Friday Fabulous Flower - little waterlily

This is such a cute little plant, but Nymphaea thermarum, the pygmy waterlily, is extinct in the wild because of habitat destruction.  It is the world's smallest waterlily and native to Africa.  You can judge the size of the lily pads and the diameter of the open flower by the penny placed to the right.  It likes hot, mucky places.  It's growing here with the water fern Azolla, which can fix nitrogen with the help of a symbiotic cyanobacterium.  The waterlily is now cultivated at quite a few botanical gardens so that it is not likely to disappear from existence although the plant was stolen from a conservatory at Kew Gardens.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - water nymph(aea)

OK nothing too exotic, just a water lily, but it was such a nice image, the white tepals against the darker background.  People always ask about the damned fish, to which TPP answers, "It's a lily pond that just happens to have a few fish in it."  No one even notices the difference between waterlilies and lotus. Got a half inch of rain yesterday, but pond loses water to evaporation quickly in the summer. Turning off the cascade at night reduces the rate to loss. More rain please.

Rare plant theft at Kew

Now this really pisses TPP off.  Plant theft in general is annoying, but when the plant is rare to the point of being extinct in the wild, and it's hard to grow to boot, and it may occupy a critical place in flowering plant evolution, then it's worth drinking a few pints while deciding if any imaginable punishment is sufficient.  And then to add insult to injury, you have the "so what" attitude of a member of Parliment who could intellectually qualify as a member of our GnOPe.  It happens everywhere whether it's cycads (Fairchild Gardens) or Wollemia pines that must be grown "jailed" in cages to prevent theft (Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney) or just coffee trees in a university glasshouse (stolen in frigid weather and just as quickly frozen to death). In this case the plant is a waterlily that only grows at the margins of hot springs.  This demonstrates one of the critical roles of botanical gardens around the world.  And this waterlily is so cute, at least to plant people!  But as we all know fuzzy, furry, feathery cute animals get all the conservation attention.  HT to AoB Blog. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Waterlily

With so many summer flowers withering in the heat and drought, it stands to reason that the only flowers that are looking good are aquatics.  Our waterlilies are just cultivars of Nympaea odorata, which is a pretty good looking wildflower.  So these have just been flowering and flowering throughout the July.  As the Phactor has mentioned before, these flowers have lots of parts and rather than being in discrete and separate whorls (e.g., sepals, petals, stamens, pistils), waterlilies have a continous helix with one type of floral organ grading into the next.  In addition waterlilies occupy a basal grade and this means they have one the oldest common ancestries with the rest of flowering plants.     

Friday Fabulous "Flower" - A Basal Angiosperm

Here's a not very awesome image of a "flower" of Trithuria submerse (Hydatellaceae). As the name suggests this is a monogeneric family of small, aquatic "grassy" plants that were long classified as monocots. The word flower is in quotes because like some of the oldest fossils of flowers, e.g. Archaefructus, it brings into question what should be called a flower. In this case what you actually see is best referred to as a "reproductive unit", which can vary in the number and ratio of subunits, in this case consisting of 4 simple pistillate flowers (C = carpel; H = stigmatic hair) each associated with a bract (B), a modified leaf, surrounding a single stamen/flower (A-anther, F-filament)(Bar = 0.5 mm). The morphological features do not suggest any close relationships, but molecular data surprised everyone by showing them to be a sister group to the waterlilies (Nymphaeaceae) and part of one of the basal lineages of flowering plants, those plants that have the most ancient common ancestry with the rest of angiosperms. These basal lineages are referred to as the ANA grade where the N stands for waterlilies now including this little vestigial (?) waterlily. The image is compliments of a recent study of the reproductive ecology which find that mostly it self pollinates, probably a mechanism for rapid reproduction in its ephemeral shallow-water habitat. That such plants look monocoty is not a surprise; basal angiosperms, basal monocots, and magnolid dicots all tend to have flowers with parts in multiples of 3s and often numerous. Others are very few-parted and simple. Water lilies also have only one cotyledon, but remember that several gymnosperms also have 2 cotyledons, so this sure does mess up the old traditional monocot-dicot taxonomy. The Phactor will save that lesson for another time.

More botanical confusion - Lotus

Undaunted by having lost this post to an electrical failure earlier, the Phactor will endeavor to X-plain another confusing botanical subject - the lotus. Lotus, as a flower of myth and legend, is tied to so many stories in so many traditions, naturally things are going to get mixed up a bit. Leaving the automobile out of it, what plants are actually called lotus?

The Blue Nile lotus is actually a waterlily (Nymphaea) as illustrated in the wonderful old botanical painting. And when Homer wrote of "land of the lotus eaters" this was the plant he was most likely to have been thinking of.

The sacred lotus of India and SE Asia is Nelumbo nucifera, which is not a waterlily at all, however its similarity to waterlilies caused it to be misidentified as one for a long time. And both can be easily mistaken for one another in artistic and figurative representations. These medallions are ceiling paintings from a temple in southern India. The one on the left could be the golden lotus (below) and the one on the right either a waterlily or a sacred lotus.

As if that wasn't enough, the golden lotus, a much revered plant itself, is actually a many bracted, many flowered infloresence in the banana family (Musella lasiocarpa). And this sort explains these cases of mistaken identity. The flowers of waterlily and the sacred lotus are both pretty large and have lots of overlapping petals. And in first appearances, the golden lotus looks likewise, although it isn't just one flower at all.

And to further add to the confusion the genus Lotus (called bird's foot lotus) belongs in the bean family, and why this bean came to share this name is unknown to me.