Some words are unrelated, yet curiously sympathetic – road and rode, wrote and rote, die and dye… Carpel and Carpal fall in that category. They sound the same, and both words have to do with individual parts that may function together. But any relationship has only to do with their etymological roots. Carpel comes to …
Category Archives: Plant Science
Withering Heights
From winter through spring, you’ll find Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) flowering in The Huntington’s Herb and Shakespeare Gardens. It’s a wonderful biennial we treat as an annual, bolting with a tall raceme (a one-stemmed inflorescence with stalked flowers) that continues to produce flowers at its apex until some point of exhaustion. The tubular flowers are perfect …
Protogyny
It’s that time of the year, the time when female flowers go stepping out ahead of the bachelors. I am not talking about debutantes, of course. I’m talking about flowering of the Titan Arum, Amorphophallus titanum. The Huntington has a population of about 40 plants, most of which are mature enough to reproduce. The story …
What are the Chances?
Growing up, I understood that when two people (especially family members) behaved…, or responded the same to eventualities, they’d be branded as two peas in a pod. But science and experience tell us that old saw is misguided. Beyond having been produced in the same fruit (the pod), and appearing similar, peas in a pod …
Cells to Contemplate
Cells are truly life’s building blocks. Everything we are as humans, everything that makes up a plant is either a cell or extruded from a cell. And each of us is made of trillions of cells. Heck – a typical wine cork is made of nearly 300,000,000 cells. So most cells are pretty small. What …
True Toppers
The “eu” of Eucalyptus tells us something is true, real. The “calyptus” part (from Greek kalyptos) suggests there is a lid, or a cap, involved. And indeed there is. Each bud of a Eucalyptus flower is capped with a Hershey Kisses-looking topper that breaks away around its rim (a kind of opening we call “circumcisal …
Plainly Beautiful Anthers
Many plant genera have beautiful anthers, so conspicuous and handsome as to be the showiest aspect of the flowers. In two notable cases, botanists were compelled to make the point in writing. Both are genera that start with “calli” – which tells you something about these plants will be beautiful. One genus is Calliandra, …
An Island Belle
Fairly recently, in 1976, a team of collectors discovered a previously undescribed plant in the Campanula family, on the island of Mauritius. One of the team, Ian Richardson, named it as Wahlenbergia mauritiana in 1979. But another team member, Mats Thulin concluded the species is sufficiently distinct to merit its own genus, for which he …
Gebonias
Students don’t have to travel far to find exotic plants for study. Common garden plants showcase wonderful specializations that students can enjoy discovering. Ask them to examine pots of Begonias (which, as children, we called Gebonias), common in gardens and readily available at most garden centers. When they do closely examine Begonias, students will …
Super Suber
Most trees make cork; it’s a dead tissue in the bark, a tissue called phellem in Greek and suber in Latin. Botanists still use the words phellem and suber to describe barks, but in English we just say cork, a term that likely derives from quercus, which is the Latin word for oak trees. Of …