Why in blue blazes do we need this?

One of the reasons people love to look through seed catalogs is to see what’s new. Although not actually new, Briggs Nursery introduced this 2 years ago, it just didn't register until the 2011 crop of seed catalogs. One item raises a question. Why in ever lovin’ blue blazes do we need pink blueberries? This is one of those things that you have to wonder why spend the time and effort to breed a pink blueberry? Did they discover this while waiting for these berries to finally ripen, and they just never did? Perpetually unripe berries, wow! Oh, no, is this is another example of the trouble our country is in? John Birch wouldn’t like this one bit, creeping commie pinko fruits invading our ‘mercan pie crusts. Way to go Briggs; you on a list now. We'll be keeping an eye on you and your little dog too.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow Walking Iris

Our teaching greenhouse is always interesting to visit during the winter months because the plant life is quite vibrant and many tropical plants are in flower. What spurs so many of them to flower is a bit hard to understand because most are supposedly day-neutral and therefore not stimulated to flower by the long nights, yet they seem to be. Yellow walking iris (Neomarica longifolia) is not in the genus Iris, but it is in the Iris family and the resemblance is fairly obvious. Walking iris is also a near weed albeit a pretty one because after flowering, plantlets grow from within the floral bracts and when they are heavy enough the inflorescence bends down and the plantlets take root. In a subtropical to tropical climate this plant could "walk" across a shady area in nothing flat. The Phactor has never seen what pollinates these flowers, but the perianth has leopardy nectar guides and the petalloid stigmas and three stamens forming a central column jiggle at the slightest vibration or touch so it would be great to see how it actually works. Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!

Plants deep in thought?

Well, something is deep. Heidi Marshall finds

it absolutely fascinating that scientists are finally starting to consider plant sentience a serious possibility. The idea of plant communication is not entirely new, and has been an integral part of some spiritual practices. So, if plants are capable of communicating with each other, and understanding whether those around them are family or not, can they also feel pain? And if they can feel pain, do their relatives hear their screams when they are cooked or eaten? I think the idea of plant sentience may put a whole new perspective on things for some people. It would seem that if plants are capable of the same things as animals (realization and communication), that eating a carrot would be no different than eating a chicken leg, as both come from beings that display awareness. It certainly gives you something to think about.

What a great example of anthropomorphic thinking. This isn’t new; consider the legends surrounding mandrake, whose name is basically a synonym of anthropomorphic, but nothing about plant communication suggests plants have any such higher animal attributes. Plant communication is not equal to plant sentience; organisms can “communicate” without having any awareness in the usual sensory sense of the word because plants don’t have sense organs or a nervous system, so the concept of pain seems misplaced as well. Seriously, do you actually think a head of cabbage screams in pain as you colely slice it into slaw? Sorry but that's just cabbage-headed. Does a plant grow toward the light because it “loves” the feeling? Do roots grow down because they enjoy the tug of gravity? Is the color yellow happy? When you google plant sentience, you will notice one interesting thing. The people discussing this idea are not botanists or horticulturalists.
Part of the problem is the semantic baggage associated with words like “communication”. Plants react to stimuli, and some of those stimuli are molecular plant signals. Dodder is a parasitic vine that “tastes” its hosts and grows such that it can find and put more parasitic taps into better hosts, but it isn’t thinking yummy thoughts (see this link for some images and a similar discussion). Why do reasonably smart people engage in so much new-agey fuzzy thinking? Taking concepts like sentience and expanding it to a concept where it is synonymous with being alive, i.e., capable of reacting to a stimulus, doesn’t help anyone understand anything. If ever there were a group of people with this problem it’s the founders of the Society for Plant Neurobiology, a new discipline with nothing to study but plant signaling, and plant physiologists and cell biologists were already doing that, and many chided their colleagues for using “superficial analogies and questionable extrapolations”. The use of such terms as plant neurobiology must be regarded as an attempt to make more of a phenomenon than it presently deserves, and it doesn’t assist with the public’s understanding of science one tiny wit as Heidi so well demonstrated. The Phactor has spoken at length with my pal Phil O'Dendron, but he hasn't had much to say, and that says a lot.

Harness Your Body's Green Power!

Do you want to garden better and longer? Do you want your garden work to be enhanced? Do you want to align your body’s own natural energy field so it can be transferred to plants and accelerate their growth? Do you want to wipe the sweat from your eyes? Garden Green Power™ wrist bands are for you!
Our Garden Green Power wrist bracelets are “based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural energy flower… They are designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body” and to soak up sweat which if it rolls into your eyes can really scroll your nerd and disturb your wa.
Garden Green Power wrist bands can be yours for a ridiculously low introductory offer of $14.95 for the pair (one for each wrist). A new product, Green Power Anklets™ are being developed so that every where you place your foot the grass will grow greener. This was discovered by a user of Garden Green Power wrist bands who liked to walk on their hands, and it took awhile for our product development team to devise a more practical solution for better lawns, particularly if you have a dog. Plant people everywhere will soon be clamoring for Garden Green Power, so be the first to go green naturally. Order yours now!

These wrist bands do actually perform one of the four claims; can you guess which? Who falls for this stuff? A click on the link will show you that the answer is for one, jocks, and if you can't flimflam them out of $29.95 by telling them it works with "the natural energy field of the body", well, you need to be in another business, but could the Phactor fund his research by setting up the Green Power Foundation to launder the proceeds? When the energy is properly aligned the unethical mind boggles, and the gullible get fleeced.

The Plant List - Name that plant!

Well, the Phactor was preparing a blog about the Plant List, a new resource for determining the correct scientific name for a plant once you think you know the name, that is. This is a problem because many plants have been named more than once, and someone has to fiugre out is this is the case or not, so only about one out of every 3 known scientific names is correct; the rest are synonyms. Oh, and that can ruin your day. Now some day when the iPlant project gets going successfully people won't think they need plant IDers like me, but even such a resource won't make you an expert or diminish our ranks. However, Mary, Mary was quite contrary and her excellent post sort of beat me to it, and actually because it is so good, she saved me some effort, so click on over to the Accidental Botanist for a look, but this resource may not be much use to many.

What is a rare plant?

"Do you have any rare plants in here?" asked a recent visitor to our teaching greenhouse. This is an interesting question that left the Phactor a bit uncertain how to answer. Our teaching greenhouse is on the smallish size, but an impressive amount of plant diversity is housed therein, and so the only question was what did our visitor mean by rare? Do you mean rare in the absolute sense as in nearly extinct? No, nothing in that category. Our greenhouse and collection couldn't be trusted with any plant so very rare. Do you mean rare in the sense as in this plant is very uncommon anywhere anyhow although not in any danger of extinction? Well then yes, we have at least one plant that is an narrow endemic from a Pacific island, a rather non-descript amaryllid. Do you mean rare in the sense that the plant is uncommon in collections and not commonly known, but it could be as common as dirt where it is native? Yes, lots of plants here would fit that description. A dozen or so may be the only specimen of that species in North America, or a most one of a handfull, like a wild nutmeg (a couple of offspring were given away). And it's always nice when the Missouri Botanical Garden gives us their exhibit left overs for safe keeping. Do you mean simply rare in the sense of something exotic that you've probably never seen or noticed before? Then probably there are a couple of hundred species that are rare in that sense. Not many places around where you can see 9 different genera of cycads, especially in such a small place. The Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago has the biggest collection in these parts, but we recently donated several new things to that collection via a former student of mine. Maybe you just mean rare in that you can learn something new that you never knew before, and in that case virtually all our plants are rare, and that's the point of maintaining collections like this. Plant collections give you an opportunity to get curious and explore in a way that you seldom get elsewhere, and unlike an arboretum or botanical garden (the Phactor has been barked at more than once; actually he gets barked at a lot) where playing with the specimens is frowned upon, students are actually encouraged to examine things to the point of taking them apart to see how they tick. So let's hope the examples were impressive because this particular visitor holds some purse strings. Now what the Phactor really wants is a conservatory greenhouse surrounded by a modest sized botanical garden. $20 million should get us off to a good start.

End of Times Garden Planning - Pre and Post Rapture

2011 is presenting a challenge in garden planning according to some who say the Rapture (seems like it needs capitalization) will occur on May 21. Now this won't really matter for salad greens and peas, although getting those peas in early will be important, and you may decide to continue cutting asparagus right up to the end, but if you think you'll be saved then don't waste your time planting those tomatoes. Actually in our part of the world you'd only be 7-10 days after the frost-free date, so you could hold off on buying those tomato plants until the 21st of May to be sure. Now the cool thing about this is that if you find yourself in a garden shop on the 21st you can be sure that everyone else there was damned right along with yourself, so you might as well get busy planting tomatoes and the rest of your summer garden. Of course, this isn't the first end of times prediction, and one thing certain is that the batting average for such predictions so far is zero, naught, goose-egg, zip, unless it actually has happened already and no one you knew was saved so you didn't notice except for the torment of reality TV (explains a lot really). So one way or another tomatoes are going to be part of my garden.

Time to update my taxonomy and YOURS: part 2

A reader has asked the Phytophactor “why seed plants evolved into monocots and dicots?” This question actually can’t be answered because science is not very good at answering WHY questions. This question is even more difficult to answer because flowering plants can no longer be simply divided into monocots and dicots, and it would be wrong to say they evolved into monocots and dicots. This is because phylogenetic studies tell us that monocots (Liliopsida) evolved from a common ancestry with dicots, and as a result, they share many characters with basal angiosperms. However, dicots no longer form a single lineage, the requirement for being recognized as a taxonomic group. The rest of the groups shown in this simplified phylogenetic diagram are dicots, except for the outgroup, gymnosperms, but even some gymnosperms share the character of having two cotyledons. So dicots, a lineage of plants with two cotyledons, does not.
None of this tells us why such groups evolved. Flowering plants presumably were more successful in many habitats than other seed plants. This may be attributed to many things, not the least being their interactions with animals involved with pollen and seed dispersal, although cycads use both as well. Why monocots evolved cannot be answered other than to say a set of modifications in the ancestors of this lineage were successful and plants with these characteristics proliferated.
The second part of the answer is that the taxonomy of flowering plants is far more complicated than monocots and dicots. Even this diagram does not reflect many of the newest findings or even show all the lineages (it was just handy), but it shows the general organization and gives examples of familiar plants. The ANITA grade is a series of basal lineages now just called ANA as some new relationships have combined what were separate lineages. The label refers to their names (e.g., A is for Amborella, N is for waterlilies, A is for Austrobaileyales), and the AA lineages have two cotyledons while the waterlilies only have one. The eudicots (eu- means true) all share a particular type of pollen. So, although this is not reflected in formal taxonomies because of the difficulty of translating such knowledge into the traditional taxonomic framework, flowering plants consist of the following groups/lineages: three lineages forming a basal ANA grade, monocots, the magnolids, and the eudicots. Even this is simplified, but next spring the Phactor will be teaching plant taxonomy.

Time to update my taxonomy and YOURS

One of the strengths and problems with science is that it keeps finding out new things, and my job is to keep up. But at times it's a struggle because you have to relearn things you've KNOWN for more than 40 years. So let's say you get a book on trees and it's organized alphabetically by botanical families. No problem, mostly, to find a maple you open near the front looking for Aceraceae, but its not there. Maybe you want to find a buckeye; no problem, you've known the family name forever, but you can't find Hippocastanaceae anywhere. What kind of a book on trees is this anyway? Well, it's up to date so Acer and Aesculus are located in the Sapindaceae, the soapberry family. This may well come as a surprise but the research was published 5 years ago. Now in the old days such taxonomic rearrangements might have bordered on whimsy, and some might become popular and others forgotten, but now phylogenetic research clearly demonstrates that a broader family concept should apply and these two prominent northern temperate genera long residing in their own families should be with the other soapberries. Unfortunately for those of us who are the go-between for putting the scientific literature into the classrooms and blogs, it's nearly impossible to keep up with the changes especially in areas outside of your research expertise(s). The Phactor will try to adjust his thinking, but it's just like when meeting a former student, and impressively the free-wheeling memory access process pulls up the name - Goldschmidt, "Hey, Ms. Goldschmidt, how nice to see you." She's impressed her old professor got the name right, but she's married now to an Abercrombe. Well, no way in ever loving memory enhancers will she ever get reclassified. Constantly having to update all those connections becomes a real problem. But it can be worse; a colleague used to complain to me that she couldn't start and finish a project on any legume genera without having the name change.

First day of a new year - Same old stuff

What a way to start a new year trying to keep entropy at bay which is an ongoing activity for all owners of older homes. Who knows how many decades this particular toilet has been in service, and vitrified porcelain is almost forever, but not so the little bits and pieces inside, and now replacement parts no longer exist, so the Phactors spent the first day of the new year engaged in the glamorous activity of shopping for a toilet because too much water was being wasted. The Phactor takes this as somewhat of an omen, a portent of things to come. How many more things will leak? How many more little internal parts will become obsolete? So much to look forward to.