Flies don't get much respect, we think of them mainly as pests. However, they are important pollinators.
A Wandering Botanist
Tales of a lover of plants, history and travel.
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Travel Story--Chicago Botanic Garden
Botanic gardens have many functions: as places to grow and protect rare plants, as places to show diverse plants to the public, as places to recommend yard and garden plants, as places to breed plants for human uses, and more. The Chicago Botanic Garden is no exception. website
I visited for the first time in June. It is beautiful.
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Chicago Botanic Garden |
Sunday, July 27, 2025
Plant Story -- Scentbottle Orchid, Platanthera dilatata
Sunday, July 20, 2025
Plant Story--Coreopsis, Pretty Tickseeds
The bright yellow flowerhead nodded in the breeze, peeking out among a variety of leaves. Look! A coreopsis!
tickseed, Coreopsis grandiflora hybrid |
Coreopsis is a genus of 35 species, most native to North America, in the daisy family, Asteraceae. They have the typical flower head structure of the family: a group of disc florets in the middle surrounded by ray florets which provide petals. Most are naturally some shade of yellow. Native ranges of the 28 species in the United States are mostly along the East Coast or California, but a few are found in every state.
Gardeners discovered them long ago, so there are many color patterns and varieties, and the plant you see growing in a garden is probably a hybrid, not a natural species.
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Rocky Mountain Wildflowers of July
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sidebells penstemon, Penstemon secundiflorus |
Sunday, July 6, 2025
Travel--Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Minneapolis-St. Paul
I visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Chaska MN (website), at the end of April. I had heard about it for years and I had traveled with them on several excellent garden tours, so I was eager to see it. I found it was much more than I had expected.
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a magnolia in flower |
Sunday, June 29, 2025
The Scandalous Orange Petunia, Glowing Petunias, and Black Petunias
Petunias Engineered. Petunia--the common one is Petunia x atkinsiana--are easy to grow. Petunias are fast-growing, hardy, diploid plants and so several plant research labs tried studying them. They soon became a model organism, widely used for research on plants, including plant genetics. (See previous blog on petunias generally). They were cutting edge for inserting and turning on genes from other species.
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petunias in many colors |
For this blog, I shopped a large garden store and came home with two transgenic petunias--orange and bioluminescent--and possibly the blackest flower in the world. Researchers inserted genes from corn into petunias to see how the biochemical pathways work; the successful insertion created an orange-flowered petunia. The orange petunia was a desirable garden plant which caused a scandal, a story I find fascinating.