Noses and Navels, Part 2: Navels

When I was a kid, boys ran around without shirts, all summer. We knew that there are kinds of navels - innies and outies. And so it is with roses and their relatives - the plums, peaches, cherries, apples, pears, loquats, etc. In this group, there are fruit types that are innies, and fruit types that are outies. For simplicity, I just refer to the whole bunch of these plants as roses.

Rose flowers, like all flowers, comprise a predictable array of flower parts (sepals, petals, stamens, and/or pistils) at the end of a special stem, a stem we call a peduncle. In the rose family, this arrangement usually has five sepals - which are often green and leafy, and fold back once the flower opens. The standard number of petals for roses is five also, and they are quintessentially normal - often white, pink, or red - though there are a lot of naturally-occuring roses with petals in the yellow and oranges, even in other colors. They are attached to this stem, this peduncle.

For many plants, the peduncle remains a simple stem tip, but in roses the peduncle (the flower stem) does neat things. It often forms a small shallow bowl, called a floral cup, in which case the sepals and petals are attached around the rim, with the sepals outside the petals. The peduncle can form more of a turban also, with parts mounded up, rather than sunken. As you might guess, flowers that form floral cups are going to become innies, and those with the mounds will develop into outies.

Most rose flowers are complete, having all of the four kinds of flower parts. Though the base situation is five sepals and five petals, stamens are often numerous, and pistils (ovaries) range from one to many. The stamens and pistils can all be crammed down in the floral cup, or will be raised on a mound, depending on the genus.

When the flower develops into a fruit, the stem often becomes exaggerated. For garden variety rose, plants in the genus Rosa, the flower forms a floral cup, which wraps loosely around the pistils and stamens. With fruiting the cup turns into the rose hip, with its crown of triangular, leafy sepals and its mop of dead stamens and developing pistils poking out the end. In the world of navels, this is an innie.

What if the floral cup were more absolute in its ability to grow around the pistils, if even in flower the cup more tightly surrounded the pistils? Then when the fruit develops, the stem becomes really fleshy and takes on an absolute shape. You could then have an apple or a pear - that is how they develop. So the flesh of an apple, and that of a pear, are basically stem tissue, and in their true complexity bear layers of tissue that come from the bases of sepals and petals also. These would be super-innies.

If the stem forms exactly in the opposite way, making a dome rather than a cup, you find the pistils sitting on top of a bulging stem tip, rather than sunken. This is a pretty normal arrangement in many other flower groups, the magnolias and the anemones, for example. In the roses, you find such an arrangement in many genera, but it is mostly grandly expressed in the strawberry. Check out a strawberry flower (genus Fragaria) with a handlens, and you will see tiny little pistils making a beaded spiral in a central mound. Even though there are numerous separate pistils, this is still a single flower. As the fruit develop (each of the little pistils becomes a separate fruit), the stem also inflates to a beautiful, red, fleshy strawberry - with its little hard, mature one-seeded fruit arranged like tiny jewels. This is a real outie.

But it doesn't end there. In some roses, each pistil develops a fleshy covering (its own fleshy fruit), every one standing out as a separate fleshy bead. In Rubus, the blackberries (and raspberries,and dewberries, and ollalieberries,) there are several pistils on the flower stem. When blackberries mature, the stem is normal, but each pistil is fleshy. So a blackberry is an outie also - a set of lovely fleshy fruit formed on the stem of a single flower.

And what if it is all just much simpler? If there is no floral cup, and if the stem is kinda normal, and if there is only one pistil, which turns into a fruit without any added stem. And because roses only produce one seed in each pistil, the fruit is one-seeded. Then you have the genus Prunus, which includes the peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and almonds. Each of these is less-messy affair, developing from a flower that had only one pistil, with its sepals at the base rather than at the tip.

So the roses are really funny. With incredibly minor changes in what is fleshy and what is not, in what enlarges and what stays small, the same basic floral arrangement yields fruit so very different as rose hips, apples, strawberries, blackberries, and peaches. Some are innies, some are outies, and some don't even have navels. Perhaps, then, it is too simplistic to think that a rose, is a rose, is a rose.

Noses and Navels - Part 1: Noses

Orchids have noses and Roses have navels (which I will explain in another posting). At least those are a couple of thoughts I fall back on when attempting to explain flower and fruit structure to a group. Examine an archetypal orchid - such as Cattleya. There are only seven parts of the flower - three of the petal-like objects are the sepals. We know they are sepals because they are the group of three "floral leaves" that originate at the same point, below and outside the petals - even alternating with the petals in exact attachment. The sepals are the flower parts that made up the outside of the developing buds.

Once the flower opens (botanists call the opening process anthesis,) the inner surface of the three sepals have the look and texture of petals. Face to face with an open Cattleya, you see that the three sepals make a triangle, with one pointing up (once you determine what "up" is,) and the other two pointing to the corners of the triangle base.

Alternating with the narrow sepals are three petals, but only the upper two look like normal petals. These are called laterals; in Cattleya they are broader and more colorful than the sepals. The tips of the lateral petals make the two upper corners of an upside-down triangle. The apex of the triangle is at the bottom, made by the third petal, which is the showiest and most characteristic petal of the Cattleya. That petal, the labellum (or lip,) is the landing platform for visiting insects in naturally occuring Cattleyas; its beauty and complexity is all about attracting and positioning visiting insects and has nothing to do with amusing humans.

Though the lip is the most conspicuous single element in the Cattleya flower, the business end is the remaining seventh flower part - a white, plastic-seeming part that looks like a nose to me. I know it is not a nose; orchids can't have noses. It is the column - the sleek device that combines all of the reproductive structures, the male and female parts we expect to find in a flower. If you examine the column closely, it has a lot of elegant structure. It arches forward, pairing off with the lip in a predictable and precise form - the two structures working together to create the mechanism by which orchid flowers are pollinated.

At the tip of the column, there is a hatch, underneath which you will find the pollen masses. The hatch and pollen together are considered to constitute all you can easily distinguish as the flower's single anther. Immediately back/behind/below the anther, the column has a long sticky chamber - on its underside, facing the base of the lip. This is the stigmatic chamber - the surface is the stigma that must receive pollen for an orchid flower to be pollinated. In most other kinds of flowers, the stigma sits proudly on its own stalk (the style) - easily visible in the center. Many flowers have separate stigmas, each on their own style as part of their own separate pistil; others have a single stigma that may have obvious lobes corresponding to separate chambers in the ovary.

By comparison to most non-orchid flowers, the Cattleya is remarkably engineered - simplified and modern in form based on a history of multiple and complex parts. But the column is what orchids have that is all about pollination, thus leading to fertilization and sexual reproduction. So you might say that Orchids have a nose for sex.

As a side note, from childhood, I remember the big deal about orchids in corsages was often simply deciding how to wear them.... what is right side up and what is upside down. When in flower, the lip of the Cattleya is down, below the column, the natural position that relates to how the flower is visited by pollinators. Curiously, to achieve this position, an orchid has to grow in a way to reposition the lip - which in its early formation is positioned on top. We call this resupination - setting the lip in a supine, or laying down, position. In the Cattleyas it happens through a twisting in the stalk (which is yet another curiosity, because it is the ovary.) Which leads to a corny ending; through a twist of fate, orchids keep their noses up in the air.

Faux Life

Today's Los Angeles Times included a full-page article on a private garden landscaped entirely with fake plants - a concept I wrestle with. I have seen wonderful artificial plants in landscape settings, for example in the forest diaramas at the Chicago Museum of Natural History. When I used to visit the museum in the early 70's, I was astonished at Trilliums and other spring woodland flowers along with life-sized trees presented in near perfection. The purpose of these presentations was not to fool the visitor, rather to create a 3-dimensional compelling image something like a storefront - not meant to deceive but to explain. The visitor understood these were mock-ups and was allowed to marvel at the beautiful craftsmanship of each object.

Adam Issac's terrace garden, pictured in the Times, has a different purpose. It is meant to bring in play the effect of a planted patio garden without the fuss and muss of living plants. And, at least in the newspaper photos, it looks like a diarama that might be in some future anthropological museum - modeling how people lived in Los Angeles in 2009. But Issac's garden brings him comfort I am guessing, as do faux flower arrangements and weeping figs all around the country. Which is nice, I want to think. After all, this reminds us that people like the look of plants, and that plants help to finish a scene. A place just seems more inviting (I want to say "warmer") when plants deck the halls.

The dark other side of this for a botanist is the realization that many people do not quite appreciate the difference between life and faux life. Regardless how pale and unmoving a Pothos may be as it clings to existence in a dim parlor, it is alive. It is a living being, taking in water and nutrients, photosynthesizing, respiring, transpiring, growing, and eventually, dying. When newly brought to the parlor, the plant had a plastic quality, a waxy sheen of perfection. But every fresh moment (though every month is more detectable in our frame of reference) the plant is different, changing for the better or worse. And the body of this plant is fantastically more complex than that of the silk or plastic stand-in. Artificial plants are made of exuded and molded polymers, solids with integral, even color. Living beings are made of cells - for life is, basically, a cellular affair. We know there is a dynamic balance of interactions inside, through, and between cells - orchestrated to acheive self-perpetuation. At the simplest level this may be perpetuation of the individual type of cell; at the most complex level it is perpetuation of whole organisms. This means that a living plant, regardless how plastic it may appear, is made of myriad cells, cells of many kinds. Each cell is totally complex and multidimensional, with its own differently textured and subtly colored parts and pieces. Under a microscope, the cells of the greenest plant are mostly clear, with only the tiniest lozenges of green stirring about. Comparing the microscopic view of a living cell to a chunk of plastic that makes a fake plant is somewhat like comparing the workings and appearance of the most complex flatscreen TV to a sheet of plastic that is dyed and painted the same colors as a picture on the screen - but not really - because the difference is orders of magnitude greater.

Still, at a distance, faux plants can be quite deceiving and alluring. More than twice I have been fooled by them, and have always wondered about people's perceptions of artificial plants. A few summers ago I hosted a group of IEA students for two weeks. We studied many plant topics together, and made some interesting experiments. One study involved purchasing three artificial plants/flowers and three living examples that were as similar in color, shape, and size as possible. The students set up a comparison, asking visitors to select (from a distance) which of each pair was real, and which was fake. The visitors were then asked to view a sample of each specimen through a simple dissection microscope (magnification about 20x). People did pretty well with a fern, and with a Gerbera - selecting the correct one as artificial from a distance and confirming that choice when viewing through the microscope. But a Phalaenopsis orchid proved an interesting case. Visitors correctly selected the artificial specimen from a distance, but in many cases changed their minds when viewing the flower through the microscope. I believe this curious shift came about because even at 20x, the cellular structure of the live orchid flower was not obvious, its waxy petals and column looking for all the world as though they are cast from plastic. The silk specimen, on the other hand, showed its fabric nature under magnification. You could see squares formed by the fibers... hollow squares which I think the public perceived as "cells."

Nifty, and curious. The observations cause me to speculate that people know they should expect to see cells, but they have lttle idea what to expect. The crisscross patterns of fibers, easily visible, come as close as anything else to representing the textbook image of a grid of cells.

So back to the Times and the patio garden, with rules detailed by author Barbara Thornburg in her sidebar that suggest how to "do artificial intelligently." Barbara wants us to keep choices to the ecology of built spaces, which means matching the surreal to the real that is implied by the nature of the space; that is, selecting plants that might actually grow in the space. It also means maintaining a storeroom of artificial plants so the sunflowers do not make an appearance in winter, and tulips do not hang around until August. Another rule bids you take a walk in nature to observe how plants really grow. Actually, you could do that on your patio if you had live plants.

I shouldn't sound snide. I like artificial plants when cleverly used. Even Disneyland has taken to using artificial flowers in the hanging baskets on Mainstreet USA-eh-A. And I see them in yards all around Southern California. One of my particularly favorite displays is a corner home landscape near California and Michillinda, a yard that is completely paved but for a permanent border, a host of golden daffodils. It is the happy land of eternal spring. Though plastic, it is unfair to say the plants in this corner garden, other yards, and balconies over the area do not change. We may all take perverse enjoyment in the way, over the months and years, that plastic leaves and flowers age in the light of day, like tattoos, to a peculiar faded indigo. Change is in order; they are, after all, by strictest definition, organic.

Prunus

I asked myself a question, today, that never has occured to me before. It isn't as though I've avoided thinking about the different kinds of stone fruits we keep in the genus Prunus. I worry about these trees, most particularly about how much I like them and yet how little I really know about their flowering and fruiting. At times it just seems that everything is a Prunus..., peach, cherry, almond, plum, chokecherry, apricot,,, and they almost all come in fruiting forms as well as flowering forms, in hundreds of selected cultivated varieties.

But why the name Prunus? I never worried about it, but had some simple idea that since we prune the fruit trees so heavily, maybe there was some historical relationship between being pruned and being a Prunus.... Wrong! When I bothered to look it up, it seems that prunus is the ancient Latin name for plum trees, prunum is a plum. And we find that the dried fruit called a prune is made from plums, most usually from cultivars of the European native plum called Prunus domestica. But the verb "to prune" has its origins somewhere alongside the Old French action verb "proignier." I don't know how the words came together, but can't help but imagine that it makes sense for prunes to get pruned rather than to get proined.

There are other etymological confusions in the group. The peach, thought to be native to China (where it is an ancient symbol of immortality), has the scientific name Prunus persica - meaning that Linnaeus (who gets credit for the first several thousand approved plant names) associated the peach with Persia (Iran). And the common names are, as usual, a mess. A well-known plant from Europe, Prunus laurocerasus, has leathery evergreen leaves and is commonly called Cherry Laurel. Another evergreen tree, Prunus caroliniana (native to the Eastern US) is also called Cherry Laurel, though we are finding the common name Carolina Laurel Cherry becoming more common every day. Of course, neither tree (nor any rose relative) can rightfully be called a Laurel - that is a totally different group of plants.

When I talk with people about the Rose family, and the fact that Prunus is of that clan, it is hard to sell this relationship if the only proof I have is the fruit. When in flower, the tale is different. People readily see the relationship between plum flowers and those of their relatives - the apples,quinces, roses, strawberries, and spiraeas. The fruit, though, are distinctly different because unlike most other roses, the flowers produce only one pistil, which means the fruit has only one "pit" - and that pit is a stony wall that surrounds the seed. Curiously we find that this stoney surround is really the inner layer of the otherwise soft, fleshy fruit. Which leaves us with one more word. A fruit that has a soft outer layer, and a hard inner layer (that protects the seed) is termed a "drupe." So a plum is a drupe, as is a cherry and a peach. But a rose is a rose is a rose.

Spectacular New Camellias

On Sunday I made a trip to Nuccio's Nursery (up in Altadena, right against the mountains above Pasadena, California), which is one of the most incredible Camellia nurseries to be found in North America. It's run by the three boys - Juge, Jim, and Tom - cousins and brothers in various combinations - and sons of the nursey's founders. If you have never visited Nuccio's, you should make a trip while Camellias are still in season. If you have visited before, let this be a reminder to go and get your annual fix - both of Camellias (and Azaleas) and of friendly, downhome horticultural expertise.

My problem in visiting Nuccio's is the sheer temptation to purchase a load of Camellias. I have never left the nursery empty handed, and sometimes have had to ask for a delivery because the haul would not fit in the pickup. That day, I only picked out fourteen plants. There were the eight handsome and somewhat dwarfish plants of 'Buttermint', each loaded with creamy white raggedly informal double flowers. I wasn't sure exactly where they would go in the garden, but was convinced that a small mass planting would make me and many other people very happy. And then there were two plants of 'Koto-No-Kaori' as well as one of 'Manato-No-Akebono' - both sasanqua-looking plants with modestly-sized but incredibly fragrant single pink flowers. 'Koto-No-Kaori' is my favorite, producing the most remarkable perfume, defying every charge that Camellias require tea olive or some other surrogate to bring fragrance to the garden.

But the spectacle of the day came from my first encounter with a pair of cultivars that Juge suggested I check out - 'Sinritsu-Ko' and 'Kino-Sinritsu'. 'Sinritsu-Ko' is the 'Peace' rose of Camellias - a loose semi-double creamy yellow with a blush of pink airbrushed onto petals that, for all the world, make the flower different from any other Camellia I have seen. There is something about the way the petals are presented, and their shape with the redoubled leading margins that is distinctly abnormal for a Camellia and completely normal for a Rose. Paired with 'Sinritsu-Ko' is a pure yellow version, 'Kino-Sinritsu', which I may like even better. Needless to say, I left with one of the pure yellow and a couple of the blushed version, wondering whether I shouldn't have bought more just for insurance. I can't wait to see how these Camellias, new to me, the novice, perform in the garden, or hold up as cut flowers. If they score well in either regard, then 'Sinritsu-Ko' and 'Kino-Sinritsu' have a wonderful future in Southern California.

Check back with me on these plants. I'd like to find out more about them..., what the names mean, and who made the selections and introductions. Stay tuned and I will let you know what I learn...