Field of Science

Showing posts with label plant identification quiz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plant identification quiz. Show all posts

Friday Fabulous Flower - What is it?

 Oh, it's been awhile since TPP has had a plant ID quiz.  Now to be fair, much to the delight of our woody hort person,TPP himself failed this quiz being not only unable to guess the name of this plant, but being unable to put it into a family!  Of course, this was a plant he had never ever seen before, and there's always something new to see.  So it's a small tree or big shrub, and here's the flower and the leaf.  See what you can do with it, and then an answer will be posted if one of you hot-shots doesn't have it by then.  It's not a gaudy flower, but it's rather cute dangling like it does.  How about them anthers?  This might be cute in a shady sort of back border, and it's clearly hardy here in the upper midwest. 

Plant ID the hard way - a quiz

One of the most common requests the Phactor gets is "can you identify this plant"? My professional alter ego once got a call from the local poison control center and they had a kid who had eaten a plant with, wait for it, red berries and green leaves. Wow, does that narrow it down to about 300 species. Are the leaves alternate or opposite? Silence; they are MDs after all. OK, have your security drive it over to my lab, and what arrives is one berry and one leaf. Fortunately that actually was enough, but it gives people the wrong idea about what is needed, besides one hell of a lot of experience, to ID a plant. So here's the latest challenge. Can you ID this plant from this photo from a reader in Saudi Arabia, which won't help a bit because as most of you know people seldom ever ask about native species? It doesn't help that the picture is out of focus, but no one said this was going to be easy. The genus seems pretty certain to me, but the reddish calyx, yellow corolla are a new combination in my experience. What are your thoughts?