Friday Fabulous Flower - Fruit stage

 

Flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, i.e., fruit, tend to get over looked.  Next to our patio is an old TV antenna that makes a good fire escape and a great plant trellis.  In this case the plant is our Magnolia vine, Schisandra chinensis.  The flowers now at the stage of fruit development made an interesting pattern. Each more or less light green axis is from a flower and on it are oval fruitlets from each of the ovaries on the receptacle of this flower.  The larger oval ones will mature, the smaller ones are abortive fruitlets, but they all will turn scarlet in color.  What is unique is how much the receptacle elongates after pollination such that the bunch of fruitlets looks more like a bunch of fruits.  Since they are spaced our the individual fruitlets stay solitary rather then fusing laterally like the drupelets of a raspberry.  Enjoy?

Friday Fabulous Flower - Basal Angiosperm Flower at the stage of seed dispersal

An old, but very sturdy TV antenna tower (remember those?) stands at the corner of our house, and it seemed like a good idea to plant a vine next to such a good climbing structure. The vine is Kadsura japonica, magnolia vine, and it occupies an interesting phylogenetic position that you are probably not aware of. Angiosperm taxonomy used to be easy: monocots and dicots. Monocots are still pretty easy, but not dicots. At the base of the flowering plant "family" tree are three lineages that have the most ancient common ancestries with the rest of the flowering plants. And one of these three lineages includes the Schisandraceae, the Schisandra family, which has two genera: Kadsura and Schisandra. The flowers of this species have either lots of pistils or leafy anthers, but not both, surrounded by a perianth not differentiated into petals and sepals, and all the parts are spirally arranged. Each pistil develops into a red fruitlet borne upon a much elongated receptacle (think long skinny strawberry). In the two flowers shown, at the stage of seed dispersal, you can see both the mature fruitlets and abortive ones that didn't get pollinated. The red fruitlets are edible, although pretty tart, and if enough of them could be reached (the vine is now 15+ feet above the roof of our house) some basal angiosperm jelly would be in the offing. Soon a flock of cedar waxwings, or some other dinosaurian relative (how appropriate for such an ancient lineage!) will appear, and the fruitlets will disappear. Although sensitive to late spring frosts, the vine is hardy in zone 5 and probably in zone 4 too. Just the thing to hide that old antenna tower!