Friday Fabulous Flower - A Passion

It's snowing, not unusual in February, except for this year when there's been not very much snow.  This definitely puts spring on hold for another 2-3 weeks.  Darned woodchuck!  So back to the glasshouse to see what's in bloom that you might not have seen.  Ah, here's a really nice flower, quite lovely, and quite unusual in its own way, a passion flower (Passiflora citrina) that remains quite oblivious to the weather outside.  Many of you have seen passion flowers before, and you can recognize many of the common elements here, but in a very different flower.  The ovary (green) is stalked and sits aloft just below the 3 parted style and 3 stigmas. Arranged beneath this are the stamens whose anthers are delicately hinged upon the ends of the outwardly curved filaments.  The 10 perianth parts, all petalloid, for a cup with nectaries at their base.  Where the corolla (inner perianth) forms the broad top of the cup, a ring of appendages forms a corona.  An incoming pollinator, probably a hummingbird in spite of the flower color, will pick up pollen from the anthers when probing the cup for nectar, and this will be in a position to be picked up by one of the stigmas at the next flower visited.  This vine flowers all the time and is pretty trouble free if you have room for it.  The flower is about 5-6 cm across. 

Friday fabulous flower - a Bignon

Bignoniacae, the bignon family, are largely tropical trees and lianas, and most of them have large showy flowers adapted to different pollinators.  Catalpa trees and trumpet creeper are our temperate members of this family.  Here's one of my captive tropical bignons, Tecomaria capensis, a species widely used as an ornamental in warmer climates.  This is just such a classic example of a flower adapted to hummingbird pollination.  It's fairly large, it's oriented laterally, it's bright red, has ample nectar, and is scentless.  The corolla is highly asymmetrical with the lateral and lower corolla lobes folded back and an over arching upper corolla lobe.  The stigma is exerted to contact the bird's head as it arrives, and as the bird moves in closer to get it's beak and tongue down into the corolla tube, then the head contacts the two pair of anthers picking up more pollen.  It's a great showy plant and a cheerful mid-winter display.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Let's get small!

Fall changes my flower focus from outside to inside, and on a stroll through our glasshouse the other day this specimen, although not in full bloom when it is truly dazzling, caught my eye. This is an orchid with a rather typical orchid flower, which is to say small. Most people have the wrong idea about orchids because the ones we grow, the ones we use to pursue mates, and the ones we use for decoration are those species with large flowers, but small flowers are more the rule. This particular orchid from Costa Rican rain forests (Pleurothallis guanacastensis) has flowers only 8 mm tall from top to bottom of the open perianth. Who knows what tiny insect pollinates such flowers? An orange perianth is not a real common orchid flower color. Such plants also live up there in the canopy, not down here where biologist roam more safely, which makes them hard to study. Here in North America you would be surprised how often people fail to notice orchids because of their small flowers, except maybe the lady slippers; lots of small green, green-white, and whiteish flowers among our native terrestrial orchids.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Clusia

Nothing like a tropical flower to brighten a February Friday. This is Clusia uvitana (Clusiaceae or Guttiferae) and the whole plant is pretty interesting. This species can grow like a strangler fig where its seedlings sprout up in a tree, its roots growing down and its crown growing up until it replaces its former host. Like figs it exudes a latex when injured. Most of the species are dioecious (two-housed), which means pollen flowers and fruiting flowers on separate trees. The flowers are fairly large, in this case about 5 cm across when open, and the perianth is very waxy, looking quite artificial to some respect. Pollen and fruiting (this one) flowers look similar. But the most interesting thing is that a resin exudate is used as the floral reward for small bees(lower left, look closely) who collect it for nest building.

Friday Fabulous Flower - A Gesneriad

How frustrating to have obtained a fabulous flower picture from my prairie study site only to have e-lost it somewhere, so when your well designed plan fails, punt. While still field season here in Lincolnland, plans are being finalized for this year's tropical field work in Costa Rica, so with a bit of fast forward thinking, here's a fabulous flower, a gesneriad, which means a member of the Gesneriaceae, a largely tropical family of herbaceous plants, best known for the domesticated house plant, the African violet. This wonderful plant is Chrysothemis friedrichsthaliana, a species mouthful, and in terms of growth it seems most like a Gloxinia because it produces tubers and periodically goes dormant. The display is a combination of showy and persistent calyx tubes, and the yellow-orange corollas. The calyx tubes hold water (just barely visible in this image) that protect the flower bud and young fruit, a not unusual condition among tropical plants.

Relief from winter doldrums: 2. Visit the greenhouse

Lincolnland is still in the grips of cold and snow, although it does look pretty right now. Usually the midwest is just sort of snowlessly bleak. But for the second in my series on seeking relief from the winter doldrums, let's visit the greenhouse and see what's going on that isn't monochromatic.

This is a pretty spectacular flower, Thunbergia mysorensis. As the specific epithet suggests, this vine is native to southern India. A pair of reddish bracteoles encloses the base of each flower providing a constant display as the flowers open sequentially bottom to top. Morphologically; the inflorescence is pendent so the bottom is at the top and each flower twists 180 degrees to attain the correct orientation. The flowers produce copious nectar, often enough to drip over the bottom lip of the corolla, and are bird pollinated. The stigma and stamens occupy the top of the corolla tube where depending upon the stage of flowering (pollen accepting or pollen dispersing) one or the other makes contact with the visiting bird's head. Enjoy.