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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.
Gone are the days when a Summer's Wasp's nest would provide its adults with sugars to survive. The grubs that exuded them have become adults and flew out into the world. So now wasps are left to their own devices to find nutrients. Here's one on an Autumn Tamarisk seeking sustenance from the nectar there still may be although the Sun is quickly losing generative warmth.
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.
Beautifully bright Sun and a decent temperature for Hoverflies and such, but a very chilly wind. In the Hortus this Eristalis sp. was foraging on the Scilla just popped up from Winter's earth.
Single Dahlia with bronze-purple foliage and contrasting bright yellow, single flowers
In the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna
Paradise Lilies hail from the mountains of central Portugal. They're very attractive to many insects, especially to Honeybees and Bumblebees. Honeybees seek them out for the bright yellow or even orange pollen but also for the nectar that is often accessed by their making a hole in the bottom of the flower (see inset).
Don't be misled! On the internet you'll often find 'Myanthropa' instead of the correct 'Myathropa'. For the derivation see my earlier www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/28918797485/in/photost....
In the photo Batman is voraciously plumbing the depths of Hoary Alyssum, Berteroa incana. Berteroa was named for Carlo Giuseppe Luigi Bertero (1789-1831) in 1818. The famous botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1779-1841) waxes eloquent on the merits of Bertero for the botany of Piedmont and remarks that he is now on a voyage of discovey in Central America. Indeed! Bertero was in the West Indies 1816-1821; and later he worked in Mexico and Chile. Always extending his horizons he set sail from Chile to Tahiti, collected there but on his planned return to Valparaiso aboard a new schooner with his entire collection in 1831 he was sadly lost to science in a presumed shipwreck.
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.
In 1934 the German botanist Hans Wilhelm Viereck (1903-1946) wrote a short essay in Kakteenkunde on how he became a cactus collector in Mexico. At length he waxes eloquent on the spiny and prickly nature of Mexican plants wherever you tread. Indeed this Hechtia which he collected near Jaumave on March 2, 1930 is a spiny and sharp-edged plant but its small flowers are quite pretty.
It was first described by another German, Hermann August Theodor Harms (1870-1942) in 1935.
Curiously, the internet has very few and not very clear fotos of our Hechtia's spiked flowers, small as they are. I hope this picture will be a small remedy.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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!
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...
The diet of our European Ladybird is mostly tiny insects and aphids; I didn't spot any on this hybrid Heath so I assume the insect must have been foraging for nectars, molds or pollen. Anyway, the Heath is particularly attractive. It was originally described in the late nineteenth century when it was first seen in the Darley Dale, Derbyshire, England. It's a hybrid of two other heathers: 'carnea' and 'erigena', whether natural or man-made is unclear.
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.
Semi-cactus dahlia
Bred by Gerhard Wirth, Vienna (1988)
The flowers of this dahlia have a diameter of 20 to 25 cm.
www.dahlienwirth.at/tdcpt_menu/biedermannsdorf/
Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna
Now something of an exotic pest in Australia, this pretty Pelargonium hails from the coasts of South Africa. And today it grows in the South African greenhouse of our Hortus. It's one of about 270 Pelargonium species. Whether this Common Carder Bee is attracted by flower's rose smell is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's only the flower lines that attract it to delve deeply.
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'.
In Ancient Times it was believed that our Peony could be used to avert storms and tempests Today in the Hortus it rather gathered raindrops. Even in this glum weather, it's a very pretty flower and it's been cultivated for its beauty down through the millennia. And we are indeed lucky that rain has come in our Arid Spring!
Eleven years ago I posted a photo of a Silver Y Moth (www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/9625499165/in/photolis...), but this one is more clear so you can see the Ys of its coloration better. The inset shows moth's face and its proboscis. On Cosmos there's also a wee insect - I think, a Thrips of some kind. It's dwarfed by Gamma.
The end of Spring... The exuberance of Tulips in the Hortus has almost entirely faded to dying browns and yellows. But our Lily-flowering Tulipa 'Marilyn' (1976) is still at the height of its colorful power for a few days. Soon flowers and stems will be removed. The foliage will remain because it'll deliver nutrients to the much diminished bulbs that yielded such a show of red and white. If all goes according to plan they'll fatten full of energy. In a few months they'll be dug up and stored until their planting in the Spring and a New Show.
This beautiful desert plant from Mexico was first described scientifically by William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) in 1856. It had been long neglected - more than half a century - at the Kew Gardens, as Hooker writes, and had come into their possesion through the good offices of Jacques Philippe Martin Cels (1740-1806) of Paris, self-taught botanist who during the French Revolution had lost his job as a tax collector.
It was 'rediscovered' by Charles Christopher Parry (1823-1890), a botanist and mountaineer, and Edward Palmer (1829-1911) during an expedition into Mexico in San Luis Potosi. Their herbarium specimen of 1878 is still extant. You can see a picture of it on the Tropicos website. But live is always better! Here it is in Amsterdam's fine Hortus Botanicus.
In the mornings the plants in the South-African Glasshouse of the Hortus are watered. Here's a very wet Heather. It was first described in 1785 by a student of Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828) in Stockholm, one musician called Jacobus Bernhardus Struve (1767-1826). Struve hailed from a pharmacist family but his heart was especially in music and he became an accomplished composer in particular of comic operas.
There are many heathers and they're extensively studied. As far as I know the last rediscription and naming of this plant is by Edward George Hudson (1938-2015) and Inge Magdalene Oliver, née Nitzsche (1947-2003) in 2005 as Erica unicolor subsp. mutica. One of its notable features are the generally three-flowered clusters. It's an endangered plant and the Hortus is happy to have one in its care!
In 1837 The Botanical Magazine writes that their pretty colored drawing of our Plant was made by William Henry Harvey (1811-1866). Harvey was an Irish botanist who worked in South Africa 1835-1837 and revisited there 1853-1858. He's the co-author of the first volumes of the important Flora Capensis (1859-1933). The drawing was made from a Tulbaghia flowering in 'the Ludwigsburg garden, at the Cape of Good Hope'. What that garden is called today and where it is, I don't know.
The same entry also says that the 'roots' derived from the Government Gardens (=Company Gardens, I think), where the plant had been presented from an unknown venue a few years previously to Lady Frances Cole (1784-1847). She was the wife of the rather unfortunate governor (1828-1833) of the Cape, Galbraith Lowry Cole (1772-1842). Presumably she'd received this Tulbaghia when he was still in office, so before 1833.
This photo was taken in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam, a repository for plants from South Africa. The violet color is not as common in Tulbaghia as the usual yellow, and I didn't smell garlic... I've written elsewhere on great Linnaeus's derivation of the name
(www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/35164401114/in/photoli...).
A week or so ago I posted a photo of a Marmalade Hoverfly on this, our Baculellum articulatum (www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/54951810203/in/datepos...). It's still in full flower and is now also freely emitting its foul odor. Something like a mixture of 'old' sweaty feet and rotting meat. Much as this is disgusting to me - and probably for you as well - it's highly attractive to prettily colored Common Bluebottle flies. I watched for a bit and it seemed to me Bluebottle was nectaring and not foraging for pollen.
Basking in the really hot sun today just under the heart of bright California Tree Poppy was this ever so green Bush Cricket. Pretty coloring of that green and golden yellow! And just regard those long antennae!
As you enter the Tropical Glass House of the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, you will see a staircase on the right and in the cramped space next to it and the main entrance there's a marvellous little terrarium. It holds small tropical plants, orchids and the like, and some Beautiful Poison Dart Frogs, Epipedobates antonyi. I've always wanted to take a closer look, but the glass doors are wisely locked. But today I was in luck because I met the very knowledgable caretaker, Walter den Hollander, who was replanting and generally reworking it. So I got to photograph this beautiful tiny Orchid, only a few centimetres big. Pretty as it is, I'm a bit sceptical as to the label "Pleurothallis prolifera". I've posted Pleurothallis before (www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/16166600306/in/photoli...). In any case, I doubt the 'prolifera'. Anyone out there to enlighten me?
The Handsome Little Frog is Epipedobates anthonyi, Anthony's Poison Dart Frog. It lives just under the pretty Orchid, and the caretaker has buried a small glass container in which he rears fruitflies for Anthony's diet. The name of our Froglet is still in a bit of a flux. Until recently - a decade or so ago - it was called Epipedobates tricolor, but now it's been subsumed under 'anthonyi'. Not long ago, I posted a photo of its cousin in the Artis Zoo: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/16842747509/in/photoli...
The designation 'anthonyi' is for the American mammalogist Harold Elmer Anthony (1990-1970). There's a lot to tell about this wide-ranging and remarkable, but especially gullible man. Maybe some other time!
PS The Hortus authorities might do well to expand that little terrarium...