Friday Fabulous Flower - lychees

Mrs. Phactor and her sister ran off to the Bahamas leaving TPP and his brother in law to struggle along with lawn landscaping, and since tropical is possible down here in southern Florida, at least before the area floods from ice cap melting, some new fruit plants are definitely a must.  Here's a lovely example of flowers at the stage of seed dispersal.  Fresh, lovely, and very tasty, Litchi chinensis, in the soap berry family, a rather unappetizing name for a lovely fruit.  Now how about carambola?

Friday Fabulous Flower - HA Tropical Botanical Garden

OK, TPP admits to being a bit jaded about tropical ornamentals. So when you encounter something new especially it it's a bit different, then it's a great thing.  So here's the FFF from the Hawaiian Tropical Botanical Garden (see precious post for more info).  All the previous plants in this genus have been quite large herbs with big bright pink/purple inflorescences, and this species, presently unknown (Medinilla sp.) is small and charmingly delicate.  For the uninitiated this genus is in the Melastomaceae, the Melastoms, one of the easiest of families to recognize. The label was partly obscured so no idea even where this species comes from, but it isn't. M. speciosus of the Philippines. Any ideas out there??
The leaves were quite succulent almost hiding the characteristic leaf venation pattern, and usually when an inflorescence hangs down like this you think bat pollination, but these are not bat type flowers in any way.  Isn't this a pretty thing?  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Palm flowers

It's a gray day in late January, and for other reasons TPP is feeling a bit depressed. However, nothing cheers us up as much as flowers and it is a Friday.  Time for some tropical attitude adjustment!
When walking the forest trails in Costa Rica, every now and again you come across a snowfall, a white, snow covering you path. A palm flowered above you day/night before.  Palm flowers are small and numerous in general, in many palms a large inflorescence of many (hundreds) of flowers comes wrapped in bract. Although technically, subtending the inflorescence, in many palms the bract forms a canopy presumably shielding the flowers from the frequent rains. Palm flowers tend to be white or cream colored and they are usually fragrant with the odor often having musky overtones.  This particular palm, and without his trusty field notebook handy TPP fails to remember exactly which palm this is, fits most of the general palm flower characteristics.  Anyone recognize this palm?
Features of note: While the inside (upper surface) of the bract is smooth, the outside (under surface, up in this view) is extremely spiny and the spines are so sharp the weight of the bract is enough to inflict damage (handle with extreme care).
The primary floral visitors and presumed pollinators are stingless bees (wings folded over their backs); a few flies are also present. Usually after just a day, or a night the, perianths fall to make for the snowfall.
And don't you like the general tropical feel?  The green, the humidity, the foreign country?  Oops, bad thinking crept in a bit there at the end. 
Sorry, citizens of Earth who do not live in the USA. Today our country begins to inflict on everyone else The Donald, our would be dictator.  As for my fellow citizens we have no one to blame but ourselves. 
Now to upload an image and feel better.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Hatoria salicornoides

Here's a nice tough house plant, although ours resides outside for almost half of the year.  It's name if Hatoria salicornoides, a specific epithet that means "like Salicornia", a halophyte (salt-loving) marsh or tidal plain plant (glasswort, pickleweed) with lots of sort of knobby branches that are narrow at their base and widening abruptly toward the apex. TPP sort of sees the resemblance, but not really. At any rate the plant is a much branched cactus whose stems become woody with age. Here in January a golden bell of a flower forms at the end of each branch so the flowering display is considerable, hundreds of flowers.
This tropical cactus is an epiphyte with drooping branches and it grows well in a mixture of fine orchid mix and cactus soil in a hanging basket, which gets hung on a big shepard's hook in some light shade beyond our patio. Once or twice squirrels have chewed on it and inflicted some considerable damage, but the plant has always recovered.  The plant deals with the household dryness of winter and needs watering only about once a week when outside, often taken care of by rain. While not spectacular, it's a very nice reliable plant and showier than the more common Rhipsalis species people often have. 

Fig root foot bridges

Several years ago TPP saw some images of these bridges, and just recently they were brought to my attention again by a fellow who is studying the engineering principles of natural materials.  First of all, note that figs are amazing.  Figs are among the biggest and most impressive trees TPP has ever seen and he's sought out quite a few notable trees. Fig produce what are called adventitious roots, roots from limbs or the tree trunk.  They grow down and when they contact the ground they can become woody and essentially form new trunks.  Such roots can support very horizontal limbs and such trees can cover huge areas essentially a grove of one tree. Here such roots have been trained and connected across a stream to provide footbridges during times of high water. Roots and trunks of figs will readily fuse into a single axis, and they will continue to get bigger and they can live a long time. There are a lot more pictures at this link.  Here's another link to a publication on the use of living plant materials in such engineering.  There are some good images in this paper too. These are marvelous things, and make no mistake about it such nice little tropical streams can become raging torrents very quickly.

Friday Fabulous Flower - teeny orchid

Friday again?  Were did the week go? Here's a great fabulous flower that TPP just happened to notice in the greenhouse the other day. But it's easy to miss even though it is one of the few really orange flowers in our collection. This is an orchid, and contrary to what most people think, most orchid flowers are fairly small, if not tiny, although the smallest orchid flower is a ridiculous 2 mm tall. In comparison this orchid, Pleurothallis guanacastensis, is a whopping three times bigger at 6-7 mm tall. When you see flowers like this, obviously providing a visual display, you do wonder what type of little critter is attracted to them and pollinates them? Whatever it is you can see the little space they fit into between the labellum (lower center petal) and the column above housing the stigma and pollinia, a space which is all of 1-1.5 mm. In the tropics such little puzzles abound, organisms about which we know next to nothing. It's been named, it lives in lowland tropical forests as an epiphyte in Costa Rica. And that's about it. 
And congratulations to my Tico friends for their big "football" win over the USA. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - tropical springiness

It's been awhile since there's been a FFF posted. Tropical plants do something sort of strange each year.  A lot of them flower in late February or March in the glasshouse, yet most of them are thought to be day-neutral for flowering.  This means that they don't need long nights to stimulate flowering, yet that's just how they act. Of course the glasshouse is also warming up a little and getting a lot sunnier.  At any rate here's a member of the Bignoniaceae, a family of largely tropical trees, shrubs, and lianas, a family with fairly large, pretty colorful flowers. The trees and shrubs also tend flower in a big-bang of blooms making for some pretty spectacular displays. This shrub is called the Cape Honeysuckle (terrible name that points to the wrong family), Tecomaria capensis, a fairly common ornamental, in fact probably in the category of UTF, ubiquitous tropical flora. But it's just so cheerful, so bright, such a welcome relief from the bitter cold and bleakness outside. You should be able to guess that such flowers are adapted for bird pollination based on the color, the lack of odor (scratch & sniff), and the exserted stamens and stigma.  Enjoy!