Mystery teeth revealed

Friday’s puzzle was tough!  Several of you were on the right track – this is a carnivorous plant. Right away Deb suggested a pitcher plant (then got sidetracked with chestnuts), but Derek was spot on with his guess of the “spiky bits” on a Nepenthes pitcher:

What the function of these spiky wings are is not clear to me; I did a little checking in the literature but failed to find anything convincing.  It does seem to suggest a close relationship with fly traps.  Perhaps the ancestral type was a fly trap type plant, which eventually evolved to an enclosed pitcher?  (Perhaps someone out there has a better grasp of carnivorous plant evolution than I do?)

And the scientific name?  Nepenthes alata, or “winged Nepenthes.”

Thanks for playing!

Friday mystery teeth

I’ve spent most of this afternoon at the NW Flower and Garden Show.  During my visit, I snapped a photo of this toothy plant part:

So the questions for today are….

What is this plant part?
What plant did it come from?
(And if you know its scientific name, that actually answers both questions at once.)

My husband is convinced this is too small a part of the plant for anyone to figure out the answesr.  I’m sure someone will prove him wrong!

Answer and a larger photo on Monday.

Breaking up Tree Week with an Important Announcement! (Or Not — depending on how you feel about shameless plugs)

OK, here it is, my one and only shameless plug — because my publisher says: Hey! You need to at least let people know that the book exists!

So — I’m excited to say that my next book, How The Government Got In Your Backyard, which I co-wrote with my good friend (and old college roommate) Eric Heberlig, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UNC Charlotte, is finally out.

In case it isn’t immediately obvious, I love to write. This is my fourth book — and in many ways I think it’s my best.  In it Eric and I look at the science and politics behind a number of environmental issues — everything from Plant Patents and Illegal Plants (think marijuana) to Organic Food, Global Warming and Biotechnology.  We look at the political right and left, investigate the science behind what they believe, and try to give unbiased opinions.  Some people have already let us know that we’re wrong!  (Which we find amusing — but that’s another story).

What we don’t try to do in this book is make up your mind for you — that’s your job based on your priorities.

Tree terrors continue

You might remember back in October 2009 I gave one of the first Friday quizzes.  The featured tree had epicormic shoots, and Monday’s answer revealed the neglected wire staking that was slowly girdling the main trunk.  (Be sure you click on those links to see what the tree looked liked in 2009.)

I thought you might be interested to see what this tree looks like now:

A picture is worth a thousand words….many of those unprintable.

Update January 2022 – in response to a reader question, here is the tree in 2019 thanks to Google maps.

Unspeakeable Acts of Pruning

(Hey, I think it’s Tree Week on the GP!)

Our land has a nice buffer of big, old oaks, hickories, and maples between us and the two-lane highway.  Power and phone lines thread through the middle of them. Thus, I have nightmares about orange Asplundh trucks.

So with much concern, I noted that utility crews and
subcontractors have been out in full force in our rural area,
inexplicably leaving one tree and then “pruning” another.

OMG that's awful

I pulled over and snapped this latest atrocity last night. The power lines are to the right (not in photo). As this is only a mere mile or two from our property, I may sit at home on the porch next week with the shotgun in my lap.

Tree teaser untwisted

Once again you had some great diagnoses!  The popular view was neglected staking material, and you were right:

Peter’s answer was my favorite (I love puns – the worse the better!).  Tom, I hestitate to ask about your previous experience here….

As usual, thanks to all of you for playing our quiz.  I’ll try to be better about doing this every Friday.  Our survey results indicated you like this feature a lot.

Trees can be good plumbers

A short follow up to last weeks post on girdling roots.  Just to reiterate, the point of the post was that we need to be careful not to jump to conclusions when assessing tree problems.  It’s important to look beyond the first defect we see and consider additional causes.  And to also reiterate, girdling roots can be a serious problem and can lead to tree failures.  The photo below shows an example of tree that was both planted too deep and had stem girdling roots.  The result was a weakened area in the trunk, which was subject to breakage during a windstorm.

Many people also assume that girdling roots restrict flow of water and nutrients in the xylem.  They can, but trees also have the ability graft roots and re-establish connections between roots.  In the study I mentioned last week, Phillip Kurzeja and his co-workers  traced water flow in ’manifold roots’ (a series of interconnected, girdled roots) by injecting dye.  The trees were subsequently felled and de-barked, allowing the researchers to determine whether the roots were still functional.  As shown below the girdled roots were able to re-establish their vasculature and continue to translocate water up the stem. So trees can be efficient at fixing their own pipes!

Image: Phillip Kurzeja

It is important to note that this phenomenon occurs between roots but not between roots and the main trunk – hence the concern for impact of stem-girdling roots, especially for trees planted too deep.

Guano

One of the best organic fertilizers out there – at least in terms of how plants respond to it —  is bat guano.  As most of you probably already know, bat guano is made of bat droppings.  What you probably don’t realize is that bat droppings need to be aged for a while in an arid environment before they become guano.  Caves provide the perfect environment for this to occur, and so that is where most bat guano comes from.

Because guano needs to be aged in special surroundings before it is used it is not a rapidly renewable resource.  Instead it’s kind of like peat in that it takes anywhere between decades and thousands of years for the raw material from which it is made to develop into the stuff that we use.  Furthermore, by harvesting bat guano we can actually damage the ecosystems present in the caves from which the bat guano is harvested.  Think about it – bats generally feed outside the cave, so when they defecate inside the cave they are actually bringing new nutrients into the cave – nutrients that other creatures can use.  Whole ecosystems are based on this poo!  So when we harvest bat guano from a cave what we are doing is disturbing a specialized ecosystem – a very unique system.

So am I encouraging you away from bat guano?  No more than I would encourage you to consider reducing your usage of peat – or of oil — or any other non-renewable resource.  I can’t deny that it’s a great fertilizer, but if you want to use an organic fertilizer why not at least consider one that is renewable instead of one that is from a limited resource and which may cause harm to a unique ecological system?