Plant Story--Fragrant Plumeria, Frangipani, Temple Tree

I first saw it in Costa Rica in 1972. A beautiful plant with spiral white flowers and an enticing scent. Plumeria the biologists told me.

wild frangipani, Costa Rica 1973

Several days later someone called it frangipani and I connected the little bottle from the New Age store with the beautiful flower.

But it is true. One common name for species of Plumeria is frangipani and it is the source of what I thought of as a rather cloying essential oil. I like the scent of the flowers much better. If you've never smelled a frangipani flower, you've missed a treat!

Plant Story -- the Mysterious Marquis Frangipani

The Marquis Frangipani eludes me.

Frangipani, Plumeria, (link: previous post) is one of the plants where the common name is no easier than the scientific name: both are multi-syllable words unfamiliar to most people. The scientific name is Plumeria. That name was chosen by Linneaus in the middle 1700s in honor of the Franciscan monk and French botanist Charles Plumier (1646-1704, biography), who collected and described many plants in the Caribbean in the late 1600s, one of which was plumeria. The plant was of course well-known to native Americans across the Caribbean and central America. The Badianus Manuscript, 1552, describes it and its use by the Aztecs, but The Badianus Manuscript was not widely known or available for many years after it was written (link).

Visiting Hawaii--Botanist on Oahu

In December, my husband and I visited Hawaii, staying in Honolulu for a week. Today (May 2020) there's a two week in-your-hotel-room quarantine for people arriving in Hawaii. I daydream about making taking a three week trip but probably not. So I'll reminisce.

Waikiki Beach at sunrise

Of course there were beautiful sunrises, such as this one, over Waikiki. But wait, that's a plant picture, a hau tree, Hibiscus tiliaceus (mallow family, Malvaceae), frames the photo. (This is after all, a botanical post).

Tropical Flowers

orchids,  Singapore

Here is are a group of bright flowers, in case you are deep in snow as I am, are heading for a tropical holiday, or just enjoy the dramatic colors -- a collection of common tropical flowers. The tropics are defined as between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the area around the Equator between 23 degrees north and south. Except at high elevations, this region never freezes and is generally quite warm and rainy.

All over the tropics you'll see:

Orchids! Members of the Orchidaceae, the plant family with more species than any of the other 400+ plant families, orchids have great diversity, from small pale flowers to large purple or red ones. People love them, so there are thousands of cultivated varieties. The vast majority of orchids require warm temperatures and high humidity so are easily grown in the warm tropics and less visible elsewhere.

another orchid seen in Singapore

Visiting Hawaii--Cactus Garden in Honolulu

A farmer's market gathers each Saturday in Honolulu, just below Kapi'olani Community College. It was fun shopping there: macadamia nuts, kona coffee, guavas, pineapples and chocolates. But I was distracted and spent most of my time in the garden behind the farmer's market, Kapi'olani Community College's Cactus Garden.

Homogenized World--Tropical Plant Distributions

I am writing a novel about Paraguay in 1630--because when I saw northern Argentina and Paraguay in the 1980s I was surprised by their natural history and history and have wanted to share their stories.

In trying to bring the 17th century to life, I have to describe what was there and that has been quite an adventure because there has been so much change.

Beginning in the 1500s, conquering and colonizing, European powers carried useful plants all over the world. To describe our world early in that process, I have to figure out what plants are native to the Americas and which were introduced. If it is native to the Americas, it will likely be new to Europeans. If it is from Africa or China, it may not yet be common in South America even if it is abundant there today.

Winter Escape--Honolulu

As the days get colder, I daydream about tropical beaches.

For example, in Hawaii

While I always recommend the Big Island if you are going to Hawaii (for its diversity and its active volcano) I recently did a successful experiment--I had a great botanical time from a single hotel in a easily-reached city. We simply flew to Honolulu last May, stayed in a hotel there, and explored from there.

View from hotel window

Plant Story--So Exotic, Bird of Paradise Flower

The bird of paradise flower, Strelitzia reginae, is so commonly planted in tropical and subtropical climates--southern California, Florida, Hawaii in the United States--as to seem boring.

At the same time, for newcomers to those and more tropical regions, it is the essence of an exotic flower: very large, bizarrely shaped and in incredible blue, orange, red and green.

Another Anniversary!

 I started this blog at the beginning of February, 2013. I am celebrating its 8th anniversary.

How very long ago 2013 seems! 

I started writing this blog to make good plant stories more available. For example, a Supreme Court decision that decided the tomato is a vegetable; several plants native to the Americas became such a part of Eurasian cultures so fast that by the 1700 people thought they were Eurasian plants, for example chili peppers, and plumeria (aka frangipani and Indian temple tree). 

red flax, Linum grandiflorum, a plant I grew because I'd read about it.

                                             It is as pretty as it was described to be.

Visiting Costa Rica--Very Seasonal Guanacaste Province

Costa Rica has been a destination for ecologists since at least the 1970s, well before it had ecotourism infrastructure--one of its strengths today. The attraction of Costa Rica to professional biologists was having so many different tropical habitats in a small area. Naturally, at 9 degrees north of the Equator, there is tropical rainforest. A line of mountains runs down the center of Costa Rica, so while the rainforest as sea level is always very warm, as you go up there are a whole series of fascinating very wet montane forests.  Cross over the mountains and lowland rainforest is there but it is not quite the same.

lowland rainforest, Costa Rica

Finally Costa Rica has dry tropical forest, a region that is very rainy half the year and rainless the rest of the year.  This a climate extends along the Pacific coast of Central America, ending in Guanacaste Province, in northwestern Costa Rica. Many elements of that community are shared with Mexico and even Arizona.

I had imagined the tropical rainforest but tropical dry forest was quite unexpected.

Plant Names and Families

Indian temple tree (Plumeria, dogbane family, Apocynaceae)

Some of my earliest blogs (spring, 2013) were about botanical classification because I wanted to explain why I used it.

I recently settled down to read a technical book on ecology and found the references (Somebody 2002, Somebodyelse and Coauthor 2011) distracting. Annoying, actually. There was a time when I read over those without a thought.

I elected from the beginning to include references in this blog, but only at the end. But I do stick in technical plant name information (Fancylatin name, twig family, Fancylatinaceae), every time I mention a plant. I am not about to give that up, intrusive as it is. So perhaps I should explain again.

Why Include References in this Blog?

I've been writing this blog weekly since 2013, describing places or plants, or botanical ideas. Most weeks I include references. Reading other people's blogs as I worked on English ivy, I noted, again, that few of them include references. So why do I? Why go to that extra work? 

What the references do is to show you, the reader, where I got my material. It is an academic thing, of course. But knowledge is built on knowledge. I have first-hand observations, but I get a lot of information from other people. In academia, it is important to give those people credit. Here on the internet, manners are different, but the core reason for including references is to let readers know where the information came from remains critical. 

grapevine, as in "I heard it through the grapevine"

If the first reason for listing references is to give credit where credit is due, the second is to be transparent about where the facts and ideas came from. That's the one I'm going to talk about.

Moth Pollination I. Overview.

Moths are the secret pollinators. They fly at dusk or after dark, tend to be small, and have blotchy color patterns. For all those reasons, they get little attention. And yet:  Moths are very numerous. They make up most of the insect order Lepidoptera, moths and butterflies. Lepidoptera are the second largest group of insects, after beetles, with 180,000 species, which is about 10% of all described living organisms. Lepidoptera are broken into 126 families; two families are butterflies, 17, 000 species, the rest are moths. So nearly 10% of the world's organisms are moths. And yet we generally overlook them. 

big tropical moth, about an inch across

Visiting Kauai -- Additional Impressions

I wrote about our April trip to Kauai a couple times. Here are some pictures from the trip that don't fit very well anywhere else.

I didn't mention the chickens. Chickens are all over the island. At first you think you're seeing them just outside someone's yard. Then you figure out that they are feral, like cats in cities. 

Tenth Anniversary!

I started this blog in February 2013. I have uploaded a post every week since then, 521 posts. The actual total is 532, because once in a while I added a mid-week post. In that decade I wrote books about conspicuous plants (listed below), gave talks about plants and travel, and, last month, published an historical novel about travel, featuring plants (see below). I learned a lot about writing, publishing, and projectors. I aspired to being an expert on a tour and just before covid, got to try it. Then, of course, I experienced staying in during the pandemic and, lately, reestablishing pre-pandemic activities. My thinking about plants went from considering all plants cool to believing we should make a real effort to grow plants native to our local area to preserve them and the animals that feed on them, which discourages growing nonnative plants. 

 In 2013 I saw the Caribbean for the first time.