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Buttercups are as we all know usually yellow. But they also come in other colors. Here's an Asian Butterfly in pretty scarlet. Still bright though wet with the drizzle which seems not to be letting up here this morning.
Suffice it to say that I recently posted a photo and description of pretty blue Glory-of-the-Snow, Chionodoxa luciliae: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/33008400070/in/photost.... For the rest: let the colors speak for Spring!
Joseph Franz Jacquin (1761-1839) in his fine catalogue (and illustrations), 1811-1816, of rare or little known plants gives a very good colored drawing of our plant. There's some discussion about who first scientifically described it. Some say it was intrepid explorer William Bartram (1739-1823) in his famous book on the natural history of the southeastern states of the US and also their native inhabitants (1773-1778). But if you turn to those pages the description doesn't quite fit the plant: its flowers are said to be rose. So naturalist Thomas Walter (1740-1789) would seem to be its author. Jacquin mentions someone else again, famous André Michaux (1746-1802); but he, too, was a Continental; and besides, in those days there was no internet to compare notes. In any case, the shrub hails from the Savannah River.
And it's quite at home as well in the Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus.
It's wet and dark here, even in the Hortus. But behind the Palm House in beds mostly out of the reach of the wind Crocuses are sprouting in the chilly rain.
Crocuses come in many kinds and I'm no expert. I hazard a guess though as to their name in this wetness: Sieber's Crocus, Crocus sieberi.
As I walked in that idyllic garden, the Amsterdam Hortus, news beeped up on my phone: a hard lockdown against Covid-19 in The Netherlands until at least January 17. The Hortus locked and out of bounds...
Anyway...
Here's a Winter Heath, Erica herbacea, in full flower. I expect to see it again soon after the 17th next month.
Many years ago I hiked the same route on the Peloponesse of Greece as Constantine Goulimis (1886-1963) a decade or so earlier, although I went from west to east, from Areopolis to Gytheio. Quite probably I saw this beautiful crocus near Vachos... but with too little knowledge I had no idea it was 'special'.
Our crocus was named for Dr Goulimis by William Bertram Turrill (1890-1961) in 1955. Here it is in full Autumn flower in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam.
You'll often find 'Polistes dominulus' in the literature as well as on the internet. Johann Ludwig Christ (1739-1813), who named our Vespa, had the specific correctly as 'dominula', as recognised by the ICZN in 2011 also for 'Polistes'.
Here it is on Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, where it's just hunted down a grub of some sort. Anyone out there known what it is? Anyway, I thought Dominula would fly away with it, but after a few nibbles it was dropped and our Wasp was on its way.
For this time of the year in Amsterdam it's very cold, and it feels like Spring is too slow in bringing Warm Sun. Even these flowers this morning were very blue! But they waved prettily in the brisk wind...
In his The Herball (1597) John Gerard (1545-1612) is one of the first to give an elaborate description of our Cyclamen. After a longish piece on the merits and uses of its various parts he becomes personally solicitous about the way he has planted his garden:
'It is not good for women with childe to touch or take this herbe, or to come neere unto it, or stride over the same where it groweth, for the naturall attractive vertue therein contained is such, that without controversie they that attempt it in manner abovesaid, shall be delivered before their time: which danger and inconvenience to avoide, I have (about the place where it groweth in my garden) fastened sticks in the ground, and some other stickes I have fastned also crosswaies over them, least any woman should by lamentable experiment finde my words to be true, by their stepping over the same'.
Already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Thomas Johnson, 'Citizen and Apothecarye' of London, in his 1633 edition begged to differ with Gerard, writing that the latter had no proof for his assertion that Cyclamen is an abortifacient when women 'stride' over it: 'I iudge our Author too womanish in this, led more by vain opinion than by any reason or experience'.
The umbels of Alexanders are composed of numerous pretty, small green flowers with nice white-tipped stamens. They draw lots of foraging insects, notably Hoverflies, and Ants like to collect their sweets.
Here's a Garden Ant, Lasius niger, eating its fill.
Compared to the glum summer's day in Amsterdam, the Greenhouse in our Hortus was bright and comforting.
Here's Achira, Canna indica. It hails from South America, and was attested by one of the conquistadores of Peru, Diego Palomino (ca.1506-?) in 1549. He'd seen it in the Cuquimayo Valley (Cusco) and describes it under the Quecha name Achira as one of four root crops of that area (the others are sweet potato, cassava, and racacha). Our plant was first scientifically described (1609) by the Jesuit father, Benabé Cobo (1582-1657). Soon botanists in Europe such as Bauhin, Parkinson, Clusius, and others were writing about it. Parkinson (1629) called it 'The Indian flowring Reede'. And given its colors, that's appropriate.
For a minute I - your singing Frog, Rana Pipiens - hesitated. There it was on the west waterside of the Hortus, the hungry murderer of many kinfolk. But Grey Heron was turned away from the water searching the shrubbery for feathered fledglings. It prefers aquatic or semi-aquatic prey like Yours Truly, but I think 'pickings' were thin and Heron even ignored Fat Frog Me! With keen eyes it sought elsewhere. In any case, I was safe for now.
I plunged quietly and kicked my way to the pretty Bridge 232 - locked to the general public - leading to the so-called Overkas, the working greenhouse for the Hortus 'over the water' (on the right). That bridge was placed in 1877. Between 2016-2018 it was named for a Dutch hero against the Germans during WWII, Johan van Hulst, but that name was then given to nearby Bridge 233 (www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/51642724527/in/photoli...).
This is not the golden brightness most people associate with Tulipa clusiana, which is more a combination of white and pink or red. In 1923 our plant was found by a flower collecting expedition in the very north of India, the union state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was first called only Mountain Tulip and then regarded a hybrid or even a cultivar of Tulipa clusiana. Cell analysis made clear, however, that Chrysantha is a special, natural variety of Clusiana.
And a Golden Beauty at that! In his great description of Tulips of 1803 Pierre-Joseph Redouté writes of Clusiana: 'Cette plante mérite ... d'être cultivée dans les jardins d'ornement.' I would hazard the same is even more true of Chysantha!
Usually in The Netherlands our Bright Flower goes by the Latin name 'Primula'. Once in a while you'll hear it referred to as 'Sleutelbloem', Key Flower. That name comes from the way Primula veris (Cowslip) hangs in clusters much in the way of keys on a keyring. Primulas in 'the wild' are generally colored in various shades of yellow and white. But horticulturalists have had a hay day with Primula vulgaris in developing cultivars in many bright colours. So also these in the Hortus's garden shop. And, of course, they're grown for all seasons, early and late. On any glum day, a joy to see...
In 1634 Jacques-Philipe Cornut (1606-1651) saw this Nerine in a French garden owned by the famed Morin family, well-known nurserymen of Paris. He named it Narcissus japonicus. Apparently a Dutch eastindiaman had earlier been shipwrecked on Guernsey. The Dutch traded heavily with Japan and would return to Europe by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Some of that ship's wreckage among which the bulbs of our plant washed away and quickly brightened the shores of Guernsey. Soon they were growing in Europe and England, too. Cornut incorrectly assumed that our plant hailed from Japan by way of South Africa and Guernsey. It is, in fact, a South African plant. In 1820 it was renamed Nerine sarniensis - from Guernsey - by astute English botanist William Herbert (1778-1947). Incidentally, Cornut remarks that their lack of aroma is compensated by the very beauty of the colors of the flower.
Here in the Amsterdam Hortus it's Autumn and one of the few bright plants to be seen. In the background Euryops, also from South Africa.
'Volgens Rede en Road' - By Reason and Cunning - reads an antiquating decorative facing brick in the wall of Zeedijk 25 here in Amsterdam. It pictures a Spider which has just completed its handsome web.
The filaments this morning in the Hortus Botanicus by a Stretch Spider, Tetragnatha extensa, under two umbels of Perfoliate Alexanders were not nearly as regular and 'handsome' as those of that decoration. But there was apparently enough reason and cunning in these arachnidan lines to have become fatal for a wee male Midge, Dasyhelea sp. (see my posting of a few days ago: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/47635243192/in/photost...). And Spider has gained a meal.
In the glum morning I was admiring Eucomis pole-evansii, the Great Pineapple Lily. The 'pole-evansii' is for Welshman Illtyd Buller Pole Evans (1879-1968), appointed to mycology and plant pathology at the Transvaal (South Africa) Department of Agriculture in 1918.
So there I was looking at those pallid fowers. A bit of sunlight and a few Bees were out collecting pollen.
As I watched I startled the Honeybee in the main photo. She lost her bearings and got caught up in a finely constructed spiderweb. In a blinking of my eyes she was already being tightly wrapped and readied for lunch by Spider. Amazingly quickly. About halfway on the right of her enwebbed body you can still make out some of that yellow pollen.
My mother of dear memory once told me that she was seasick for a week on the North Atlantic and that she - who had a great penchant for colors in her flower beds - saw various dark shades of lilac and purple most of the time in her delirium. She'd have been amused by the story of Elias Erici Tillandz for whom this wonderful excentric plant was named. Tillandz (1640-1693) from Finland, as a student traveled from Turku to Stockholm to further his studies. On the way there he is said to have been so dreadfully seasick that he never ventured aboard a ship again. To return home he walked the 1000 kms around the Bothnian Gulf.
Great Carolus Linnaeus, always in for a good story, decided to name a Bromeliad family for Tillandz because the roots of these plants are so shallow that they never need to experience deep water. Of course they live mostly in the jungle and collect water in a variety of other ways.
Olymp decided to be bright in the dimness of the Hortus glasshouse in the autumnal gales. So the photo is a bit more colorful than I'd have wanted. But Olymp doesn't easily take 'no' for an answer...
Together with Johan Huydecoper (1625-1704), a famous mayor of Amsterdam, Jan Commelin (1629-1692) founded the Hortus Botanicus at its present location in 1682. Commelin, the botanist of the two, wrote a catalogue of its plants, the first volume of which was printed in 1697.
In it he describes our African Milkwort as a year-round plant. He says it came to the garden from the Cape of Good Hope through the good offices of Huydecoper. Just as a drawing was being made of it, the plant met with accident. Commelin writes that it could still be drawn but that it died before he could examine its seeds. So the plant in the photo is not descended from Commelin's plant...
In other words I do not know the name of this flower I photographed at the Open Garden, "The Wright Place" in Kambah, Canberra, ACT. An overcast and very windy day so I was pleased to get this image without using a tripod. An amazing garden with a series of garden rooms avoiding straight lines where possible.
I now believe this flower is an Osteospermum.
This morning the beautifully blue Chicory flowers in the Hortus Botanicus were full of small Resin Bees, Heriades truncorum (I think). The word 'resin' refers to their use of resin for the cell walls of their nests. According to Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1897-1873) in his great Nomenclator 'Heriades' is derived from the ancient Greek for wool. Why 'wool' would be descriptive of our Bee, I don't know.
This pretty creature is particularly devoted to yellow aster-like flowers. And you can tell she's been on a visit there. Heriades doesn't gather pollen in corbiculae on her tibias; instead pollen clings to hairs on her abdomen. Here you can clearly see her bright yellow collection.
Chicory has white pollen and the Resin Bees I saw were not collecting it. Rather they were diving deep down into the heart of the flower, presumably for nectar. An after work drink?...
German plant collector Johann Frantz Drège (1794-1881) (see my www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/34721393640/in/photoli...) found the forebears of this pretty Nemesia versicolor during the Summer of 1830 in three places in South Africa: notably in the west between Lange Vlei and Heerenlogement and in the east near Silver Fontein not far from the uMzinyathi River (Buffalo River) running down from the Drakensberg, part of South Africa's Great Escarpment relatively near Lesotho. In the scientific literature there's confusion about the exact coordinates of these places. Drège's extant herbarium exemplars (Missouri; both from Lange Vlei [see internet photos]) were identified by Adèle Lewis Grant (1881-1969) as Nemesia versicolor Benth. in 1930 but the coordinates ([28°34'22"S][023°49'34"E] are for a place west of Kimberley and neither for Lange Vlei nor for Silver Fontein.
Drège was an intrepid and exacting collector, and he noted down carefully where he found his plants. His notes were later edited by his friend Meyer in 1843 and our Nemesia was scientifically described in 1836 by George Bentham.
Drège returning to Germany in 1834 married and, remarkably, renounced his adventurous life. He became the director of a nursery business. These pretty flowers in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam derive, I am pretty sure (the inset 'red' is, I think, not a 'naturally' occurring form), not from those South African climes but they're the cultivar products of a Dutch nursery. I'll have to ask my friends at the Hortus from which one.
Europe, Netherlands, Zuid Holland, Lieden, Rapenburg, Hortus Botanicus. Hothouse, Tropical plants
'De Hortus' is the oldest botanical garden of the Neherlands-- foudend in 1590 by Carolus Clusius. Website: here.
It's been a while since i posted Hortus pics, the last time was some 13 years ago: here, here and here.
This marvelous split flower - look at the stamens and pistil - is endemic to the shores of Chile more or less in the shadow of majestic Aconcagua Mountain. It was first collected near the mouth of a river running down to the Pacific Ocean. Rodolfo Amando Philippi (1808-1904) was a versatile naturalist of German heritage. Though he specialised in moluscs and diptera his interests were wide-ranging and included botany.
On a trellis of the wind-free wall of the Palm House of the Hortus in the early spring Sun this Blood Pear is about to burst into its pretty blossom. It hails from the mid-Apennines in Italy; the 'cocomerina' is for watermelon. Though the pear has greenish skin, its flesh is pink; hence its English name: 'Blood Pear'.
Yes, I did have an idea of Lake Victoria in Africa being locally called Nyanza. So that's what our African Acanthus was named for by the Brits around 1900 who explored and subjugated East Africa.
But the plant had already been found and described earlier in the west by the adventurous French botanist and naturalist Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot de Beauvois (1752-1820). In 1818 in the second volume of his interesting Flore d'Oware, he named it for his traveling buddy, one M. Brillant-Marion (on whom I could find nothing; 'M' may stand for a first name or else just for 'Monsieur', or his name may be 'Marion Brillant'). Palisot is proud to have been the first botanist to have traversed Oware, as he calls it.
But the 'owariensis' had me stumped.
Palisot, though, in his description adds that he found our flower near Agathon in what is today Nigeria. I searched around a bit more and found that Agathon goes by a variety of similar names. The one on a map of ca. 1700 (inset) is Agotton. That, too, is what Willem Bosman calls it in his Nauwkeurige beschryving of 1704. The town lies on a hill on an island in the Benin River. He adds some remarks about the fruitfulness of the area and how it's being rebuilt after recent war damage. And it turns out 'Oware' is also 'Ouwerre', today the petroleum city of Warri.
The history of that place belies the beauty of the Acanthus. It turns out this area was part of the Dutch Slaving Coast from where many non-human products were also procured. Agotton enriched the Dutch with fine cloth and with huge shipments of ivory. Now oil is what counts.
Exploitation east and west... then and now.
Honeybees 'flap' their wings about 250 (!) times a second . Far too quickly for Olymp to show more of their flight than a rotor movement (see inset). In the main photo Apis has collected lots of pollen and is now delving for nectar in a flower of Augustine's Rhododendron.
Augustine Henry (1857-1930) - for whom William Botting Hemsley (1843-1924) named that flowering shrub - must've been busy as a Bee himself. He studied natural sciences and philosophy winning a Gold Medal and then went on to do a crash course in medicine. He didn't much want to enter 'boring' medical practice in some town in Great Britain or Ireland. Henry was encouraged to enter the British Custom Services. He quickly learned the rudiments of Chinese (Mandarin) and at the age of 24 was posted to Shanghai. Soon after he was sent to Yichang (Incanh) in Hubei, China. Life as a customs official there was boring, and Henry took up botany, first as a collector of plants. He was to become a versatile botanist who became an expert on Chinese plants and sent an enormous collection back to England. Among them this Rhododendron. Departing China (1900), Henry studied forestry in France and was appointed to the first readership in forestry at the university of Cambridge and in 1913 to the first chair in forestry in Dublin, Ireland. Busy Bee, indeed.
in 2019 Anthony Hitchcock (1960-2020) published a wonderfully exciting overview of the 're-establishment' of this Erica, discovered in the Cape, South Africa, in 1767 but extinct in the wild from 1908 (Science and Actions for Species Protection: Noah’s Arks for the 21st Century. Proceedings of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ Proceedings of the Workshop of 13-14 May 2019, Chapter 46, eds. Jurgen von Braun, Thomas Kauffels, Peter Raven, Johannes Vogel and Marchello Sánchez Sorondo, Libreria Editrice Vaticana). There's now a shrub of it in the entirely renovated Glass House of the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam.
The photo shows a Garden Bumblebee 'stealing' nectar from one of Heath's pretty tubular flowers. Its tongue isn't long enough to access that sweetness through the tube. So it gnaws a tiny hole at the base of the flower that allows it to suck up nectar. I've earlier posted a similar phenomenon but on Aquilegia: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/47944011838/in/photoli.... Take a look at our Bee's proboscis.
When you touch the stems of Silene viscaria you'll sense a stickness, an exudation from glands which can trap small insects. I'm not sure why Silene does that because it's not a carnivorous plant in the sense that it derives nutrition from those small animals. Whatever the explanation, our Hoverfly is far too big and strong to be thwarted in his quest for nutritious pollen. And he doesn't stick to pink but will court any colorful flower of which he can access nectar and pollen.
Lots of Butterflies aflutter in their Glass House at the Hortus Botanicus today. All was bright even though the Sun was very low above the trees. Here are two Heliconians enjoying the sweetness of Wedelia trilobata, Creeping Ox-eye. Just look at their angling tongues.
The Orange Longwing is Dryas iulia (see my earlier: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/5455277749/in/photolis...): our Zebra is Heliconius charithonia (see www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/8475853103/in/photolis...)
I watched Honeybee alighting on Winged Everlasting. Flying to and fro between the pretty, papery winged flowers she'd soon gathered lots of orange-yellow pollen. Though our Ammobium loves the sands of south-eastern Australia, it's thriving in the loam of a flower bed in the Hortus. It was first collected in 1804 by the famous Scottish botanist and naturalist traveler Robert Brown (1773-1858), who'd sailed to Australia on HMS Investigator.
What happened between 1665 and 1682 with the plants of the original botanical garden of Amsterdam - a medicinal herb garden especially - I don't know. Fact is that the first prefect of that garden was Johannes Snippendaal (1616-1670). On his appointment he lost no time in making a catalogue of his plants which was published in 1646. In his listing he includes an Apocynum americanum which is today Linnaeus's Asclepias incarnata, a Rose Milkwood which grows in North America. Snippendaal was relieved of his duties in 1656 and the garden was dismantled in 1665; a new one was founded in today's location in the Plantage (1682).
Whether the Milkwood that I photographed this morning in that Garden derives somehow from Snippendaal's original collection... who's to say? The signage suggests as much, but I don't know on what grounds.
The great Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris has survived revolutions and wars. Founded as a royal garden in the early seventeenth century, the Revolutionaries of 1793 decided to nationalise it. Down through the centuries French and other naturalists enriched the Museum with their finds. This morning my fingers wandered through the virtual herbarium, especially the Herbarium Guyanensi-Antillianum.
To my delight I found the very plant you see in the photo. Of course, the photo is brighter; the herbarium specimen is brownish and dried, but it does date from the 1780s! And you can see it for yourself on-line.
Just imagine: Louis-Claude Marie Richard (1754-1821), one of those adventurous servants of the French crown, was sent to French Guiana, in 1781 to set up a botanical garden for the eco-agricultural study of plants that might be useful for export to Europe. Once there though his plans were at first thwarted because the governor used the garden to grow vegetables for his dining table. Undaunted Richard began to collect natural specimens, one of which this member of the Melastomataceae family. He called it Aulacidium; later it went by Salpinga, and today it's Macrocentrum. The 'cristatum' is for the small tassels at the ends of the petals.
If you look at the herbarium specimen - which arrived in Paris in 1789 -, you will see that Richard notes that he collected it in the Kourou commune, today the home of ESA (the European Space Agency), and that in the Galibi, Kalina, Carib or Kari'nja language it's called 'Itoupou'. What it's called in a European language I don't know.
The other day was pleasantly sunny and as I ambled in the early-Spring Hortus Botanicus I came upon this Foxy-Red Tawny Mining Bee just basking in the Sun. Basking done, she'd no doubt go after the honey and nectar of the tiny aromatic flowers (see the inset) of her very own Sweet Box, Sarcococca hookeriana. Other Bees and Bumblebees seemed to be more attracted to Corydalis, so Sarcococca's delights were Fulva's very own to enjoy!
I looked for her burrow in the sandy ground nearbij but couldn't find anything. Next time I'll look more carefully.