Little non-showy flowers abound in the spring - look closely.

Most people fail to notice flowers that are associated with wind pollination because generally they lack showy flower parts.  Sometimes people notice the pollen-producing flowers if they are aggregated together to form long dangly catkins or aments.  At one time botanists thought that the rather cone-like aments were primitive because they were more like the cones of conifers.  But this idea was falsified in the early part of the 1900s.  So people notice the long dangly catkins on my filbert, Corylus americana, but fail to see the small but rather showy pistillate flowers.  Actually the only part you can see are the bright red, somewhat feathery, stigmas that stick out of the buds to pick up pollen.  So here you are both types of flowers, dozens of pollen flowers and 2-3 pistillate flowers.  TPP does not like calling them male and female although that is common enough usage, but wrong.  Lots of temperate deciduous trees use wind pollination; they flower in the spring before leaves expand an get in the way of pollination.  Welcome to the early allergy season.  

Weed of the week - ragweed

Your eyes may have just started to water just looking at these images of giant ragweed. The plants can reach 7-8 feet tall easy and a local walking/bicycling trail goes through a virtual gully of them just now coming into bloom. There are so many flowers they'll leave a yellow dusting of haploid males (pollen) on the ground.  Woe be to any allergic people who hazard this gauntlet.  Both the common and giant ragweeds are easy enough to recognize, but they are usually ignored in the spring when they are more easily controlled by mowing them down or whacking them out, or by herbicide application in the spring or early summer.  Too late now.  The smaller common ragweed showed up in an older blog and you will notice the highly lobed leaves that Linnaeus thought resembled wormwood, thus Ambrosia artemisiifolia.  Notice that the giant ragweed has three lobed leaves Ambrosia trifida (shown above) and the flowers are not showy at all because it's wind pollinated, so the co-flowering goldenrod gets the blame for hayfever. The flowers shown are just prior to flowering.  How long can you hold your breath?  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Filberts

The filberts (aka hazel-nut, Corylus americana) are in flower in the upper midwest in March this year. Most people being quite plant blind don't even notice the catkins (3 shown here), the dangling inflorescences of pollen flowers some 3-4" long. So no one at all, including botany students, ever notice the brilliantly, dark red pistillate flowers. OK, they are pretty small, but they usually come in clusters of 2-3 flowers enclosed by bud scales (2 such clusters are in this image). Actually all you really see are the stigmas, the pollen receiving parts of the fruiting flowers, which are quite red. Such colorful stigmas are quite common among wind pollinated trees. It takes some pretty good powers of observation to notice the tiny red flowers when distracted by the big, conspicuous catkins at least in terms of size. Flowers adapted for wind pollination generally lack big conspicuous perianth parts because they have no need to attract pollinators. Now that you know, keep your eyes open. TPP is quite impressed with the camera in his new cell phone; that technology has come a long way fast.   

No, no, no, no, no - Goldenrod doesn't cause hayfever!

The fall allergy season is here, almost. The harvest season kicks up lots of dust and mold spores, and ragweed comes into flower soon. The local newspaper had a nice sidebar article about allergies and they mentioned all of these factors, BUT then some moron put a picture of goldenrod in bloom above the article! Now maybe they think goldenrod is ragweed, or that goldenrod causes allergies; wrong and wrong. Here's the problem: they both flower at about the same time, and most people see and recognize goldenrod, but they don't see or recognize ragweed. This is because goldenrod is insect pollinated; you should know this because the flowers are showy to attract pollinators. Ragweed flowers are green and seldom noticed as a result, but the plant is wind-pollinated so it must make a lot of pollen to blow around. Once again, TPP only wishes they would check with their friendly neighborhood botanist before doing such things; he doesn't charge much.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Salt Rush

In the grip of a pretty severe drought, nice flower pictures are a bit hard to come by locally, but really spectacular flower pictures are pretty regularly featured in the annual Botanical Society's Triarch student travel award for best botanical images competition.  This image of a salt rush inflorescence (Juncus breweri) shows that it pays to look closely sometimes.  This is a wind pollinated plant, so you wouldn't usually expect showy flowers, but up close these flowers are really pretty, pretty neat.  To capture pollen blowing in the wind, such plants often have big, feathery stigmas (surface area), and here the stigma's three branches are twisted into cork screws and pigmented pink (pink to red is pretty common color for such stigmas - not certain why).  The cork screw shapes probably cause air eddies that enhance sedimentation of pollen.  At any rate this was an award winner for Glenn Shelton of Humboldt State, and here's where you can see the other submissions for 2012.  The monetary awards help cover their travel costs to the meetings.  See if you can spot any of the other award winners.  Our young botanists can really take some great pictures.