Botany Photo of the Day

Thank you to sabagal of Kansas City, Missouri for today's photographs from her time on the Caribbean island of Saba (in the Netherland Antilles). sabagal has posted the original photographs of these and other tropical fruits in this thread in the BPotD submissions forum. Do keep the thought in mind while reading sabagal's commentary on the images that Saba is only 13 km² (5 square miles)! Thank you for sharing, sabagal.

I particularly liked what sabagal shared about her experiences with this fruit: “Soursop is so popular that people will pick it too green and even steal it. If you knew of a bush in a corner you never told anyone about it. We made smoothies, ice cream and cheesecake with it.” Sounds precious!

I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but yet again, Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates provides the most detailed information about this species online: Annona muricata. As noted in that article, soursop isn't the most marketable of names for this fruit. Neither is the Dutch common name, zuurzak, which translates to “acid bag” (source: Wikipedia). Chinese gooseberry became popular once it began to be sold as kiwifruit – perhaps a similar effort will one day be made on the behalf of soursop.

A few bits of BPotD news, all to do with maintenance. First of all, there were a few hours yesterday when the site was down as we were upgrading the operating system on the web server. Usually, this means about five minutes of downtime so it's not worth mentioning, but we ran into some difficulties – this is discussed in a bit more detail in this discussion thread (since there were a few concerns about wonky behaviour).

Secondly, the building that contains the garden's web sites server will be undergoing electrical upgrades this weekend. Due to this, BPotD and other parts of the web site will not be available from 5:30pm on Friday, April 13 to noon on Saturday, April 14 (local time). The BPotD entry will be published later than usual, @ 2pm (local time) on Saturday.

For good measure, though, if you're an email subscriber, you won't receive email notification until the evening. The UBC email system is also undergoing a major upgrade on Saturday, from 7am to 7pm local time, so no emails will be sent out until that is complete, sometime after 7pm.

Fortunately for locals, the Alpine Garden Club of BC Spring Show is on this weekend. If you attend the show (and visit VanDusen Gardens while you're there), you'll barely notice that this web site is offline for a bit.