Friday Fabulous Flower - Beach Morningglory

Spotted this nice specimen peaking up out of the sand where it had almost gotten buried by drifting sand, but no worries, this is a tough plant.  The beach morningglory (Ipomoea imperati) is adapted to and grows on coastal dunes where it helps stabilize the sand.  The sprawling "vines" often get buried and you only see the distinctive leaves showing, and in the case the flower bud was poking up just enough for the flower to open even if the base of the corolla tube was in the sand. This morningglory is found all along the SE coast of N. America, but the funny thing is that this plant really gets around, and the Phactor saw it first on a sandy coast in SE Asia!  No idea of where it is actually native, where it started its travels from.  This makes you assume it's dispersed by seawater, but not sure about this.  Anyone?  And if ever you want a photographic challenge, a white flower in strong sunlight in a highly reflective place (sand) is it.  Fortunately my camera gives the photographer a lot of override latitude to correct the exposure and even still it took a couple of tries.  

Hot and humid vs. hot and dry

Today promises to be a typical hot, humid Carolina low-lands' day.  Back home the upper mid-west is sweltering, but the big difference is that here it's humid and there it's dry.  In out particular area summer always brings hot days, but there have been summers when we've barely turned on the AC.  But when you string together day after day of 90s and even the occasional 100 degree high, our weather is more like what you expect in Tulsa, and who wants to live in Tulsa?  Unless some thunderstorm activity intervenes and waters our gardens, we expect to find some losses among the newly planted.  One of the problems of doing everything ourselves, no one else knows when and where things are planted, and therefore a house-cat sitter has no idea what to do if you say "water the new Japanese yews".  Actually the needs-water list is rather long this year, and just watering the potted/house plants is quite a chore, so our vacation may end up costing us more than we planned.  Maybe we need to start a coop garden babysitting service because having someone who knows gardens and plants would make things much easier.  Anybody part of such a thing?

Green Swamp - Carnivorous Plants Abound

The intertubes have made this a much smaller world, and a long-time reader figured out that we were vacationing only about 10 miles apart.  As a nice botanical gesture, she recommended that the Phactor visit Green Swamp.  Somehow we did manage to get a couple of hours away from the family mob and have a look-see.  None of the urban sophisticates comprising the rest of our family demonstrated even the least interest in tagging along to a swamp.  Well, it was their loss.  Even without knowing the area or having any guidance the Phactors managed to see sundews by the dozens (2 species it seemed, but haven't checked yet), showing off their glistening and deadly glandular hairs, bladderwort in flower, venus flytraps, and pitcher plants, all of which are "carnivorous" plants, trapping insects or other inverts for purposes of augmenting their nutrient supply.  Nitrogen is generally hard to obtain in these wet acidic environments.  The pitcher plants were past their prime, so see this blog post from our friendly tipster to see them a bit earlier in the season.  Image-wise you'll have to make do with a sundew.  There were also two milkworts, two Rhexias, a yellow-eyed grass (Xyris sp. ?), and lots more in flower. The Carolina coastal region is quite famous for such plants, some of which are endangered because of habitat destruction and human predation.  

World class beach architecture

This NC beach is composed of very fine sugar sand, which when properly wet packs tightly and it can be sculpted in considerable detail.  Here's a fine example for what is obviously a first effort.  With some practice this fellow will probably get pretty good at making sand sculptures.  Sort of made you start looking around for little tiny hobbits.  

Botanical benefits of June

The Phactors have vacationed on the NC coast with Rent-a-Mob relatives on several occasions, but usually later in the summer; never before in June.  It turns out that this is an excellent time to visit this area for several reasons, and the two best are peaches and blueberries.  The Phactor is something of a fruit snob in terms of quality, and getting the ripeness and freshness just right is seldom achieved, and never in stupormarkets.  A just just under ripe peach, firm fleshed, but juicy and tender, a combination of tart and sweet peachiness is one of the best fruits in the world, and this is the considered opinion of a well-traveled, well-experienced (Hmm, maybe my fruit life list would be an interesting blog.) fruit sampler.  A perfect mango comes close, very close, but these peaches just couldn't get much better.  Rent-a-mob ate a peck of peaches just for breakfast. Today they can peel their own.  Now blueberries are often insipid, lacking that tart counterpoint that makes their taste interesting.  As a result blueberries are pretty far down my berry preference list.  However these were freshly picked blueberries at just the right stage, and they were simply the best ever sampled.  There were even stupormarket blueberries that served as a basis for comparison before they were discarded.  Now this brings me to a very important point.  Mrs. Phactor is a talented woman as surely mentioned by this correspondent many times before.  One of her greatest talents is that she makes incredible pies with perfect crusts.  So this bounty of blueberries gave her an opportunity to display her talent for the crowd, and the result of transforming excellent blueberries into pie were the best blueberry pies ever.  Fortunately the F1 captured the result before the pies were inhaled.  Now this is part of what makes a great vacation.

Botanical flotsam

In general, algae adapted to coastal environments by anchoring are called seaweeds.  Here's an exception, a seaweed that re-adapted to the open ocean by becoming free-floating again, Sargassum.  The Phactor doesn't know his seaweeds well enough to know for certain, but clonal clumps of this algae get picked up by the Gulf Stream and then transported north from the Sargasso Sea to the coast of North America where it washes up on the beach.  You can see the flotation devices, pnematocysts.  For some reason most "young" people don't know the term pneumatic although it used to refer to your car or bicycle tires meaning they were inflated with air.  Even less well-known among today's college students is that pneumato- starts with a p.  Cyst is the cell or structure that is inflated.  It's no wonder such terms are just a puzzlement.  This little clump looks really fresh because it it was just after high tide and very early in the morning, early enough that the beach was still nice (vacant).  

Drat, more revisions!

One of the horrible, terrible, very-bad, no-good things about writing a book is that the scientific publishing never stops, and it takes a lot longer to get a book published than to get a scientific paper published, although sometimes it doesn't seem so.  So what you really, really hate is when while putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript an article gets published that you now must, yes, must, incorporate into your book, and so it is that an otherwise nice morning scan through a bunch of science blogs results in annoyance.  So here's the short version, because the long version isn't available to you.  Most of these findings are not really a surprise, more of a confirmation of what was known, but very nicely summarized in terms of character evolution.  Hornworts have the most ancient common ancestry with the rest of land plants.  Sporophytes invented stomates, once it would seem.  and the innovation of apical growth and apical branching produced sporophytes with 2 or more sporangia on bigger sporophytes, and then plants really got a lot bigger.  It would appear that this study will provide some conclusions that are more specific than previous studies.  Otherwise the Phactor had it pretty much right about what led to vascular land plants. 

Southeast coast - somewhere

Well, it turns out that we have arrived, somewhere along the SE coast, actually right on the border between North and South Carolina, if my information from the naviguesser is correct.  Quite a few of the inlaws are here, Mrs. Phactor's sisters and brothers, and even cousins and their families, so this Irish Catholic mob is having a gathering, and truly, we hope that this time the gathering manages to fly below the local police radar.  Seriously, rent a mob is not all that bad, law-wise.  Nonetheless a lot of food and booze will be consumed this week.  If the Phactor understands things correctly, the ocean is only a short distance away.  So we shall continue to report from this ecological disaster that once was a barrier island, but now is a development blight upon the landscape.  Still it's good to see the people, the family, and it's especially gratifying that all these cousins get along so well, and how fun it is to see a new fellow, who seems rather fond of a niece, the newest of the new, and how well the Phactor remembers all those years ago when he was in that position. What goes around comes around.

Bourbon bar in Kentucky

OK, the Phactor must be on vacation because apparently he is in a bourbon bar in Lexington Kentucky.  How very nice although a bit C&W for his taste.  The Phactor has never really gotten along with horses, and Mrs. Phactor can verify this.  So perhaps it is a good thing in terms of being in KY that the Phactor gets along with bourbon very well.  In keeping with my formal policy of never endorsing any product that does not in some small way grease my palm, no particular brands will be mentioned.  And in any case, a considerable thirst compelled the Phactor to drink a tall, cold Kentucky bourbon barrel ale, which has the taste of a bourbon boiler maker.  It actually was quite good, very smooth, but not something you would want to responsibly drink more than one of.  Wow!  What a feeling!  Is it the bourbon beer, the fatigue, or academic decompression?  Immersion in scholarly projects is good for getting things done, but then you almost get light headed when you are peeled away from them for some R&R.  Sort of a rapid decompression and it goes to your head.  Hopefully, and this is my only worry, the Phactor will not loose track of where he was in the process and have to spend valuable time back tracking.  But now things get complicated.  Here's how it stacks up.  Vacation, then back for a week, and off to the botanical meetings, but still have to prepare the talk, and better look up the abstract and see what was promised.  And then finally about mid-July, it will be time to get back to the book project and get it DONE, because the fall semester will be looming.

Friday Fabulous Flower - waterlilies

Yes, the Phactor is posting his Friday Fabulous flower a day early because a glance at tomorrow's schedule suggests he might not get to it otherwise.  In fact for the next week or so, posting might be a bit spotty.  One of the reasons that the Phactors threw their money into a hole and had their 90 year old pond refurbished was so it would be a better habitat for waterlilies (Nymphaea).  For several reasons, primarily competition from a sacred lotus, now caged to prevent more nasty interactions, well before our pond was redone, our waterlilies had died.  So late last season waterlilies came back to the lily pond, and it was either that of change its name.  And now they are responding with some colorful displays, at least as colorful as our hardy waterlilies get (creamy white, yellow, pink), and it's nice some plants like the hot weather.  They are really a lovely flower, one of those flowers where there are lots of floral parts and no sharp demarcations between floral parts that you would want to call sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils; they just grade from one into the next.  You don't see that outside the basal lineages or magnolids.  And that's the other reason for having waterlilies; they are an ancient and basal lineage of flowering plants as strange as that may seem.