Friday Fabulous Flower - It's red, really red.

This is usually not the type of plant TPP grows, mostly.  It's common in more tropical climes, it's an annual, but seeds itself in fairly easily.  But it attracts hummingbirds!  OK even a rocket scientist could probably tell a botanist that this is a morning glory.  Trumpet shaped flower on a twining vine.  It has a number of common names, but TPP has heard it called cypress vine, cardinal flower, and cardinal creeper mostly.  Cardinal flower is out because red lobelia is called that.  Cypress?  Don't see the connection, but there you go.  This is Ipomea quamoclit, the same genus as sweet protato, which you may not have known was a morning glory.  This vine doesn't have huge flowers, about an inch across, but they definitely are red, and who doesn't want more hummingbirds.  Our friends in OK gave up on feeders and grow this vine instead. The highly dissected leaves have always seemed rather interesting too. So fix up something 6-8 feet tall for it to climb on and grow this little vine. It's for the birds, hmm.

Plant parasite of plants

One of our students defended her master's thesis today, and it was a very impressive study designed to see if a plant parasite responds to a host plant under water stress like insect herbivores would respond.  The parasite is an amazing organism, dodder, a fully parasitic vine in the morning glory family.  It looks like yellow-gold silly string, and it can make some really impressive infestations.  One of the hardest problems is keeping a single parasite on a single host, and in nature the vine can sprawl across numerous hosts and make hundreds of connections to the vascular tissues of the host plants.  It turns out that dodder doesn't react like aphids or other herbivous insects, but it is a totally amazing organism none-the-less. Image courtesy of Silvae.