Friday Fabulous Flower - Mimiature "holly"

Not too many people notice these little pink flowers on a little shrub in our glasshouse. Most people think it's some kind of miniature holly because of its leathery leaves with spiny margins, and that's what Malpighia coccigera is called some times.  This species is a close relative of the Barbados cherry (M. glabra). The fruit of both species is a bright red berry/drupe, but the former's fruit is pretty small. It's sort of unusual to see petals on stalks, but the sepals peeking through each have a pair of glands.   Sometimes this shrub is grown as an ornamental, and for many years TPP had one as a bonsai tree that required constant pruning (a total pain because it's a stubborn plant).  Nonetheless it's charming in flower especially when seen close up.  The name is interesting because it's an honorific for Marcello Malpighi, a professor at Bologna during in mid1600s. Here's his  Wikipedia entry: Malpighi gave his name to several physiological features related to the biological excretory system such as the Malpighian corpuscles and Malpighian pyramids of the kidneys and the Malpighian tubules of insects. Well, that is just an outrage!  Marcello was one of the father's of plant anatomy, and not a mention of that or the plant genus named after him!  This is the usual human-biomedical bias about what's important in biology!  What would you rather have named after you?  Some part of the excretory system or a really attractive flower?  

Going Gaga over a fern

Honorifics are either generic or specific epithets that honor someone by using their name.  They are quite common actually, and sometimes they can be humorous or down right mean.  Consider Ruiz and Pavon who named the genus Galinsoga after a Dutch rival saying that the beauty and size of the flower matched his botanical accomplishments, except the flowers were small and not very attractive.  So this is pretty funny actually, a new fern genus, Gaga, yes, an honorific for Lady Gaga, and it was done by one of my good colleagues, Kathleen Pryor, in the most recent issue of Systematic Botany.  Now they could have done better with the title of the article, “Going Gaga over ferns” or something like that, but it’s still pretty catchy.  The resemblance is pretty obvious in this illustration except they are comparing this haploid fern to the diploid singer.  HT to AoB blog and No seeds, no fruits, no flowers; no problem blog. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Galphimia glauca

Wow, almost missed the fact that today is a Friday, and that just wouldn't do, would it? Here's another denizen of our glasshouse, one of the most prolifically flowering shrubs in the collection: Galphimia glauca. This is another member of the Malpighia (Barbados cherry) family; you may recall the miniature holly of about a month ago. One of the factoids presented then was that Malpighia was an honorific taxonomic name; so is Galphimia but in a very unusual way. See if you can figure it out before reading any further. Any puzzle loving people out there get it? Galphimia is an anagram of Malpighia so maybe it's a fonichori. This genus also displays the "stalked petals" common in the family. This shrub has some limited ornamental value in warmer climates and is a popular non-component of homeophathic remedies for hayfever, but that's good because the leaves and twigs are poisonous and extracts used as an insecticide. The flowers are about 1.2-2 cm in diameter.

The Princess tree - a royal pain?

A recent trip to the NYC area coincided with the flowering of the Princess tree, Paulownia tomentosa, also known as the royal paulownia or the empress tree. While those names suggest quite a blue blooded European pedigree, in actual fact this very attractive tree is from Asia. The genus is named after Anna Pavlovna, daughter of Czar Paul I, the eventual wife of Prince Willen of the Netherlands, so the name is what we call an honorific.

Paulownia is a very fast growing tree and you sometimes see ads in newspaper inserts touting it as a super-fast growing shade tree. And among trees, the princess tree is a real speed demon, growing to several inches diameter in just a few years, but this also means its wood is light weight and the trees tend to break easily and die young. So why was it imported way back in 1834? Well, in flower the princess tree is quite striking with its big panicles of large snapdragon like flowers.

And it makes lots of seeds, and they grow quite well in disturbed areas. The fact that princess tree is a woody invasive "weed" in some areas is not actually much of a problem there in the NYC area because where it grows, on railroad embankments, vacant lots, alleys, and the like ,means it covers up even worse looking stuff. However in areas of eastern TN and western NC this invasive tree is taking over road sides and rocky areas, and it has become so common many people think it a native. While the tree looks quite a bit like a Catalpa, it isn't a member of the bignon family, but sort of loosely related to some of the bits and pieces left over from the recent dismemberment of the snapdragon family.

So royalty or just a royal pain? Mostly the latter except when its flowering.

That's PROFESSOR to you, fella!

This really rubs my rhubarb! This issue is nothing new, and it ranges from our local news rag to the ever dwindling giants of news publishing. The issue has surfaced because, unlike all previous vice presidential spouses, Mrs. Biden has a doctorate in education and teaches college courses. So here is my annoyance. Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific "Dr." unless the person in question has a medical degree.

I used to ask all of our PhD students what PhD stands for in the rather perverse perspective that you don’t deserve any degree if you don’t know what its honorific stands for. If you are a reasonably well educated person, you are undoubtedly aware that PhD stands for philosophiæ doctor, written in italics because it is Latin. Philosophy means lover of knowledge, and here’s the critical part, doctor means TEACHER!

MDs are physicians, a worthy and noble profession, but they are not teachers, and yet they are the only ones to merit the honorific doctor? Wow! Refusing to grant academics the honorific doctor because they don’t have a medical degree exposes the ignorance and attitudes of journalists whose 6.5 years of undergraduate study in communication or journalism at some state college clearly were not equal to their task. They probably still don’t know what the B in their own degree stands for even though the Phytophactor has tried to help.

The real reason for not calling people with PhDs doctors is the fundamental anti-intellectualism that permeates our society. You certainly don’t want to acknowledge that some egghead intellectual actually might know and understand some things better than a journalist or other member of the general public. The American public much prefers good old boy street smarts and common sense that gets itself mislead and hosed on such a regular basis that what we really, really need in this country is a remedial course in critical thinking for everybody.