Friday Fabulous Flower - a tropical cucurbit

On miserably cold bleak days, a reminder of the tropics is always welcome. Although squash flowers can be pretty big, members of the gourd family, generally called cucurbits, are not thought of as having very many attractive flowers. Here's Gurania makoyana from Costa Rica that makes a pretty dramatic display to attract pollinators, in this case butterflies for certain. The sepals are the orange part of the display; the yellow corolla doesn't open very wide making sort of a tube and doesn't contribute much to the display. Since the vine is often scrambling through the rainforest understory along dense and dim edges, this inflorescence really stands out. Greenish-white, finger-sized cucumbery fruit follow.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Episcia

International travel and the recovery rom it has left the Phactor day and date disoriented. Almost let Friday slip away without posting a fabulous flower, not that there haven't been lots of nice flower posts of late, but TGIFFF. Today's flower, Episcia lilacina is a close relative of a couple of well known house plants in the gesner family. It's sort of funny; a plant like this is hard for many people to grow, and this species has not been used as a temperate house plant to my knowledge even though it has a larger flower than the two cultivated species in our greenhouse, but down in Costa Rican rainforests this lovely plant with it's pale lavendar flowers and varigated leaves with purple on their undersides grows upon bare clay banks in the dark understory. The problem with growing such a plant is quite simply the difference in humidity, and the arid winter air in our houses is just too dry for many tropical plants.