Friday Fabulous Flower - A Rose by anyother name

Well, a rose by name may not be a rose, like a rose-of-Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) Mallow family, as the flower so aptly shows.  The common name refers to a place, Sharon, in Palestine, and the rose-of-Sharon is a woman from there, referring herself in Solomon 2:1 if you like Biblical references, but this is not the plant being referred to which was more likely a sun-rose, Cistaceae.  This Hibiscus is of Asian origin.  Sorry, don't have my Plants of the Bible reference book handy. This particular plant grows as a small to medium sized shrub, and it has the great advantage of flowering in the late summer for several weeks.  This particular variety (?) has a single flower with non-overlapping petals.  Many other varieties exist and you can often find very old plants as this ornamental has been around a long time. Many have more purplish/bluish flowers and if they are doubled, they quickly begin looking like a wad of tissue. It's only problem, as a mallow the Japanese beetle find it quite appealing although ours has not been much bothered this year.  The plant is quite cold hardy, maybe not quite hardy to the bottom of zone 5.  Our plant works well in a mixed perennial bed even when a bit short because the flowers while not huge are pretty big (4" in diam). The white with bold red markings is pretty striking.

About okra

Yesterday's trip to our local farmer's market held no real surprises: peppers were rebounding, tomatoes, except maybe cherry tomatoes, were shot, fall crops were coming into season, and people had a lot of okra for sale, and sadly, most of it was not worth buying.  The reason for this is simple; it was all too mature.  There are a number of fruits that we usually eat as vegetables that are only edible when immature.  The mature fruits are inedible.  Okra matures into a hard, dry capsular fruit that splits open along 5 seams to release its seeds.  As long as the young fruits are elongating, they are soft enough to consume, but once they reach their mature length, they become fibrous very quickly, and okra grows rather quickly so you must pick any pods more than an inch long once a week.  This is the zucchini lesson all over again.  Pick them young!  But vendor after vendor had great big old things as if large size were a virtue.  Hmm, no image of okra in the files, especially a mature fruit, but here's a nice image of an okra flower.  The flower is a dead give-away that okra belongs in the mallow/hibiscus family.

The season and okra in combination remind TPP of one more thing: my suggestion that team mascots be plant names.  Let's add to the ranks of forward looking universities and colleges by introducing the Delta State Fighting Okras!  Yea, go Okras!  Fear the Okra!  Got to get one of those t-shirts!  If the pods start to sprout arms, they're too old to eat.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Dombeya spectabilis

This is not a plant you see very often. It was formerly in the Sterculia family, but the Mallow family was enlarged to include all such genera. In truth the flowers and leaves are very mallowish. The flowers are just at the lower range of what is considered large, about 2-2.5 cm in diameter, but they are clustered into rounded inflorescences to make quite a display. This species has brighter pink flowers than other species the Phactor has seen, perhaps the reason for calling it "spectacular". Dombeya is an honorific for a hard-luck French botanist who kept getting his impressive and valuable collections "stolen" and as a result some still reside in the British Museum. The interesting thing is that as the flower opens, the edges of the petals are dusted with pollen functioning perhaps as a pollen presenter, which is somewhat unusual especially for the perianth. But the trouble with such captives is that you do not get to see them interact with other organisms in the wild so how they work remains unknown.