Finally, I’ve given a quiz that’s fooled everyone!
Believe it or not, this is a foxglove flower mutation:
Often, species with irregular flower will have flower which revert to a more primitive form. In the case of foxglove, the bilaterally symmetrical flower reverts to the ancestral radial form – a phenomenon called peloria. Apparently foxglove floral variations are pretty common and have been reported in the literature for many decades.
Having now depressed my Michigan colleague with my earlier post, here’s a little lighthearted fun for the long weekend:
This photo is from Brandi at Fine Gardening. Can you figure out (1) what it is and (2) why it looks like this?
Monday’s photo will reveal more, and we’ll discuss the second question in more detail.
Have a great holiday – enjoy yourselves!
Ha ha hahahaha
*mad scientist-type cackling*
Purslane? Nyet! (but good guess).
It’s an Impatien! Specifically, Impatien repens, common names variously Ceylon Jewelweed, Golden Dragon Impatien, etc. Ours is actually pretty small – can form huge clumps and cascading torrents in warmer zones.
Flower is typical of many members of the genus, and they ALL have the little spur in the rear.
For more weird, wild species impatiens, visit the Cistus Nursery website (I’m pretty sure they used to sell this, but I don’t see it listed currently). We got ours from local plantswoman, gardener, and mail-order-addict Elissa Steeves.
Thanks for playing, all!</d
Ooooh, this is a good one.
Factoids:
– Tropical, but doing well in our campus garden (Blacksburg, VA).
– Succulent stems; alternate, lima bean-shaped leaves.
– Rampant scampering.
– Very cute yellow flowers. (Hee hee, that really won’t help.)
– I hesitate to say this, ’cause it may just give it away: a couple of other members of this genus are common as mud.
Guesses, anyone? Or maybe this one’s already common as mud for you Pacific Northwesterners…
(and P-Dub, do refrain until others have had a chance 😉
I’ll post the "D’oh!" flower photo in the morning.
Hellebore and Hosta for scale. There are flowers, just not in this pic.
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Lots of good, thoughtful answers from you over the weekend about these trees. Here’s another photo from a bit farther away:
As Laura pointed out, there’s a relatively new parking lot here. The creation of the parking lot both compacted the surrounding root zone, then covered it with impermeable surface. The dogwoods are huddled on their little island, which is unirrigated, unmulched, and indeed hot in the summer as Daniel said. All of these environmental insults, in addition to the mature age of these trees, have led to what we call a “mortality spiral”: trees are environmentally stressed and then become more susceptible to opportunistic pests and diseases. Jon and Wes both did a nice job of discussing this.
There’s a couple of take-home messages here:
1) If you must disturb a significant portion of an existing tree’s root zone, you should both protect the zone from undue compaction during construction, and then follow up with heavy-duty aftercare of irrigation and mulching.
2) If you can’t follow point #1, then for heaven’s sake just remove the trees when they start their inevitable failure. “Lingering death” is not an attractive landscape theme.
Here’s a photo of two mature dogwood trees that are obviously on their way out:
What happened? There’s been no construction in the area since the parking lot was paved several years ago.
Answer on Monday!
Just back from a quick vacation to Little Cayman island. Truly a dot on the map – the whole island is about 7 miles long and a mile wide. Only 150 locals and a couple hundred tourists are on island at any one time. It’s beyond laid back, with few attractions other than the resident iguanas and red-footed boobies (booby jokes abound).
Airport terminal/post office/fire station.
The big draw is diving – LC is the home to Bloody Bay Wall, one of the most famous dives in the Caribbean. The reef drops off like a sheer cliff, from 40-60′ to more than 1000′.
All the action is underwater!
(Let me know if you want to see more slightly blurry diving photos.)
“Fascinating, Holly. But what does this have to do with painted mulch?”
The extent of the landscaping for most yards: conch shells arranged in interesting designs and/or piles. But as we pedaled past a rather upscale condo, I came to a screeching halt. A gorgeous Bismarckia nobilis had caught my eye, but then I saw what was under it. Egad.
Everything comes to Little Cayman by a weekly barge or little prop plane and is wildly expensive. Four-pack of batteries? $15. A six-pack of beer is $20. TWENTY DOLLARS!!!
So, good readers, what we have here is possibly the most expensive mulch on the face of the earth. I can’t even imagine.
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Sorry to be late with my post this week – I was away reviewing grant proposals. It was interesting and useful work, but really drains your brain. So with that being said, my post is long on pictures and short on words.
One of the things that bugs us GP types is poor plant placement. Why bother planting a tree if you’re not going to allow it to grow naturally? Here are some photos to mull over the weekend. While I have lots of bad pruning pictures, these ones are chosen specifically because the trees were obviously poor choices for either site usage or size.
Because my sense of humor seems to have been left at the grant reviewing venue, I can’t think of amusing captions for these pictures. But I’ll bet you can! Just submit them in the comments sections, and I’ll repost the photos later next week with your contributions.
Photo #1
Photo #2
Photo #3
Photo #4
Photo #5
Small dog snout + normal-sized cucumber provided for scale.
This problem is self-explanatory and probably not at all atypical for our readers. Pattypans became UFOs; grey zucchini, footballs. Note that it’s been very dry here in the Blue Ridge. I shudder to think what would have happened with normal rainfall.
Beans amuck! Scared the hell out of Joel when he opened the fridge. But they wouldn’t fit in the bucket!
If you haven’t tried yard-long beans, give them a shot sometime. Super easy to grow, just need the usual pole-bean structure. Pick daily, or they get out of hand. They have a rich, “beany” flavor and no strings attached. Best sauteed – I toss them with a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce in honor of their Asian heritage. Leave ’em long to impress the kids! I bet one or two beans equals a full serving of vegetables.
Yard-longs (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis) come in both green and a dark red that keeps its color after cooking! They’re actually in the cowpea genus. Normal green bean at top of plate for scale (it now has a complex).
Some good and creative guesses about why the Clematis leaves had interveinal necrosis. While iron and manganese deficiencies both cause interveinal chlorosis (veins are green, areas between are yellow), the necrosis indicates tissue death between the still-living and green veins. Very simply, this has been caused by water loss.
During transplanting of the vine, I had to remove them from the fence and lay them out on the ground. They remained this way for a couple of days. For much of the foliage, this meant that the lower leaf surfaces were now exposed to the sun. As with many broadleaved plants, the upper and lower leaf surfaces are morphologically distinct: the upper surfaces have a thicker waxy cuticle and epidermis, with few stomata, while the lower surface lacks much of the cuticle and is loaded with stomata. When the leaves are turned upside down, the shade-adapted lower surfaces now receive intense sun exposure: water evaporates quickly from these unprotected leaves and the tissue dies. The only parts of the leaf that don’t die are the veins, which remain full of water as long as the roots are functional.
So both LisaB and Benjamin identified sun exposure as the culprit behind the damage. But as with many environmentally-induced plant problems, the ultimate cause is water stress.