Friday Fabulous Flower - Is poinsettia a real flower?

'Tis Christmas eve, and all through the house the Phactors are fixing a dinner for friends and family.  Unfortunately not much is blooming to mention, but while stopping by his favorite garden shoppe, an old favorite question popped up.  A woman asked, "Is this [referencing a poinsettia] a real flower?"  As opposed to being artificial, this is surely a real plant. But if she was asking, is the attractive part of this plant a flower?  Then the answer is no.  Poinsettias have large, colorful bracts, leaves associated with flowers, and usually flowers are present, and they are a bit hard to explain and often not noticed. The plants have "male" pollen flowers, and "female flowers", unisexual flowers, and they are clustered together variously giving the superficial appearance of bisexual flowers, but they lack the usual attractive petals.  The most conspicuous floral parts are the oblong yellow nectaries.  Male flowers here have anthers with yellow pollen showing. Female flowers have a conspicuous rounded ovary with red style/stigma branches at the top.  Quite a few flowers can be found here at the center of just one "bloom" surrounded by a couple of dozen bracts.  So yes, these are real flowers, just maybe not what you were thinking.  Here's a link to a past FFF about another Euphorbia that looks even more like a flower.
The mini-lecture was ended and another woman said, "I wouldn't have such a poisonous plant in my house." What crap!  Poinsettias are in the spurge family, and many plants in this family are charmingly toxic, but not this one. You'd have to eat every red leaf in sight to maybe get a toxic dose.  Unlikely.  Poinsettia's toxicity however is a quite common myth about the plant.  No need to worry about having one around the house.  She still didn't buy one, but probably because she didn't know who she was talking with.

Flowers at the stage of seed dispersal

Of course TPP is talking about fruits, flowers at the stage of seed dispersal. These particularly handsome berries were among the best part of our kitchen garden this season, so far. Note the past tense. Now begins the whining of a gardener with a small garden.  One of the major problems with small gardens is that they cannot sustain much damage. The person who plants 50 tomatoes at her Father's place in the country doesn't have to worry about losing a plant or two, or a variety that doesn't like the weather this year, or an animal eating their fill. A rather violent thunderstorm toppled one of our tomato trees (5 feet tall) in a cage and the fall snapped off the stem about 8 inches above the soil.  It would grow back and probably even produce some fruit, but that was one sixth of our tomato orchard; it was replaced by a late season bargain from a garden shop closeout sale. So far this year the eggplant had been a stand out; vigorous, healthy plants, early prolific fruiting. Yea!  Then some miscreant who hadn't read or decided to ignore "wildlife friendly yard" agreement picked almost all the leaves off the eggplants at the base of the petioles, and dropped them.  They weren't to their taste, but in a classic slow learner response, they tried another, and another, and so on down the row. This was not one of the usual suspects, not neat enough for bun-buns or tree rats, and neither ever pays any attention to eggplant (nightshades generally are not their thing).  A couple of small eggplant were chewed on a bit, and TPP suspects perhaps an opossum.  The thing is that eggplant without many or any leaves don't produce much fruit until they recover. On the good news side of things the Japanese beetle season is about over; it was fairly brief and the beetles were not very numerous. Big cannas and a June berry bush were the only plants significantly damaged. 

Chelsea Flower show pictures

Here's a pictorial preview of the Chelsea Flower show from the Guardian. It doesn't do the show justice, but it does give you a taste of the floral extravagance that will be on display. Logistically it seems quite impossible to have so many perfectly flowering specimens of so many different plants all at once and for the entire week of the show. The displays are always quite beautiful, and even the potatoes are beautiful. Was it worth attending?  Yes, although they limit the number for each day of the show, the crowd was a bit dismaying. Rather hard to stand and just admire a garden at times even if they do forbid that bane of street fairs, farmers' markets, and garden shows, the stroller (or is it a pram?). And also no dogs. What ever makes you think your dog enjoys going to such events with you? Sorry.  You also get an idea here just how creative some of the garden designs are.  Enjoy.

Gardening by-products - butterflies

The Phactors did not set out to plant a butterfly garden, and yet we did as a consequence of trying to generate season long flower color and plant diversity. A number of butterflies have always been fairly common in particular painted ladies and red admirals, and the ubiquitous white cabbage butterflies. During the late afternoon, groups of red admirals dance in colorful tornadoes in sun spots that appear here and there in our gardens, undoubtably a behavior associated with reproduction. Monarchs have been fairly common this year, which is good because many biologists are concerned about their declining population levels. Milkweeds, their larval food plant, have never done well in our gardens although at least 3 species have been tried, but milkweeds are common enough in many places. The most common fairly spectacular butterfly is the tiger swallowtail, and tulip trees, their larval food plant, are quite common in our neighborhood. Black swallowtails are also fairly common and their very distinctive black-yellow-green larvae can be found eating your parsley and dill, another butterfly with a family level dietary restriction. This year a rare sighting of a giant swallowtail was a nice surprise, but TPP does not know their food plants. Now that several spice bushes, Lindera benzoin, have gotten to a decent size, as well as a largish Sassafras tree, spicebush swallowtails have become regular residents. Note the variable bluish-green coloring mostly on the lower wings, a marking that quickly distinguishes them from black swallowtails. Now all of the plants mentioned above are larval food plants, the adults are all nectar consumers patrolling the many different flowers, particularly mints, pinks, composites, and the like. Even from here in the kitchen the various butterflies can be seen flitting about the flower garden. This image of the spicebush swallowtail feeding on a blazing star is from the Ohio-nature website and you can find many more butterfly images there. 

Buckets of flowers

Isn't this pretty? Buckets of flowers for the bride and bride's maids all sitting together keeping fresh. Garden came through with the flowers when needed. It's a bit humid and some light showers are threatening.  Don't want TPP's Hawaiian wedding shirt to get wet.

Bird interactions

It's a beautiful summer day here in the upper midwest, as nice as they get. With a high in the mid-80s, it's probably a bit warm for some people, but with lows in the mid-60s, the house stays very comfortable. Things are pretty well spruced up inside and out for all the visitors from near and far. One of the farthest is due to arrive in about 30 min. by train, although a distance train horn can now be heard; north bound or south bound? Can't tell. Rain is skirting our area to the south, and the gardens could use some watering. Containers had to be watered, but some beds need watering for the first time this year. August is always dry. Areas of the lawn that got flooded a few times earlier this summer are still in bad shape, and now the soil is beginning to crack. Lovely. The Phactors are not the tallest of people, so some dangling bald cypress twigs had to be trimmed so as not to mess with tall people's heads. No top hats are expected for this wedding.
Oh, yes, this was to be about birds. It was a very birdy day; lots of activity. While ruby throated hummingbirds are very common out in the countryside, they are more uncommon in our urban setting, however with lots of good butterfly and hummingbird flowers open a lot of both are around. Tiger swallowtails are pretty common, but a giant swallowtail made an appearance. And spicebush butterflies are more common this year probably because we have their food plant. A couple of hummingbirds were operating throughout our gardens. What was most interesting was to watch a hummingbird interact agressively with a house wren. Now of course they do not compete for the same food at all, so TPP really doesn't understand why the hummingbird was so intent on chasing the wren out of the area. Watched the hummer fly up and dance back & forth right in front of the perched wren until the wren bailed out with the hummer on his tail. Strange.

Mrs. Phactor's gardens

A number of readers have requested that TPP feature Mrs. Phactor's gardens in some of his blogs. Well, they are completely right; he should and will. A number of the flowers have been featured on various Fridays, but not the garden as a whole, or even small portions thereof.  Mostly these gardens are intended to be viewed as a whole, a melange of flowers and colors and textures that change through the seasons. Right now there are some pretty vivid colors which are quite a change from early June. Even since this image was taken, a rose mallow, Queen of the prairie, and a couple of bee-balms have added themselves to the mix. From our patios, the perennial gardens sit in front of a dark, wooded background. Pretty and cheerful, and loaded with butterflies. Enjoy.  

Expected witch-hazel, got more snow instead

Well, isn't this just a fine development?  By this time the witch-hazels should be in bloom and probably the silver maples too. Instead it snowed some more and the forecast is for another week of winter weather at least. Blast that woodchuck! This is not helping TPP teach plant taxonomy and ID at all. You see, things have to flower so that you can identify them using a field manual. Granted, plants are not usually cooperative in this regard, but that's the way of it. Now woody plants usually provide enough material that you can identify them on the basis of winter or leafy twigs if you have the right field guide and if the bun-buns have left you any twigs, but otherwise you need flowers. TPP will be reduced to begging for leftovers at the local florist shoppes. How demeaning! The glasshouse helps and this past week it provided examples of several important families: dogbane, euphorb, mallow, cactus, and dutchman's pipe. But that doesn't help with the local flora. So what is a guy to do? Hmm, let's put a nice beef brisket in the spiced brine to "corn" it (takes about 2 weeks), and maybe make some gumbo to cover all the holidays in view. 

No such thing as typical meets non-observers

In trying to teach students about floral parts and the diversity of ways they get put together you quickly come to understand that there is no such thing as a typical flower.  Now, as always, patient observation and thoughtful study usually get them to a satisfactory understanding of the specimens provided.  Did you detect the flaw in this last statement?  Today's students are not patient, observant, or particularly thoughtful.  The biggest problem they had in figuring out the imperfect flowers of Begonia was reading the sign that said "two types of flowers; take one of each".  Yes, even that tiny bit of instruction was too much for some of them.  Hosta (Don't tell you-know-who her flowers were stolen for a lab!) and Aloe did not seem alike because they were different colors!  Hmm, where's that section of the lab guide that says lavender and orange flowers can't ever both be monocots.  Anthurium was just a total puzzle, and nobody in the entire class had any idea what a jack-in-the-pulpit was!  Isn't that one of the more easily recognized and common wild flowers in this area?  Doesn't anyone go outside any more?  No wonder plant identification is such a rare skill anymore; people don't even know the common things any more.  You tell them that Kohleria is a gesner, nothing registers, so you say it's in the African violet family, still nothing registers!  Not only don't they go outside, they don't bring any nature inside either!  TPP needs a drink; hold the nectar. 

Hot, humid summer field work

Humidty on our prairie study site was about 300% (based on how it felt) this morning especially down in the vegetation where we had little seedling plots to photograph.  The emergent vegetation, e.g., compass plant, is already about 6 feet tall and getting ready to flower.  The grasses will wait until later to shoot upward for flowering.  Quite different from the stunted growth of last year's heat and drought.  This area has had rain for the past few days so the plants can transpire a lot, and that makes the humity down in the vegetation as high as it can get.  And as the morning wore on, the heat rose, and you just became soaked in sweat.  Now the only complaint here is that when you're trying to see things, bending over, you keep getting sweat on the lens of your glasses, and that's really annoying.  The other problem is the prairie vegetation has lots of rough edges, and wearing short sleeves for comfort, your arms get quite scratched from pawing through the leaves searching for your well marked plots that nonetheless are hard to find.  It's not just sedges that have edges.  In compensation it's a nice meadow of flowers this time of year, fleabane asters, yarrow, wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium, shown with beetle floral

visitor), cone flowers purple and pale, pinks, black-eyed susans, sunflowers, lead plant.  Tomorrow morning will be a repeat.

This week's lab - quad spring field trip

Today and yesterday have been the first two days this semester when you could actually conduct some out door instruction and not be cold or wet, or both.  One of the problems with lab instruction is that the bits and pieces, the specimens, the pickled items, the microscopic slides, don't get integrated into the minds of many students because they didn't take them apart to begin with.  This is why it's so useful to take people and show them where everything came from, i.e., that cones and flowers are actually attached to plants, in particular ways, in certain places, and that if you observe closely you can see some things you've never noticed before, like the North American corkwood (Leitneria floridana) in full glorious bloom!  OK, actually some pretty unremarkable catkins, but the plant is plenty unusual.  The only problem today is that the entire campus is outside too and inevitably somebody has made the mistake of choosing some space under the only "male" ginkgo on the campus, or the only doug-fir with nice cones, and so on.  TPP tried to include them, you know, make them feel like part of the group, show them what's going on, and some seem happy enough to play along, and others give you let's-leave-the-weirdos-alone stare.  You can even suggest they shift their lounging over to a flowering crab or some other inconsequential tree.  If they get a bit crabby TPP points out that this is his classroom, and they are welcome visitors, but he's got a class to teach.    

Very amusing bird & flower field guide

For the biologically challenged there's a fun description of an old fanciful field guide provided by Stoat.  All you birders and flower hunters will enjoy this.  It's just fun, silly fun particularly if you've ever been confused by clover and plover.