Plant Quiz: Where is Boston ivy, Egyptian cotton, Jerusalem artichokes and Russian sunflowers native?

  Plant names are endlessly fascinating to me. Especially when I learn they don't tell me what I thought they did.

 So today, a quiz: 

I don't have the right pictures, so I send you to the web to see pictures of the plants.

Where are the following plants native?

Boston ivy, Parthanocissus tricuspidata   Boston ivy

Egyptian cotton, Gossypium barbadense  Egyptian cotton

Jerusalem artichokes, Helianthus tuberosus Jerusalem artichokes and the flowering Jerusalem artichoke

Russian sunflowers, Helianthus annuus  Russian sunflowers

And the answers are:

Plant Story: Chocolate, Food of the Gods

Theobroma cacao tree, cacao 

    No doubt you know the story of chocolate.  My two favorite parts of the story are that it started out being drunk spiced with chilis, and that the name had to be changed.

  Chocolate is made from the roasted seeds of a small tree, Theobroma cacao, in the plant family Sterculiaceae.  It is native to the New World tropics, requiring warm temperatures (never below 60 F/ 16 C!) and plenty of rain. Big pods form on the branches of the tree. Unlike familiar temperate zone fruit trees, the flowers and then the fruit (pods) of cacao come directly from the branches, not off little stems. That is probably important, considering that cacao pods are as big as grapefruits.  

Anniversary post: Six months of blogging

  Sometime in the last week I passed my half year anniversary. I've been writing this blog for 6 months.

  I expected it to be hard work checking my facts, and it has been. While I am writing I have lots of  books and web pages open, looking for facts and ideas. And I do lots of pacing while I think about what I want to include.

  It has also been great fun! Writing this blog raises my mood. I work on it for a while and am happier than when I began.

 I will certainly go on gathering information about plants, places and the past to share.

  Thank you for reading!

a fine begonia!

Comments and corrections welcome.

Kathy Keeler, A Wandering Botanist

More at awanderingbotanist.com

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Visiting Northern California: coastal forests at Inverness

Forest, California coast

Tomales Bay, California

  Not far from the coast, the penninsula with Point Reyes National Seashore has forest to ramble through. Trees included some coast redwoods, but also Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), big leaf maples (Acer macrophyllum) and California bay (Umbellularia californica).

Plant story: miner's candle, Cryptantha virgata

miner's candle,
Oreocarpa virgata, 
forget-me-not family
Boraginaceae

   Like common mullein (previous post) miner’s candle makes a tall spike of flowers in the Rocky Mountain front range. And yet these plants are very different.

   Miner’s candle, Oreocarya virgata, formerly Cryptantha virgata, grows on rocky slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The Rocky Mountains extend 3000 miles (4800 km) from northern British Columbia in Canada to New Mexico in the southern United States, so there would seem to be a  lot of similar terrain where miner's candle could grow. But it doesn't . It is found only in Wyoming and Colorado. (See records in Rocky Mountain herbarium)

miner's candle habitat

   Why?

   I have no idea. 

    The genus Oreocarya has 62 species, all in the western United States. Some are widely distributed but others are found only on sand or deposits of volcanic ash. Weber and Wittmann imply miner's candle prefers gravelly granitic slopes, but I don't think those are confined to Colorado and Wyoming.

   Despite its narrow geographic distribution, miner's candle can be quite abundant where it is found.

    Miner's candle sends up a flowering spike that can be 2 feet (70 cm) tall. The flowers look like large white forget-me-not (Mysotis spp.) flowers, because they are in the same plant family, the Boraginaceae, the forget-me-not family. The leaves have coarse hairs. 

    How long does miner's candle live? Nobody has studied it but is certainly a perennial, living two or more years.

miner's candle

   I could not find one paper in the professional literature on miner's candle. It is mentioned in plant lists for natural areas and included in papers relating the species in the its genus to each other, but that's it.  
  
  The contrast with common mullein is striking--only one common name, no studies of life cycle or plant chemistry, no reported medical uses, no folklore. 

   This, sadly, is the case for a substantial number of the world's plants: all we know about them is their name.

miner's candle
Cryptantha virgata

     Easily recognized, of limited distribution, unstudied, miner's candle is a plant of more questions than answers. We think we know so very much here in the 21st century, but at best that's only true relative to the past, not to what there is to find out. 

     Where can you see miner's candle? Not in cultivation. Maybe in a native garden in Colorado or Wyoming but I don't remember ever seeing it. It is more likely that you can see it in the wild, although that means in Colorado and Wyoming. Once there it is actually pretty easy to find. These pictures of mine are from Round Mountain Nature Trail, along Route 34 going up Big Thompson Canyon toward Estes Park, CO.

Comments and corrections welcome.

References I consulted

Ellis, James.2006.  Rocky Mountain Flora. The Colorado Mountain Club Press, Golden, CO. print

Guennel, G. K. 2006. Guide to Colorado Wildflowers. Plains and Foothills. Westcliffe Publishers, Boulder, CO. print.

Kristen E. Hasenstab-Lehman1,2 and Michael G. Simpson. 2012. Cat’s Eyes and Popcorn Flowers: Phylogenetic Systematics of the Genus Cryptantha s. l. (Boraginaceae). Systematic Botany (2012), 37(3): pp. 738–757 http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/plants/cryptantha/pdfs/Hasenstab_Simpson2012-Cryptantha-Boraginac.pdf

Nelson, Ruth Ashton. Handbook of Rocky Mountain Plants. Skyland Publishers, Estes Park, CO

Rocky Mountain Herbarium, University of Wyoming http://rmh.uwyo.edu/data/search.php (link updated 1/30/21)

Weber, William A. and Ronald C. Wittmann. 1996. Colorado Flora. Eastern Slope. 3rd. ed. University Press of Colorado, Boulder CO. print.

Kathy Keeler, A Wandering Botanist

More at awanderingbotanist.com

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Plant Story: Common mullein and its folklore

common mullein
Verbascum thapsus,
in late summer

    Common mullein, Verbascum thapsus, is a European plant that has made its way all over the world. The USDA plant distribution maps show it in all the U.S. states and all but Arctic Canada. It is a member of the Scrophulariaceae, the snapdragon family.

    The name mullein may be from mollis, Latin for soft, a description of the big hairy leaves, but it is possibly from the Latin malandrium, a disease of cattle, for which mullein was a remedy. There are several points of confusion about common mullein (see below). But clearly it has been known so long that its common name is based on Latin.

    Pliny called the plant verbascum, so apparently that was another name Latin speakers used. Linnaeus adopted Verbascum as the scientific name for the genus.

    The word, thapsus, is the name of a town in north Africa, now Ras Dimas, Tunisia. On April 6, 46 BC, Julius Caesar defeated the forces of Scipio at Thapsus. The battle was fought on the outskirts of the city and the city surrendered shortly thereafter, ending the war against Caesar in Africa. However, when I tried to figure out if that meant that mullein grows in Tunisia, I discovered that en.wikipedia says, convincingly, that thapsus was taken from thapsos, the name of an unidentified plant from Thapsos in Sicily. As far as I can tell the plant has been growing in both areas since prehistoric times. I doubt that it is native to all of Eurasia as the en.wikipedia article says. More probably, long before written history it migrated with humans to all those locations, from some much more limited homeland.

Visiting Northern California: the Coast at Inverness

Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore, California

Dunes, Point Reyes
National Seashore, California

   Point Reyes National Seashore is a lovely place. When it is unpleasantly hot in St. Louis, Denver, or Walnut Creek, you can head to the beach and find yourself cooled by the breeze off the ocean, and even looking for a windbreaker  when the clouds roll in. 

     We were there in May and we really did have these beaches to ourselves. 

beach at Point Reyes

flowers on the headlands,
Point Reyes

   
     The spring wildflowers were glorious. They dotted the headlands with color.

California poppy,
Eschscholzia californica