Botany Photo of the Day

Bill from San Jose, California (aka bbum@Flickr) provides us with today's burst of colour (BPotD Flickr Group Pool | original image). Bill's weblog, bbum's weblog-o-mat, spans everything from photography and nature to programming and restoring pinball machines – quite fun! Thanks for the pic, Bill.

I've had to tentatively identify the plant as Lantana camara, as there are at least a few cultivars with lookalike flowers. Absent any other details about the plant, it is impossible to be certain.

Known simply as lantana, or shrub verbena, Lantana camara is a species whose native distribution is not easy to determine; I've looked through ten different web sites for native distribution and came up with nothing definitive. The Jepson Manual treatment for the species states “naturalized more or less worldwide [tropical and sub-tropical], perhaps native to Caribbean”. The USDA Plants Database claims it is native to the US (Texas?), but it is certainly introduced elsewhere in the southern US. Another site states it is native to the tropical Americas and western Africa. My unqualified-to-say thoughts? Likely Caribbean in origin, and introduced everywhere else.

Though it seems to behave in California, Lantana camara is an invasive shrub in many places, including Florida, Hawaii, South Africa and Galapagos.

Botany resource link: Protea Atlas Project, coordinated by the National Biodiversity Institute of South Africa, “aims to encourage amateur involvement in Botany. The ultimate objective is to stimulate amateur awareness and enjoyment of the veld thus engendering a conservation ethic” (and other objectives). It seems like they've succeeded – a project with only a few staff but over four hundred seventy-five volunteers!