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By Ben, on July 23rd, 2010
The scarlet hibiscus (Hibiscus coccineus) is one of six species commonly found in Florida wetlands, and is probably the most commonly grown native ornamental hibiscus in the state. The one in our back yard is an interesting little story. It’s a perennial plant that is so hardy it can be mowed when it’s done flowering for the season. The stems/stalks are very long, over seven feet tall in the peat tub that it shares with our pond apple tree and some purple flag lilies, and they resemble bamboo in their lightness and stiffness.
The stems aren’t segmented like bamboo, but they [...]
By Ben, on July 8th, 2010
While much of the northeast has been experiencing triple-digit temperatures, south Florida was in the balmy 80′s this past holiday weekend, with large bouts of rain thrown in. At our weather station we got more than Π inches of rain, which kept me from getting out and doing much in the way of shutterbugging. But here on our front porch, right in front of the overflowing rainbarrels, was Randia aculeata, white indigo-berry in flower, thus demonstrating part of the reason for its name:
This is a nice shrub with a fairly distinctive growth pattern of opposite stems angled away from the [...]
By Ben, on April 12th, 2010
The long pointed leaves of the blue flag iris (Iris virginica) are pretty enough, but the flower is where the action is. Mine have been bare blades of green for almost as long as I can remember; I was almost certain that they’d given up the ghost completely. Then, last Friday, I saw that they had just been waiting their turn. After the oak trees leafed out, the iris began putting on their show:
By Ben, on April 9th, 2010
It’s been a little over three years now since we tore out our old landscaping, with its mostly exotic plants, and replaced it with plants native to our area: live oak, cocoplum, saw palmetto, myrsine and marlberry, bitterbush, firebush, wild coffee, coral bean and necklace pod, spicewood, buttonwood, crabwood and ironwood, stoppers of all sorts (Spanish, Simpson’s, twinberry). In all, we brought in some 85 native species of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, and a few noninvasive exotics like our Dutchman’s Pipe vine (complemented by the native maypop vine). The very first spring after we had the native plants installed, [...]
By Ben, on April 8th, 2010
Just before my recent trip to India I went on a morning walk with the lad and ran across a couple of interesting palm trees that I hadn’t seen before. What interested me about them was their intriguingly shaped hastula:
Although I’ve only been looking at this structure for about a month, I’ve been surprised by the variety of shapes it assumes; this is the most nearly circular I’ve found yet.
I have no idea what species of palm this is, but since it’s not far from my house, I’ll have plenty of time to puzzle it out with the references later. [...]
By Ben, on March 25th, 2010
In writing the post on hastula, I found out that a hastula is like a ligule. Which I guess is fine, as far as that goes, but really, it doesn’t go very far with me. I, after all, am neither agrostologist nor graminologist, so I had no idea what a ligule might be. According to MW, ligule, or tongue, is from New Latin ligula, from Latin for small tongue or strap, fr. lingere, to lick. They define it as “a thin appendage of a foliage leaf and esp. of the sheath of a blade of grass.”
By coincidence, I just happened to [...]
By Ben, on March 16th, 2010
The other day I was talking about spines on palm trees and got to thinking about defensive strategies of plants in general. It seems like there’s a general arms race going on between primary producers (organisms that convert sunlight into energy that sustains them) and primary consumers (organisms that capture that energy by feeding on the primary producers). Since most primary producers are plants and algae, by definition most primary consumers are herbivores. So in order for a plant to pass on its genes to its descendants, it must ensure that it survives long enough to reproduce.
One way to do [...]
By Ben, on March 10th, 2010
Plants have evolved many different defensive strategies over the millenia to enable them to compete for space. Some plants use chemical defenses like poison, sometimes signaled by bright colors, sometimes not. Other plants choose physical defenses against herbivory, like spines:
The spines on the frond of this Cuban petticoat palm (Copernicia macroglossa) are pretty subtle, but presumably effective. To protect its trunk, the tree just covers it completely in a coat of these fronds:
It would be pretty hard for an arboreal browser to get through that armor!
Taking the arms race one step further, this palm (Aiphanes sp.?, based on the sharp, [...]
By Ben, on March 8th, 2010
Today’s word is a botanical term, hastula, which I assume originates from the Latin hasta, spear. I can only assume it because I don’t know it for a fact. None of my desk references, not Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, not the “unabridged” American Heritage 4th edition, not even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary admit the term into the language. Even the online OED gives me this sad result:
No results, alas, even in OED
So, what to do now? Well, go back to the book in which the hard word arose. In this case, it’s Wunderlin and Hansen’s Guide to the Vascular Plants of [...]
By Ben, on February 26th, 2010
Psammophyte. This seems to be a fancy way of saying seaweed. Since this word is too hifalutin’ for the American Heritage or even Merriam-Webster teams to take on, here’s a definition of the term from Dawes and Mathieson (Seaweeds of Florida, U of Florida P 2008):
A plant that grows in unconsolidated sediments or on rocky subtrata that is impacted by sand scouring; these plants show specialized morphological and/or reproductive adaptations.
“Unconsolidated sediments” sounds to me like sand; not sure what else it could be (gravel or crushed shells, I suppose). And since psammo is Greek for sand, I’m going to say [...]
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