Friday Fabulous Flower(s) - all around weirdness

OK, now before you read on, what family of flowering plants does this specimen belong to?  In fact some may wonder if it is a monocot or a dicot given that the flower parts are in multiples of three.  Although virtually all textbooks and field guides so delineate monocots and dicots, actually flowers with parts in multiples of three are a shared character between monocots and dicots.  And you just might notice the very dicot palmately compound leaves.  TPP remembers the first time he encountered this vine.  As a new botany teaching assistant my assignment was to provide a specimen of a monoecious plant, one with both staminate and pistillate flowers, i.e., "unisexual" flowers, on the same plant.  Wow! What a find.  Dragged it into the lab and labelled it "monoecious".  Job done.  The professor in charge, a grand old man of the department, wasn't satisfied.  "What is this?"  Why, Professor, surely you recognize that!  Where upon TPP decides maybe it would be a good time to grab his Gleason and Cronquist and figure out what this actually was.  A bit later the Professor seeks me out in my office with the plant in question in hand.  "Exactly what family do you think this is in?" he asked.  After looking at it carefully, TPP replied calmly.  Well, Professor, this is a bit unusual, and it is a new one on me, but if a guess has to be made about the family, it would be Lardazabalaceae.  "Harrumpf!"  Yes, did you get it right?  The Lardazabala family, just your plain ordinary totally weird family.  Firstly, this cultivar has cream colored flowers and the wild type has purple (pistillate) or lighter lavender colored (staminate) flowers.  Each inflorescence consists of one larger pistillate flower with 6-9 (mostly 6, this one 8?) protruding and cylindrical pistils, and three petalloid perianth parts (neatly side stepping the sepal or petal question).  The rest of the flowers are staminate, each with 6 stamens that have rather broad, flat, one might say leafy, anthers.  (If you looked closely with a lens or dissecting scope you would find rudimentary stamens and pistils in the pistillate and staminate flowers respectively.  When actually hanging free, the pistillate flower hangs above the staminate flowers.  TPP often wonders how this whole thing works in the wild; here in N. America the plant doesn't seem to have any takers.  Akebia quinata is an ornamental vine from east Asia that does sometimes escape or more often over grows its boundaries.  Although it seems to ignore warnings of impending cold, the vine is quite hardy.  This one hides our recyling and trash bins quite effectively. 

Time to update my taxonomy and YOURS: part 2

A reader has asked the Phytophactor “why seed plants evolved into monocots and dicots?” This question actually can’t be answered because science is not very good at answering WHY questions. This question is even more difficult to answer because flowering plants can no longer be simply divided into monocots and dicots, and it would be wrong to say they evolved into monocots and dicots. This is because phylogenetic studies tell us that monocots (Liliopsida) evolved from a common ancestry with dicots, and as a result, they share many characters with basal angiosperms. However, dicots no longer form a single lineage, the requirement for being recognized as a taxonomic group. The rest of the groups shown in this simplified phylogenetic diagram are dicots, except for the outgroup, gymnosperms, but even some gymnosperms share the character of having two cotyledons. So dicots, a lineage of plants with two cotyledons, does not.
None of this tells us why such groups evolved. Flowering plants presumably were more successful in many habitats than other seed plants. This may be attributed to many things, not the least being their interactions with animals involved with pollen and seed dispersal, although cycads use both as well. Why monocots evolved cannot be answered other than to say a set of modifications in the ancestors of this lineage were successful and plants with these characteristics proliferated.
The second part of the answer is that the taxonomy of flowering plants is far more complicated than monocots and dicots. Even this diagram does not reflect many of the newest findings or even show all the lineages (it was just handy), but it shows the general organization and gives examples of familiar plants. The ANITA grade is a series of basal lineages now just called ANA as some new relationships have combined what were separate lineages. The label refers to their names (e.g., A is for Amborella, N is for waterlilies, A is for Austrobaileyales), and the AA lineages have two cotyledons while the waterlilies only have one. The eudicots (eu- means true) all share a particular type of pollen. So, although this is not reflected in formal taxonomies because of the difficulty of translating such knowledge into the traditional taxonomic framework, flowering plants consist of the following groups/lineages: three lineages forming a basal ANA grade, monocots, the magnolids, and the eudicots. Even this is simplified, but next spring the Phactor will be teaching plant taxonomy.