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Today I have moved my blog to its own domain, http://ntsavanna.com and have posted the first entry - on galls.

I have also launched a small website, called Learn Plants Now! devoted to learning about plants. It covers some of the strategies and tips I have developed over the time since I’ve been in Panama. The hope is that it may be of some use to those who are new to the field, as I still am.

Hope to see you there.

A couple of years ago I wrote about two Mimosa species that we have in the area. They are sensitive to the touch, and I was quite taken by them, at first. Now that we have a few good healthy stands here and there, and now that I’ve walked barefoot upon them, and now that the dogs carefully avoid them, I’m a little less enamored. Here’s a sample stand:

And here’s a representative thorn:

We now have plans to remove at least the stands near the house.

Nevertheless, I continue to marvel at how the leaves shrink upon touch. And now I’ve read a very interesting post at Niches explaining exactly how and why the leaves shrink. He has some nice pictures, too. Definitely worth reading if you’re at all curious about this famous sensitive plant.

It’s the time of year for the Miconia rubiginosa bloom - possibly my very favorite Miconia tree.

All of the Miconias in this area have small white flowers in what is called a panicle inflorescence, that is, more or less pyramid-shaped. The Miconia rubiginosa have small tufts like little cotton balls within the inflorescence.

Two other Miconias in the area bloom earlier in the year. Miconia impetiolaris has large shiny leaves and produces a bright red berry. Its inflorescence (left, below) looks like a robust cluster of bottle brushes. The third Miconia, which may be Miconia argentea, is a looser inflorescence than the other two (right, below).

I have a special fondness for M. rubiginosa, though. It’s pretty dominant in this area, and I see many stands of it on the road between Potrerillos and Dolega. Locally it’s known as canillo. It’s really difficult to get a shot that gives you a sense of trees everywhere blooming white. This will have to do for now:

Thanks to a link from Seeds Aside, I found this plant-like depiction of the architecture of the Neotropical Savanna web site:

It’s created by a program at Websites as graphs, which also gives the following information about color coding:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

I wonder what it means - that big cluster down in the lower left? Probably that I should get outside and take some pictures of real plants.

If the ordinary-looking beach plant, the sea rocket, notices unrelated plants on the beach nearby, it will sprout aggressive nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects a sibling nearby, it restrains itself. The research is described in the Science Section of today’s New York Times. That’s surprising enough behavior for a plant, and there’s a little discussion about it. But the box-office smash in the article is a time-lapse movie of a parasitic dodder seedling sniffing out, and then coiling around a hapless tomato plant. Check it out!

A little diversion today.

A couple of years ago I wrote about how much I like cecropias because they represent to me, the quintessential tropical tree. Maybe I should say “a” quintessential tropical tree, since the strangler fig is another…However, in my enthusiasm I decided to transplant a couple of saplings.

Six weeks later, the smaller of the two was about a foot tall - 30 cm, actually. The larger one is farther back, to the left of the stick and in front of one of the young pine trees.

Those two pine trees in the background are near the seasonal spring that marks the boundary between the neighbors’ property and ours.

I sort of forgot about documenting the growth of the cecropias, though, until I noticed this year they seem to have shot up. To capture both of them, I had to use a different angle than in the first picture. Also a different camera, different time of year, so the colors are different as well. Notice that my measuring stick is worn, but the smaller of the two cecropias, which was 30 cm in September 2006 is now more than 1 m in June 2008.

The pine trees in the back have grown, too, but relatively speaking, the cecropias really took off. And yet it seems to me that the cecropia saplings that have not been transplanted grow even faster than this. I guess I’ll have to start keeping track of them. Probably nobody cares about this but me.

Welcome to Berry Go Round #5, a blog carnival in praise of plants.

May is the month of the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, who was born on May 23. (You’ll find some references giving his birthday as May 13, but that is according to the calendar as it existed in 1707, which corresponds to May 23 on our calendar.)

Linnaeus, of course, is considered the “father of modern taxonomy” and also one of the “fathers of modern ecology” (wikipedia). You’ll find a few more thoughts and links about Linnaeus, his opus on plants, Species Plantarum, as well as news about Darwin’s garden at the end of this post, but let’s start with the blogs.

Taxonomy and Plant Identification

In honor of Linneaus, we start today’s Berry Go Round #5 with evolgen’s outrage at the outdated taxonomy taught by a participant on NPR’s Whad’ya Know quiz show - Whad’ya Know About Protists? The post itself clarifies where both land and aquatic plants fit into today’s taxonomic scheme, and shows just how passé the grassland ecologist was in her quiz answers about seaweed. But don’t stop reading at the end of the post - some of the comments get into the difficulty of teaching biology with today’s textbooks and other issues.

Identification and naming of plants are essential to any system of taxonomy. It can be frustrating or as much fun as a detective story. For me, finding the scientific name of a plant is like solving a mystery, and after finding the name one of the first things I want to do next is to learn how it got its name. MMW at Two Gardens writes in The Ides of May about how the firecracker flower got its scientific name, Dichelostemma ida-maia [because MMW's image of D. ida-maia is in the background, I asked permission, kindly given, from xerantheum at Flickr, to use his image, which is at the right]. Was it named after Ida May, a woman, or the after 15th of May, when it is in bloom? It must have been fun to find out - and don’t take the name of the post as giving away the answer! Bonus - the image from The Ides of May post, with Ixia viridiflora in the foreground, made Botany Photo of the Day on May 22.

All parts of a plant are useful in identification, but it takes a little practice before a novice botanist can recognize a bract with confidence, they are so variable. The term itself, from the Latin bractea ‘thin plate of metal,’ was first applied to plants in the 18th century (Oxford American Dictionary), most likely within the lifetime of Linnaeus if not first by Linnaeus himself. Wayne at Niches tells of the finding of an unusual bract in a buckeye - a mutation. Along the way he writes in his inimitable way about the biology of bracts and mutations in plants. A fascinating post.

Leaves tell, and hold, many secrets about the plants that grow them. When I first moved to the tropics, I was intrigued by the number of plants here that have pointy tips. Laurent at Seeds Aside has written about them in Drip tips drain leaves more efficiently… and there I learned why it’s important for leaves to drain away the residual from tropical rains.

In Praise of Plants

Several blogs this month revealed the sheer joy of plant appreciation: Modern Green Man has a touching tribute to one of my favorite tropical trees, a tree known here in Panama as the Flamboyant tree or Poinciana, but one that is known in many parts of the world as The Flame of the Forest, the title he gives his post. His images are much nicer than mine, at left, so go take a look and enjoy the grace of his writing. Tracy of Outside loves Bleeding Hearts, with the pictures to prove it. Gravity’s Rainbow took a trip to Lotusland - yes, there really is a place called “Lotusland” and it was established by an opera singer! - during spring break and has distributed her images among 8 posts.

Corey at 10,000 Birds explores the spathe and spadix of the cool-looking Jack in the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) near his aunt’s house in upstate New York. Nice pictures, too. We learn from Aydin Örstan at Snail’s Tails about the Tulip Tree in Liriodendron tulipifera: a good place for snails. Another one with nice images. More on Tulips in the Trees at Niches as well.

Food and Agriculture

We can’t really let a plant carnival go by without recognizing some blogs about food. The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog highlights a recent study on diet quality in resource-poor areas. The finding, not too surprising, is that Dietary diversity improves nutrition. Programs to alleviate hunger concentrate on providing only a few of the needed micronutrients. Green Me went to pick asparagus to fill her yellow bucket and had a hair-raising experience on the way home, which she describes in My Asparagus Adventure.

Seeds Aside suggests that the pomegranate (Punica granatum) might be the Best fruit ever - you should see the list of why this is so. Mark Schauss of Toxic World Blog - Detoxify and Heal Your Body has discovered that those numbers plastered on your fruits and vegetables actually mean something - you can use them to distinguish organically grown, conventionally grown, and genetically modified fruits. Read What do the Numbers on Your Fruits and Vegetables Mean? to learn the easy-to-remember codes.

And you can’t think about agriculture without thinking about droughts. Mama Joules looks into the definition of drought, coping issues, and a few surprising statistics in Drought for thought. And you can’t think long about drought without thinking about global warming. The Tao of Simplicity has listed the Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming. Here’s one: Faster satellites. Can you guess why?

Linnaeus and Darwin

Now for those extra words about Linnaeus:

Last year was the 300-year anniversary of his birth, and there’s not as much of a fuss being made about him this year. Unless you consider a fuss, as I do, the announcement of a “landmark” book co-published by The Linnean Society of London and London’s Natural History Museum. Titled Order out of Chaos: Linnaean Plant Names and their Types, by Dr. Charlie Jarvis, it was published on his birthday this month, May 23. It’s much more than an English version of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, which was published in 1753 - it gives the current name of each plant, reference to relevant literature, type specimen information, and more. Well worth the 80 pounds sterling plus postage and packing - if only I could afford it! And, bye the bye, want to bet the intention was to publish this volume last year? Botanists have been working on it since 1981, but with the rapid changes in systematics and taxonomy in recent years, it’s amazing they missed their (presumed) deadline by only one year!

Meantime, the rest of us have access to Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum at the Missouri Botanical Garden. What’s amazing to me is that Linnaeus covered in the two volumes of this book all the plants known to European naturalists at the time. He based his organization on the sexual features of plants and came up with the idea of giving each plant two names - binomial nomenclature. With his system a novice could simply count the pistils and stamens in a flower and come up with a list of genera the plant could belong to (wikipedia).

A little more than a century after the publication of Species Plantarum, Darwin made his own observations on the pistils and stamens of primroses at his home, Down House, leading to experiments that helped him develop the theory of evolution. The New York Botanical Garden currently has an exhibit on these and other plant experiments called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

Finally, we can’t leave this round without acknowledging a carnival named after the Linnaeus - it’s called Linnaeus’ Legacy, featuring blogs about classification, taxonomy, and systematics of all forms of life.

Berry Go Round #6 will be at Seeds Aside . If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this convenient submission form.

Last February for a couple of weeks or so it seemed we were surrounded by plants bearing small white flowers with many stamens (male reproductive parts). Most of those plants are producing fruits now, and it turns out two of them, at least, are very closely related. First the flowers:

The flower on the left has tannish anthers (pollen sacs) at the tips of the stamens and pink tinges at the base of the petals. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you should be able to see a greenish pistil (female reproductive part) near the middle of all the stamens.

The flower on the right has white anthers, all-white petals, and a white pistil.

Now for the berries:

The red berry on the left is the first fruit of the young cereza (Spanish for “cherry”) plant in our orchard, which we purchased from MIDA, the Panamanian government source for saplings and young plants. The green, maroon, and blue berries on the right are berries from the escobillo (Spanish for “broom” or, literally, “I sweep”) shrub growing on a volunteer, untended shrub in our yard. Below are the respective plants when they were in bloom.

Both these plants, the cultivated plant and the volunteer shrub, belong to the same genus of the family Myrtaceae. You might guess from the similarity of the flowers that they belong to the same family, but what makes them members of the Myrtaceae family in particular?

The Myrtaceae (Myrtle) Family

The family gets its name from the Myrtle genus, Myrtus, which is native to Europe and north Africa. A member of that genus, the common Myrtle, Myrtus communis, is said to have been sacred to Aphrodite and Demeter (wikipedia), but I haven’t been able to find out why.

Members of the myrtle family are woody with essential oils. They include: myrtle, clove, guava, feijoa, allspice, and eucalyptus (wikipedia). There are at least 3,000 species in the family and 130-150 genera.

To recognize a member of the Myrtaceae, Gentry (one of my favorite plant ID books for this area) says we need know only three characteristics of the leaves, at least for the Myrtaceae in our area.

The leaves are

• opposite
• simple
• pellucid-punctate (dotted with translucent pits)

Here are those characteristics in our two plants:

On the left is a stem from the plant in the orchard, showing simple leaves coming off opposite sides of the stem. On the right is a stem from the shrub, same thing. The shape of the leaves is quite different, but the arrangement of the leaves of each is opposite and the type of the leaves is simple (not compound - for more details on this distinction see here).

Those translucent pits can be seen pretty easily in the orchard plant. There’s a red rectangle in the left image (you can see it better by clicking on the image to enlarge it). The right image is a magnification the leaf section within that rectangle.

The pits in the leaves of the shrub are not so easily seen without magnification, so I scanned one for a better view. To have a comparison, I also scanned a leaf from the orchard plant. Again, the orchard plant is on the left, the shrub on the right. You can see the pits better in both cases in the enlargement.

So we have clear evidence that these plants belong to the Myrtaceae family - opposite, simple leaves with translucent pits.

The genus is harder to pinpoint. Gentry points out that although the family is very easy to recognize by the combination of the above characteristics, determining the genus is especially difficult in the Myrtaceae family. As frequently happens with me, I stumbled on the scientific name of one of these plants by accident, and the other followed as night by day. I was browsing through the wonderful book by Carrasquilla when I saw a picture of the broom plant…Eugenia biflora.

The Eugenia Genus

The genus was named by Linneaus himself - for Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736), an Austrian general (Dave’s botanary) known for his patronage of the arts (Columbia Encyclopedia). Don’t ask me why Linneaus decided to honor the prince in this way!

Eugenia is found mostly in the New World. Like other members of the Myrtaceae, the sepals, which lie beneath the petals, stay on the plant after the petals fall off. Here are the sepals of the shrub, which I find quite attractive:

One of the distinguishing features of Eugenia species is that their flowers and fruits are carried on pedicels, or stalks. And here is where we come to the very close similarity of these two plants.

The scientific name of the plant from the orchard, the one with tannish anthers and pink tinges at the base of some of the petals, is Eugenia uniflora - which means single-flowered.

The scientific name of the plant from the yard, the all-white flower, is Eugenia biflora - which means with two flowers.

Here’s why (click on each image to enlarge):

The flower pedicel (arrow) for Eugenia uniflora, on the left, supports only one flower. The flower pedicel (arrow) for Eugenia biflora supports two flowers, more easily seen in the image after the petals have fallen away and only the sepals remain.

Very closely related, indeed!

The fruit of Eugenia uniflora is also known as the Suriname Cherry or the Brazilian Cherry. I missed getting a good picture of the fruit from our first-year plant, but A. V. Popovkin at Flickr has a great one, used here with his kind permission:

You can see that the fruit is 8-lobed, like a little pumpkin. It’s high in vitamin C and when very ripe has a sweet taste which can be resinous. Here in Panama it’s simply called cereza and it is prized for eating as is and for jams.

Because it is valued as a fruit and an ornamental plant, E. uniflora has been distributed to places in the world well beyond its native Brazil and the Neotropics, as shown in this map from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

The fruit of E. biflora is edible, but I don’t know that many people here take advantage of it. It’s pretty small and has a big seed, and so may not be worth the effort.

This plant has not been distributed as widely as E. uniflora. It is confined to the West Indies and Central and South America.

Here in Panama, the leaves and branches are put to good use in some areas as brooms, and, as mentioned, the common name for the plant is escobillo, meaning “I sweep.” I remember a day in early January a couple of years ago while waiting for our weed-eater to be repaired visiting with the wife of the mechanic. She told me that it was a New Year’s custom to make a new broom for the house.

She promptly went out into her yard, cut some branches from from an escobillo shrub, lashed them to a pole, and handed me my New Year’s broom. It worked, too!

It’s spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and many plant and garden bloggers are writing about it. You’ll find a nice collection of posts on the 4th edition of Berry Go Round at Foothills Fancies.