Botany Photo of the Day: Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion'

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November 16, 2005 : Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion'

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Keywords: Lamiaceae | Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion' | 23072-0537-1983

A warm welcome today to readers of one of Canada's national daily newspapers, the National Post. For those who don't have access to the newspaper, you can read today's article (minus the photographs) about Botany Photo of the Day here: “In Science, Beauty. In Beauty, Science.”

For those investigating the site after reading the paper, I'll add links to the rest of the BPotD entries featured in the full-page article after seeing the paper copy, but here are a few for now: Linnaea borealis, Vitis vinifera 'Cabernet Franc' and Gladiolus flanaganii. You might also like to read the first BPotD entry Melliodendron xylocarpum, read a bit more about Botany Photo of the Day, check out the main page of the UBC Botanical Garden site, ask a question on the garden's discussion forums or, if you are a Mac OS 10.4 user, download the BPotD Widget. A word of note on commenting on BPotD entries – though comments are greatly appreciated, they are moderated to prevent spammers from polluting the site. I'll be pretty quick about approving comments today, though. Lastly, a minor correction to the last paragraph of the article: I chose this Lilium sp. as a flower picture for stress relief that day.

Today's plant is yet another award-winner for gardeners, 'Profusion' beautyberry (RHS Award of Garden Merit and a Great Plant Pick). For a gardening perspective on the plant, check out Paghat's article on beautyberry. Paghat mentions that the berries are not highly preferred by birds, which I agree is true for most years. However, in observing two different plantings of beautyberry at UBC in the past month, I've noted an atypical decrease in the number of fruit on the plants (atypical in the fact that it is so early). Attributable to birds? Perhaps – I was joined by a rufous-sided towhee feeding on the fruit while taking photographs of this plant yesterday, which was a bit odd considering the amount of its typically preferred food available.

The genus Callicarpa is distributed in Central America, the southeastern United States, tropical and subtropical Asia and northern Australia. The beautyberry found in the southeastern US, Callicarpa americana, is a candidate plant for UBC Botanical Garden's new Carolinian Forest garden (mentioned in brief here). Many of the plants planned for the Carolinian Forest have relatives in the flora of southeast Asia, a biogeographical pattern observed in roughly sixty-five different genera of plants that has long been recognized and studied. Indeed, this pattern is one of the research and educational rationales for the Carolinian Forest, particularly for the UBC biologists examining the evolutionary relationships between these plants. If you have institutional or library access to scientific journal articles, a good introduction to the subject is Wen, J. 1999. Evolution of Eastern Asian and Eastern North American Disjunct Distributions in Flowering Plants. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 30:421-455.

Conservation / philosophy resource link: Two resources on Dr. E.O. Wilson, noted biologist and author, both touching on the idea of reuniting science and the humanities: the first is a filmed lecture from Harvard University, “On the Relation of Science and the Humanities”, and the second is an interview in Salon, “Living in Shimmering Disequilibrium”.

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 1:51 AM

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Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion' - Z6, RHS Index of Garden Plants, Griffiths

Posted by: Beverley at November 16, 2005 6:51 AM

is this edible? also............from your wonderful collection of photos (which i have created a folder, including all the amazing links)i send every once and a while, one of your pictures, full size, to my friends and family, just saying "a flower for you". you can't believe all of the wonderful returns of thanks for making someones day !!
thank you again ! phillip

Posted by: phillip lacock at November 16, 2005 11:40 AM

phillip, thanks for the compliments, and glad to be of help in making someone's day.

Regarding edibility, no, not for humans. There was a good discussion recently on the forums that arose out of a plant ID question for Callicarpa americana that you might like to read here.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 11:52 AM

beautiful!

why have you placed this in the lamiaceae and not the verbenaceae?

Posted by: eric at November 16, 2005 11:53 AM

Eric, thanks - I'm following the latest work done through the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, which notes Callicarpa is in the Lamiaceae (though currently unassigned to any subfamily). I've not been able to track down a paper or reference that explains the change in families, though.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 12:06 PM

For readers of the National Post article, here are the entries associated with the remaining photographs: Sumallo Grove, Verbascum eriophorum, Populus trichocarpa, Acer circinatum, Gleditsia japonica var. koraiensis and Euonymus alatus 'Compactus'.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 12:11 PM

Daniel, congrats on the excellent national coverage!
It would be interesting to see a compilation of 'hits' to the site, correlated with media coverage in the past. On average, how many visitors do you receive per day?

Jeff

Posted by: Jeff Saarela at November 16, 2005 2:08 PM

Eric, I've added some of the references re: Lamiaceae in that discussion thread from my comment prior to yours.

Jeff, the best ever day for the site for unique visitors was when BPotD was made a Yahoo! Pick of the Day with 10206 visitors (this was during a time when site visitors ranged from 4000 - 6000 / day). Currently, the site receives roughly 6000 - 8000 visitors / day, and last month was the best ever, with a total of just under 118 000 unique visitors for the entire month. These numbers have to be taken with a small grain of salt, of course, because there are factors that push the numbers both higher and lower that can't be recorded by any web statistics software (e.g., you might have a thousand people who use RSS readers to view the site, but that might only count as a handful of unique visitors).

For a little bit of fun, you can visit Alexa.com's traffic rankings and do some comparisons and trend-watching for the UBC Botanical Garden site. For example, in the box below the graph type in rbgkew.org.uk to check UBC's traffic vs. RBG Kew's or nybg.org for New York Botanical Garden. It isn't a terribly useful comparison, because you're not quite comparing the same populations of users (e.g., I think it's safe to say that Kew receives a far higher proportion of researcher users), but it's good for a bit of a lark. Still, it seems we've similar numbers of people using and visiting the UBC site, even though our institutional budget is perhaps 2-3% of RBG Kew. Much credit for this though is the contributions of the many users on the garden's forums.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 2:41 PM

P.S.: Most people are familiar with “Hits” as a measure of web site popularity, which is pretty useless because it counts the number of files requested from the site (which may be dozens to see a single web page). Monday's stats are as follows: 7809 visitors, 33890 page views, 143283 hits for a total of 2.18 GB bandwidth.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 2:46 PM

P.P.S.: I should also mention, since I'm on the topic, that I first started tracking the garden's web statistics in February 2003. The number of unique visitors for that month was just over 3000, which we now reach in 12 hours.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 16, 2005 2:55 PM

Hi Daniel... great photo as usual!

A quick search of TreeBASE for phylogenies containing Callicarpa found a 1993 study by Olmstead and colleagues that placed Callicarpa as sister to Salvia within Lamiaceae... maybe that is where the switch from Verbenaceae to Lamiaceae is coming from.

Olmstead, R. G., B. Bremer, K. M. Scott, and J. D. Palmer. 1993. A parsimony analysis of the Asteridae sensu lato based on rbcL sequences. Ann. Mo. Bot. Gard. 80:700-722.

Posted by: Steven Kembel at November 16, 2005 9:03 PM

Thanks Steven. It seems that the work out of the Olmstead lab is based in part on some work done by Cantino in the previous year:

Cantino. 1992. Evidence for a polyphyletic origin of the Labiatae. Ann. Mo. Bot. Gard. 79:361-379.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin at November 17, 2005 10:38 AM

Please share your comments about the photograph(s) and accompanying write-up. Telling a story about the subject of the photograph(s) is also much appreciated! If you have a gardening question, the best place to ask is on the UBC Botanical Garden Forums. Thank you!

Botany Photo of the Day

In science, beauty. In beauty, science. Daily.

November 16, 2005 : Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion'

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