Friday Fabulous Flower - Gunnera

Gunnera is one strange plant. It is found at higher altitudes in the wet tropics, and it's a huge leafed herbaceous perennial.  People say it looks like a big, coarse rhubarb. Really? The rounded radially-veined, lobed leaf blades can be more than a meter across, and stand a couple of meters high on a stout, prickly looking petiole, big enough to provide shelter from a rain. This young plant isn't that big yet.  Systematically this genus is a basal lineage of the true dicots (eudicots), that includes most of what used to be called dicots. The problem here is that "dicot" plants having a pair of cotyledons, embryonic leaves, does not form a single lineage because the Magnoliids are dicots, and so are the ANA basal lineages of flowering plants except for waterlilies that have one cotyledon (monocot) but otherwise have dicot characters, and then there are gymnosperms that have two cotyledons as well. Monocots remain a lineage, a good taxonomic group, dicots aren't. So remember the old monocot/dicot how to tell them apart table. No? Then don't bother. This nice image is courtesy of my old friend Dr. Chips who lives in a mild enough, wet enough climate that Gunnera can grow there (lucky duck) if mulched in their winterish season.  It has quite strange flowers that are borne on large columnar inflorescences; even TPP isn't sure what constitutes a single flower, but he's never had flowering specimens to examine first hand.  Pretty weirdly fabulous on the whole. 

Friday fabulous flower - a repeat, but better

While tropical plants are generally day-neutral in terms of flowering, something about the short days (actually it's the long nights) stimulates a lot of our glasshouse tropical plants to flower.  It makes visiting the glasshouse in February and March a lot of fun. One of our stranger plants is a semi-viney member of the screwpine family, the genus Freycinetia multiflora, a plant that has been featured as a FFF before, but the flowering this time is even better, bigger clusters, brighter color. The flower like structures are actually three ranks of bracts that surround 3 inflorescences hidden within. The glasshouse used to have a real Pandanus, but it got way, way too big and had to be cut up and removed in pieces.

Timing is everything - household jobs edition

September is always a schizophrenic weather month, in like summer, out like fall, and here in the Midwest the changeover can be sudden.  Last week you needed the ceiling fan on one night, and the next night it was 45F and you had a cat snuggling in bed with you.  Except for late August and early September temperatures around here were pretty reasonable this year, so reasonable there was little need of the AC.  As a result TPP got the window screens installed on the south end of the sun room, and then a distraction occurred of some nature, so he never got the screens in the north windows, although there is a screen door there.  So for 3.5 months those two window screens have leaned against the wall a testament to procrastination and distraction.  Each time TPP spied them launched a very brief self-recrimination that was quickly squelched by good mental health, and then forgotten until the next time they were noticed.  Now comes the realization that it didn't matter. The screens now can be returned to the garage attic until next summer, a quite happy thought, and then brought out again with all the best intentions.  The sun room needs to be warmed up because several tropical plants want to come inside; 45F is a temperature they don't like.  Although it doesn't damage them, some of them metabolically shut down for a spell.  The bonsai figs are very tough plants and don't seem to mind a bit so they can stay outside for a bit longer. 

On the Road Again - Rain Forest Ecology Field Trip

Today, tonight, tomorrow, all night, all day, that is starting about midnight the travel begins and with luck 18 hours later the Phactor with a bunch of students in tow will arrive at a field station in Costa Rica to study rain forest biology for the next 2 weeks. The wi-fi connections out there in the rain forest have always been a bit dodgy, but every attempt will be made to do a series of blogs directly from the rain forest. Weather has not been good in Costa Rica lately, but the heavy rains and land slides have been more of a problem on the Pacific side than the Atlantic side where the field station is located, which is always pretty wet. The record for one of our field trips was 18" of rain fall in 8 full days at the field station. As one of the students remarked, "Well, it is RAIN forest." Travel with students, overseas, is terribly stressful and demanding, even with the NO WHINING RULE in force, and it would not be worth the effort if the outcomes were not so educationally rewarding for both parties (both students in the picture are smiling!). And of course after the field trip the Phactor shall bestow prestigious awards upon outstanding members of his class: the monsoon mud monkey award to the person most at one with mud, the atad award for the student most confused by their own data (one awardee never got the joke!), the cryptic researcher award for the student who most resembles or acts like their research organism, the teflon award for that particular student that just never seems to get dirty, the closest encounter of a dangerous kind award to the student who has the nearest miss with disaster and giving their instructor more gray hair or causing more of it to fall out (those pit vipers are so well canouflaged, crocs have moved into the swimming hole, and so on it goes). Truly winners all.

Winter flowers - Indoor Tropical Plants

You can take the biologist out of the tropics, but you can't take the tropics out of the biologist. A number of tropical plants actually thrive living out of doors during our generally hot, humid midwestern summers until early fall, hung from shepard's hooks in semi-shade or convenient oak limbs. Once the temperatures begin falling below 50F, they get moved inside for the duration of fall and winter.

The interesting thing is that this move stimulates regular flowering from December to February, a great indoor display of botanical color. Here's one of the Phactor's long time favorites: Billbergia nutans, the Queen's tears, a bromeliad or a member of the pineapple family. The combination of pink bracts and calyx, green ovary and petals, outlined in blue, and the yellow stamens is very striking and a quite unique color combination.

This plant grows well in a 50:50 combination of orchid mix and cactus potting "soil". Every two weeks the entire hanging basket is showered throughly and allowed to drain before rehanging.

Another reliable and easy to grow tropical plants that reliably flowers under this indoor-outdoor regiem is one of the orchid cacti that another blogger has illustrated so nicely. Enjoy.

Cannonball tree - another ludicrous flower to enjoy!

While clearing out lab space the Phactor happened upon a box of old 3.5” disks (Hey, there are still boxes of 5.25” disks around here too.) that were used as the file storage medium for the 1st digital camera our department ever purchased. And they were filled with images from the tropics, and although now looking a bit low in resolution, such images are not easily replaced. It’s been awhile since the Phactor had a good ludicrous flower for you to enjoy, so here’s the flower of Couroupita guianensis, the cannonball tree.

As you may judge from the fingers (upper left), the flower is pretty large, some 5-6 inches across, and rather luridly colored orange-red, and not of the usual floral organization. The petals are not equal and in a nice regular whorl. The thing that looks a bit like a sea anemone is an androphore, a structure that bears anthers, and the rather thickish anther filaments are lavender. The furry-fuzzy disk behind is composed of sterile anthers with a single pistil in the middle that develops into a hard, cannonball-sized (6-8" diam) fruit. Like many tropical trees, this one produces flowers on its trunk rather than among its leafy branches, but this tree grows a mantle of leafless, twisty-turny dangling branches upon which flowers and fruits are borne. While a native of the neotropics, cannonball tree has been planted around the tropics as a curiosity.

Earning my keep botanically

The Phactor does earn his salary, and for the sake of any Lincolnland legislators who happen to read this (if any happen to be able to read!), its a real bargain to get such expertise so cheaply!

All kinds of crazy, goofy, off-the-wall botanical questions that people come up with get directed to me. Even the Botanical Society of America sends the questions they get to me. Why? For the simple reason that having been a botanical garbage mind for several decades means they get answers. The Phactor delivers! It's a the result of a great deal of diverse experiences combined with a broad knowledge of botany. Please understand, most of my botanical colleagues are experts that can run circles around me, but only in their specific area of expertise. The Phactor is broadly knowledgeable, and also has a very good botanical memory. Telephone numbers, people's names, birthdays, anniversaries, the date, social events, these things I can't remember at all. But every place, every plant, every plant name, every bit of information, gets logged away for later recall almost effortlessly.


So, how does this go? Glad you asked. This AM my friend Bill, executive director of the Botanical Society, sends me an email and a picture. Someone wants to know what this is. The picture was taken in the Bahamas. Already I know this is probably useless information. Most people visiting the tropics for vacation see very few native plants; mostly they see UTF, ubiquitous tropical flora, a set of plants that have been moved around the world by humans for some particular use, often because the plant is attractive.

Well, there it is. Fortunately for my reputation, this is pretty easy. This is an immature fruit of a screwpine (not a real pine at all), Pandanus utilis, probably. The big long leaves with nasty saw-toothed margins are commonly used at a thatch roofing. And of course the Phactor was right, this is an old world plant, a native of SE Asia, so it is an exotic introduction to the Bahamas.

The appearance of screw pines must attact people. They are big, somewhat ungainly, somwhat palm like plants with many stems and huge stilt roots. I say this because I was asked to ID a similar species of screwpine about a year ago from a picture taken in Thailand. And it's hard to tell you how I know what this is because there is only an instant recognition of screwpine. Now if only I could get people to pay for this service.