Tansy is a small plant with bright yellow flowers and a spicy smell (scientific name, Tanacetum vulgare sunflower family, Asteraceae). It is native to western Asia but long ago became an herb and spice that was grown throughout Europe and then transported by Europeans all over the world. Today we know it more as a garden flower or roadside weed than as a flavoring or medicine, but it is all of those.
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| common tansy, Tanacetum vulgare |
One of the ideas that attracted me to ecology as a student was pollination. In particular, the match between flowers and their visitors. Bees like open flowers like echinacea and bees can enter closed flowers like peas, but some flowers are too long and narrow for them to reach the nectar. This results in patterns in nature, plants that are mainly bee-pollinated, for example, and plants that are not pollinated by bees. And those bee-flowers share characteristics, so that you can recognize them, just as bees do.
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| Bumblebee drinking nectar from golden banner (Thermopsis montana) |
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| ten-petal blazingstar, Mentzelia decapetala, at night |
In the regions where I have lived in the last 50 years, Colorado, Nebraska, I knew only two bindweeds, the very common field bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis (blog), and the much rarer, hedge bindweed, perhaps better called hege false bindweed Calystegia sepium, both with white tubular flowers open in the mornings. Hedge false bindweed is much bigger--and so quite beautiful--and although I saw it climbing through roadside shrubs, it didn't seem particularly weedy.
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| hedge false bindweed, Calystegia sepium |
In western Ireland, there is a region of limestone outcrops, called the Burren. Great expanses of limestone rock lie at the surface. You can see them as the hills in the distance in the photo. Plants grow in crevasses, but nothing grows on rock, so it has never been cropland.
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| The Burren on the hills in the distance |
The roselle is a small hibiscus, Hibiscus sabdariffa, (cotton family, Malvaceae) that is grown as food, but pretty enough to be grown as an ornamental. Also known as Jamaican sorrel, roselle is a tropical perennial which can be grown outside the tropics as an annual. The stems are red, the leaves green, the veins in the leaf red. The flowers are white or yellow with dark centers. Around each flower are a series of fleshy red sepals and another circle of red bracts that look very similar. The sepals are gathered and eaten, sometimes under the name "hibiscus flowers."
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| roselle, Hibiscus sabdariffa |
Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, in the rose family, Rosaceae, is a lovely and conspicuous European wildflower, now naturalized in the eastern United States (known there as "queen-of-the-meadow").
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| meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria |
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| buffalo burr, Solanum rostratum |
The University of Nebraska's Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, Nebraska, is celebrating its 50th year. Opened in 1975, using the facilities of a former Girl Scout camp, Cedar Point has each year since then hosted summer biology courses, geology courses, art courses, and experiential learning by children of many ages. Researchers staying there have studied everything from soil mycorrhizae and beetle intestinal parasites to prairie grass genetics and barn swallow social behavior.
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| Goodall Lodge, Cedar Point Biological Station 1976 |
In early August I took a garden tour with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to the cities of Vancouver and Victoria in southwestern British Columbia. Garden tours focus on plants; here are miscellaneous highlights.
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| a bed of coleus and marigolds |
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| blue tufted vetches (Vicia cracca, called bird vetch in the U.S.) and unknown white flower (fools parsley, Aethusa cynapium?) |
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| zinnias, genus Zinnia |
A tour took me across southern Ireland, west to east, in mid July.
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| Coast of the Dingle Penninsula, Ireland |
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| hoary vervain, Verbena stricta, very close up |
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| hoary vervain, Verbena stricta |
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| burned forest, Rocky Mountain National Park |
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| meadow by burned forest, Rocky Mountain National Park |
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| switchgrass, Panicum virgatum, famous autopolyploid |
Summer moves steadily up the mountains. As you rise up above the plains of Colorado into the Rocky Mountains, the plants that are done flowering at 5,000 feet elevation are in full bloom at 8,000 feet, but are still in bud at 11,000 feet. Of course not all the plants are able grow from 5000' to 11000' elevation, but many do.
These photos were taken in a ramble around Lily Lake, at 8,931' elevation.
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| Lily Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado |
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| Winged wild buckwheat, Eriogonum alatum in flower (yellowish, center) |
Pussytoes (Antennaria species, sunflower family, Asteraceae) are cute little plants, easy to recognize when flowering, inconspicuous when they are not. There are about 45 species of Antennaria, mostly in North America plus a few in Europe and South America. The U.S.D.A. plants database gives 36 species of Antennaria in North America, counting Alaska, all of them native.
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| Antennaria pussytoes |
When flowering, they send up clusters of round flowers, easily imagined as cat feet. (Catsfoot is another common name). The non-flowering plant is a cluster of quite small oval gray-green leaves on the ground, often below the grasses, and so quite inconspicuous.
This flower is a pink. But it is clearly not very pink.
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| pinks, genus Dianthus |
I flew to St. Louis to see the periodical cicadas, brood XIX, 13-year periodical cicadas. Why? Because they are a wonder of the world. No other organism spends 12 or 16 years underground to emerge, mate and lay eggs in the 13th or 17th year, with all of the periodical cicadas in an area synchronized at these very long intervals. Nothing in the world comes even close to it. How could this evolve? They are found only in the eastern U.S. from just west the Missouri River east almost to the Atlantic Ocean, from Wisconsin and New York south to Louisiana, Alabama, northern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and nowhere else in the world. I somehow was never in the right place at the right time to see them emerge.
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| periodical cicada, St. Louis, Missouri |
"We have a marketing failure with natives," Doug Tallamy wrote in Nature's Best Hope. While I think the "grow natives" movement is helping correct that, the fact that many natives are called weeds does discourage loving them.
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| fireweed, Chamerion |
Lots of our native plants are weeds. That is, they have weed in their common name. Fireweed (Chamerion), milkweed (Asclepias), jewelweed (Impatiens), Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium), and ironweed (Vernonia) to name a few.
We took a motorized boat --jet boat--tour up the Snake River from Clarkston Washington to Hell's Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America (7.993 ft). The river was wonderfully reflective as we left Clarkston.
As a group, the plants in the mustard or cabbage family, Brassicaceae, are cool weather plants, growing well early in the spring, flowering as the temperatures warm, going to seed in the heat of summer. Familiar mustards are cabbage (Brassica oleracea), broccoli (Brassica oleracea), and mustard itself (mustards are species of Brassica, Rhamphospermum and Sinapsis). These edible mustard family plants were domesticated in Eurasia and they are a small selection of the more than 3,700 species worldwide. North America has 634 native species in the mustard family. It also has more than 100 exotic mustards.
My recent cruise down the Snake and Columbia Rivers retraced some of the steps of the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition. Also called the Corps of Discovery Expedition, they were sent to explore the area of the new Louisiana Purchase (link) and the region west of it to the Pacific Ocean. The Expedition has grabbed the imagination of people for two centuries now, as they imagine being in a small corps of men (and one woman) going into unknown regions. The Expedition walked, rode, and boated for over 8,000 miles in under three years, roundtrip.
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| Crow Butte, Washington |
Looking in detail at the discoveries of the Expedition is a reminder of how much the United States didn't know in 1800.
Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, a genetic phenomenon which is widespread in plants and uncommon in animals. The ancestry of most if not all plants includes a doubling of all the chromosomes. In addition, many plant species were formed by crossing between two existing species, with subsequent doubling of the genome which made the hybrid fertile. (See previous blogs Intro to Polyploidy, Crop Plant Polyploidy, Speciation via Polyploidy).
Long known and still poorly understood is variation in polyploidy within a species.
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| fireweed (Chamerion) has within-species polyploidy |
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| Spokane Washington |
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| The Spokane River, Spokane, Washington |
There is a national push for homeowners in the U.S. to grow plants native to their area (see previous posts part1; part 2; part 3; HNPwebsite). The number of birds and insects have been dropping over the last 50 years. Lack of food is blamed because we replaced native habitat with lawns and parking lots. Rewilding our neighborhoods is not a realistic solution; what is suggested is that we each grow regional natives on our properties, making our yards contribute to local habitat.
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| Alpine clover Trifolium dasyphyllum, an alpine tundranative that won't survive in Denver, though the distance is only 50-60 miles. |
Strawberries are popular fruits, eaten world-wide. This is despite the fact that fresh strawberries do not improve after harvest and cannot be stored for very long. So popular are they that we have bred them to produce fruit throughout the growing season, not just briefly in June or July, and ship them from warmer climates or big greenhouses for year-round fresh strawberries, and we freeze them or preserve them as jams and jellies to them always available.
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| fruit salad with strawberries |
Strawberries, genus Fragaria in the rose family, Rosaceae, are a popular fruit and have been for millennia. Twenty to 24 species are recognized, with cultivated strawberries adding many hybrids and varieties. They are native around the world, mainly in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, plus a few Southern Hemisphere species.
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| strawberries, Fragaria |
Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, when all the chromosomes and so, all the genes, of an organism double. In plants, it is very common; easily 3/4 of plants are polyploid.
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| an Oenothera |
Because polyploidy is a genetic effect that takes place inside the cell's nucleus, it is not casually observed. But botanists discovered polyploidy as soon as they had microscopes to look at the contents of the nucleus and when they tried crossing polyploids and got results that didn't make sense based on diploid genetics. (Diploid = 2 copies of the genome, polyploidy = numbers over 2, like 3, 4, and 6 see previous posts in this series link link). Study of polyploidy began in the early 1900s.
Catnip, Nepeta cataria, is one of the better-known little herbs because it is a drug for cats. Cats respond to catnip for about 15 minutes, with distinctive behaviors from rubbing on their faces and rolling in it to grooming and salivating. Young kittens do not respond and some adult cats never do. On the other hand, the response is widespread among cats of all kinds, lions, tigers, cheetahs, lynx, pumas and so on, but not dogs or rabbits or rats or other groups of animals. Since cats are common pets, people provide or grow catnip for them, with the result that catnip is known to many people.
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| catnip, Nepeta cataria |
Here is a photo album of pictures from Tokyo in April. Beautiful spring flowers.
The photos are from April 2017 but if you hurry, you could still get there to see what it is like in 2024:
Classical Japanese design
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Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, where all the chromosomes double. Animals rarely survive major chromosome changes, but plants usually do, leading to aspects of plant genetics that are quite different from animals.
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| strawberry, Fragaria ananassa |
It is still winter for me. The ground is brown and cold. Oh, I can see a trace of green in the lawn and a new shoot or two on the iris, if I look carefully. My snowdrops and crocuses are out of the ground, but not yet flowering. So, here are photos of summer flowers for cheer. Just a few more months...
Annual sunflower, the cultivated Ukrainian sunflower, Helianthus annuus
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| carrots, flowering |
Since prehistory times, humans all over the world have collected black elderberries, the fruit of black elder (Sambucus nigra, viburnum family, Viburnaceae) (see previous post: link). The plant has been used medicinally for that long as well. In addition, it grows into a nice tree, 20, sometimes 30, feet tall, with useful wood. The leaves were used as insect repellents. Folklore abounded, some protecting the plant, some considering it accursed. My herbal, traditional, and folklore books have long sections on elder. Here is a selection of what they say.
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| black elderberries, Sambucus nigra |
Species in the genus Sambucus are called elder. That somehow doesn't sound right to my eastern North American ear, so I always say elderberries. That name I prefer is clearly weird--the tree doesn't always have berries, or the berries are just the fruit of the elder--but I'm not alone in this speech pattern, you can see it in a lot of U.S. writing. Historically and properly, it was elder, but bear with me, I keep sticking -berry on the name.
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| Elderberry with berries |
It has been snowy and cold, icy and cold, windy and cold, and just cold the last week. So here are so plant photos to remind you of warmth.
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| Ixora |
It was a rainy September day two years ago when I visited the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. We walked from our hotel, down old streets and past local markets.
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| Edinburgh in September |
The plant I call fernbush is an American shrub native to the U.S. west, from eastern Oregon and Idaho south to California and New Mexico. It grows to be about 10 feet tall, spreading to 10' wide. It has leaves with lots of divisions, hence the name fernbush, with a rich spicy scent. The flowers rise in spikes of white flowers with yellow centers. The USDA plants data base calls it desert sweet. An older plant book called it tansybush, because the leaves look like, and smell a little like, the garden plant tansy (Tanacetum vulgare).
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| fernbush Chamaebataria millefolium |
Botanical gardens are zoos for plants; places where plants from around the world are conserved. Frequently they are public but they do not have to be. Frequently also the staff conduct research on topics relating to plant propagation and identification.
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| Singapore Botanic Garden |