very unusual flower color, but it shows up well in dim light against a dark and green background, which abounds in the rain forest understory where the Phactor works.

Each individual flower is about 2 inches long. And like wisteria, which the Phactor is told flowers, his own vine providing no evidence of this at all, the inflorescence hangs upside down, so each flower twists 180 degrees on its stalk to present itself right side up. Some tropical fruits have a similar pale blue color, again to show up well against a dark background, and the Phactor promises to show you one soon.

The inflorescence of flowers is a foot or two long and hangs down from the vine on long cord-like stems. And this combined with the color tells me that the pollinator is a nectar foraging bat! A similar bean (Mucuna holtonii) grows in the neotropics, but the flower color is just a pale greenish, however the upper petal of this bean’s flower acts as a sound reflector to bounce the bat’s sonic signals back at them (research conducted by Dagmar and Otto von Helversen; you meet the best people while doing field research.). Jade vine is now fairly common in conservatory collections at botanical gardens, like the New York Botanical Garden which is where this picture was taken (eat your heart out GrrlScientist).

The flowers work by lever action. The weight of the bat pushes the keel down forcing either the pollen laden anthers or the stigma out the tip of the keel to make contact with the bat’s body. Unfortunately never having seen bats and the jade vine in action, I don’t know how exactly the two interact, and very unfortunately, the native habitat of both are threatened by deforestation. It’s depressing to know that someday such organisms may only live in cultivation. At least this Asian import won’t escape into the wilds of the Bronx.