Flowering Plants (14)
January 15, 2007
Colchicum sp.
A thank you to Hampshire, England's “Souren” for sharing this photograph via the UBC Botanical Garden Forums. These photographs were taken in September of 2006, in the Kharkiv University Botanical Garden (Ukraine). Much appreciated!
The alkaloid colchicine was first derived from plants in the genus Colchicum, hence the name. In addition to the medicinal uses outlined in the link, colchicine is extremely important in plant breeding research. If applied properly, a colchicine treatment can lead to a doubling of chromosomes in (half of the) gametes, resulting in offspring that are polyploid, or plants that have more than two similar sets of chromosomes.
Polyploidy is important for plant breeding in two respects. First of all, polyploids tend to be more robust than the diploid progenitors. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on polyploidy, many important crops were (unintentionally) bred to be polyploid: apple, banana, durum, maize, cotton, potato, tobacco, strawberry, sugar cane, etc. Compare wild strawberries to domesticated varieties, and you'll understand what's meant by more robust! Colchicine, by helping to induce polyploidy, can help create new ornamental or food varieties of plants. A second use of colchicine in plant breeding work is to overcome hybrid sterility, as is done with triticale.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:00 AM| Comments (9)
January 7, 2007
Hosta sieboldiana var. gigantea
From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel
A photo from mid-October.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 1:01 AM| Comments (3)
January 3, 2007
Rubus thibetanus 'Silver Fern'
From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel
This bramble is the source of much recent photographic frustration for me. It beckons outside my second-floor office window with its tangled icy-blue mass of canes, asking to be photographed in pretty much the exact frame that I see through the window from my office chair – a window that only opens thirty degrees outwards, thereby requiring me to either 1) move furniture and lean out the window while undergoing unnatural contortions (which I suspect the safety folks might have something to say about); 2) take the photograph through the window glass (and accept some glare and reduced image quality); or 3) let it taunt me. I wonder if I can get away with propping a ladder against the side of the building...
This shot was from a much closer distance, with a new lens.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:00 AM| Comments (4)
December 18, 2006
Trachycarpus fortunei
From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel
In infrared. Previously featured on BPotD here: Trachycarpus fortunei.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:00 AM| Comments (6)
December 15, 2006
Ipomopsis aggregata
Scarlet gilia is a native of western North America with a distribution range stretching from British Columbia south to Mexico. According to the Plants for a Future database, the crushed leaves smell like skunk. I wouldn't know, as I was intent on both photographing the plant and being vigilant of my surroundings. Looking back to when I took this image, it was likely the most endangered I felt in 2006 while taking photographs.
Realistically, I was most in danger of being injured when I was walking on unstable rocks and boulders in the rock slide area where I took this photo of Acer circinatum. However, this image of Ipomopsis aggregata was taken while standing in a small ditch between a highway and rocky slope (there was a barrier between the ditch and highway) with semis roaring behind me – a bit unnerving, and certainly distracting. When I returned to the car after the session, I was informed I was bleeding from my legs. Between concentrating on the photographs and keeping an eye out for the relative impossibility of a semi jumping the barrier, I hadn't noticed that the rocks on the slope I was kneeling against had punctured skin.
As noted in the Jepson Manual, the genus Ipomopsis can be found throughout most of southern North America, but at least one species resides in southern South America. I've yet to find a reference explaining the broad, disjunct distribution of the genus.
If you're searching for more images of this species, there's the always-reliable Burke Museum of Natural History: Ipomopsis aggregata.
On the topic of the next few weeks, I'd like to first note that I will be around, so please don't hesitate to comment on or discuss any BPotD entries. In anticipation of not writing much in the next month of BPotD, I'll add this now: thank you to all of you for your support of BPotD and the kind words you send along behind the scenes. It is very much appreciated.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:00 AM| Comments (7)
December 14, 2006
Berberis wilsoniae
The last reader-contributed photograph (original image) of 2006 is supplied by Eric in SF@Flickr. After tomorrow's entry, I'm taking a “writing vacation” from BPotD until January 15, 2007. For the next four weeks, I'll be posting some of my abstract botanical / landscape photographs from 2006 with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your liking, I hope you'll revisit the site in the middle of January when BPotD returns to its more traditional format.
In addition to relaying my thanks to Eric for today's photograph (thank you, Eric!), I'd also like to thank everyone who has submitted photographs for BPotD since its inception. For those who have submitted, you may have noted I can't use every photograph (whether it be for size, or repetition, or lack of imagination on my part to write something about the subject), but I do want to state that I appreciate your generosity and thoughtfulness. Thank you to all of you.
Wilson's barberry is named after the wife of the famous plant explorer, E.H. Wilson (thanks Greg and Peter – see comments below re: my mistake). If you're researching the plant online, it is important that you also search for a misspelling of the scientific name, Berberis wilsonii, a common error which had creeped into the Wikipedia article on Berberis (though I've now corrected it).
Eric also has a photograph of the flowers on Flickr. You may note the strong resemblance to the flowers of Mahonia – Douglas's comment on the Mahonia entry explains some of the differences between the two genera.
If you're interested in reading more about the area of China where Berberis wilsoniae can be found (and some of E.H. Wilson's adventures), Discover magazine published “The Mother of Gardens” in August 2005.
Lastly, I submitted the recent photograph of the varied thrush and Chinese mountain ash to the I and the Bird Blog Carnival, “a carnival celebrating the interaction of human and avian, an ongoing exploration of the endless fascination with birdlife all around the world”. It's made an appearance in the text of I and the Bird 38 on the Ben Cruachan Blog. If you're interested in birds at all, I and the Bird is certainly worth following.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 5:30 AM| Comments (8)
December 13, 2006
Crataegus douglasii
Many thanks to Lotus J. aka ngawangchodron@Flickr for sharing today's photograph with us (via BPotD Flickr Group Pool | original image) – appreciated, as always.
How many species of Crataegus (or hawthorns) exist? The answer is, “It depends on what you mean by species.” Depending on the taxonomic interpretation, there may be a couple hundred species or there may be over a thousand. Charles Sargent, first director of the Arnold Arboretum, described 732 new species. Dr. Tim Dickinson of the University of Toronto cites W.H. Camp as pronouncing the determination of number of species as “The Crataegus Problem”.
Dr. Dickinson provides excellent resources about hawthorns on his lab and teaching site. A broad description of hawthorns is available on this page: Crataegus. A paper specifically about the black-fruited hawthorns (of which Crataegus douglasii is one) can be found here: North American Black-Fruited Hawthorns.
Landscape architecture / art / design resource link: Pruned, recently listed as one of the Best Blogs of 2006 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading. Hours and hours of readings and wanderings available here.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:00 AM| Comments (8)
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Botany Photo of the Day and all associated images are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Botany Photo of the Day is a project of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, located in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada. UBC BGCPR is a department of the Faculty of Land and Food Systems within The University of British Columbia.