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When I walked today in the pretty botanical garden of Amsterdam, the gardeners were taking up the Fuchsias to store them for Winter. So I was happy to have taken this photo a few days ago. I'd wanted to post one of a blossom being visited by a Honeybee or by a Hoverfly, but that'll have to wait until next year...
This beautiful shrub is labeled as Fuchsia paniculata Lindl. in Latin and Seringenfuchsia (= Lilac Fuchsia) in Dutch. That's confusing to me because I've understood Lilac Fuchsia to be what is scientifically called Fuchsia arborescens. Anybody out there to enlighten me? Many thanks.
Usually botanists are not given to much exuberance in their descriptions. Johannes Snippendaal (1616-1670), prefect of the Amsterdam Hortus Medicus, clearly showed his delight. In his Catalogue of plants (1646) he says of our Cranesbill that it has 'pretty striped flowers'; as indeed it does. Those lines, of course, are so-called insect lines that lead those animals to succor.
I'm not sure whether Cinnamon Bug partakes of such sweetness and nutrition. But I noticed it lurking in Geranium's foliage. Then it took flight, landed on a petal, but quickly scurried back into green.
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.
I sat back a while to watch whether any insects would come along to visit our Eight-petalled Crocus but none did. Apparently that Dronefly (inset) rather foraged for pollen on its 'normal' Six-petalled neighbor. You don't see these Eight-petallers often; Crocuses as a rule have six petals. Once in a while something in a flower's ontogenesis goes awry and this can be the result. Why that is the case is anyone's guess. Perhaps a quirk induced by a climate change. Anyone 'out there' in the know? Please tell me.
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.
The Hortus has a relatively large section with wildflowers, that is to say, a kind of ecogarden growing wild without signage. So you have to know your plants. It's a delight to spend some time there especially in High Summer.
Here's Common Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, with a Sweat Bee visitor stocking up on pollen.
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.
It is said Yarrow's Latin name comes from the story that the great Greek hero Achilles used it to help heal his wounds. Of course, it didn't help the heel wound caused by a poisoned arrow shot off by Paris. It killed him...
Here a flower umbel is offering sustenance to a small Potter Wasp, identified by Bernhard Jacobi as an Ancistrocerus. Many thanks!
Each Spring, the Hortus here puts out an array of tubs planted with tulip bulbs. This year the first flowers to sprout from the green are Alborz Lowly Tulips, which originally hail from northern Iran and the surrounding area. This Tulip was introduced to Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century and first flowered in England in 1844.
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.
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'.
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...
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.
Great Carolus Linnaeus in 1758 named Our Beauty: Papilio atalanta. But in 1807 his great one-time entomological student Johan Christian Fabricius (1745-1808) established the name for its genus as 'Vanessa'. That name was at the time just in vogue for women. It had been contrived by Jonathan 'Gulliver' Swift (1667-1745) for his lover Esther (Esse) Vanhomrigh (1688-1723) in his satirical poem Cadenus and Vanessa (1726). 'Vanessa' = the first three letters of her last name and then those of her first nickname. So it is thought that Fabricius derived his nomen for our Butterfly from Swift. Indeed, Vanessa in the poem is a nymph, a favorite designation for Butterflies.
Incidentally, Gulliver, Swift's wonderful creation, during his sojourn among giants in Brobdingnag is called an insect by the uncouth king.
In the photo Vanessa is nectaring on Garlic Chives.
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!
Here's a colorful eponymous plant name if ever there was one: Colquhounia! It's for Sir Robert Colquhoun (1786-1838), that untiring patron of natural history - 'historiae naturalis fautor indefessus' - as Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854) calls his 'most esteemed friend' in his naming of our plant. His description is all in Latin; hence my photo's title.
Colquhoun was actually mainly a military man and a colonial adminsitrator. During the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814-1816) he established the famed Gurkha Regiment in the Kumaon of Uttarkhand, south of Tibet in northern India. But he had very wide-ranging interests - perhaps because fighting wasn't a daily thing and life must often have been slow in those mountainous stations - and he sent many natural specimens, mainly plants, from Kumaon to the Calcutta Botanical Garden of which he later became a patron. There they were gratefully received by Wallich a Dano-Anglo-Indian in charge of that garden, before his settling in England (1846) for reasons of poor health.
Wallich himself first collected this plant in the mountains of Nepal and he described it as Colquhounia in 1822.
The chilly Sun today might just have 'loosened' some nectar. Something in this magnificent Orange has in any case attracted the attention of little Black Ants, I think probably Lasius niger.
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...
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.
Pitcher Plants are, of course, carnivorous. Insects attracted by the sweet-edged pitchers fall in and are drowned in the digestive pool at the bottom. There the Plant - which produces far too little in enzymes for digestion itself - is helped commensally by tiny invertebrates such as the larvae of mosquitoes and midges; and by various bacteria and protozoa. The resulting stew is the life's blood, so to speak, of our Pitcher Plant.
The photo shows none of this. Here rather is a Sarracenia flower. Those flowers stand high about the Pitchers and one might think pollinating insects could inadvertently fall into one, intent as they are on gathering proteins from the pollen and nectar. You've probably seen the way many pollinators seem to tumble around. To prevent such a Fall, the flower of the Pitcher Plant has ingenuously developed a kind of Catching Cup - clearly visible in the photo - just under its pistil and stamens. Thus the Plant has the best of two worlds: it safely attracts insects for the pollination of its flowers and others yet for its Pitcher for food.
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?...
The greenhouse for the Victoria Amazonica is the warmest greenhouse in the Hortus. Victoria Amazonica is the largest species in the water lily family. Older leaves can reach three meters in diameter and carry 40kg. What is special is that the flower only opens at the end of the afternoon, and only blooms for two nights: white the first night with a delicious pineapple scent, the second night pink and odorless. The giant water lily in the Hortus is sown in January every year and planted in February-March: a huge annual
An early-flowering plant here is Hollowroot; in whites and purples they now cover the Hortus grounds. And, of course, they attract insects. Those creatures are often hard-put in accessing pollen and nectar deep within the spurs of the flowers. This Bumblebee has found a way 'in' by punturing the spur itself. Regard its proboscis forcing a way inward.
This morning my attention and that of Olymp was drawn to beautifully green Euphorbia escula. Lots of insect life on its pretty flowers. Hoverflies (top left and bottom right) of which I've often posted photos. A pretty little Ladybird (Propylea quatuordecimpunctata) bottom left. And top right a wee Black Wasp with marvellously long antennae, perhaps an Ichneumonid... (Please tell me if you know! Thanks.)
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.
The Maidenhair Trees in Amsterdam's pretty Hortus have already lost their leaves. But here in Paris this one is golden against the blue sky. The tree was brought to Europe from the Far East in the 18th century, and I've mentioned it several times in this stream. It struck me as I was plodding up the hill that Maidenhair and Blue Sky in the present Advent remind of the Virgin whose designated color is blue.
PS Yes, that's the Sacre Coeur on the hill... The lady in red I don't know...
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.
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'.
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.
Not on a pear tree, as its Latin name suggests, our Crescent Hoverfly is foraging on a Gaping Storksbill. I don't much like that common name but can have recourse to others such as Trailing or Spreading Pelargonium. Anyway, the flower is wide open for the advances of Scaeva.
There are quite a few common names for this pretty Saxifrage. One is 'Mossy Saxifrage' and another 'Eve's Cushon'. In both cases you might well imagine a soft seat in the woods. It's Winter now and you wouldn't want to sit on this frosty green. But it's quite pretty catching a ray of sunshine.
Often you'll find an incorrect derivation of that name. 'Saxifraga' does not denote that our plant by the power of its natural growth 'breaks' rocks and stones to create a bed or seat for itself. Rather down through history medicinal folklore has it that drinking a boiled concoction of its roots will break up bladder - or kidney stones.
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.
Except for Bees most insects this morning were clearly sluggish from the cold. Just a few more or less occluded rays from the Sun caught well by the 'Suncatcher' Tulip of the so-called Triumph Group. In any case, a few slow Hoverflies had found their way to Flower Brightness. Here's a Common Banded Hoverfly, quietly absorbing warmth.
It's a hot day here in Amsterdam today and by good fortune I happened on to a 'snowy' treatise: Tractado de la nieve y del uso della, a treatise on snow and its uses. It was written by one Francisco Franco (ca.1515-after 1569), in his time apparently a well-known Iberian physician and botanist until at least the early nineteenth century when our pretty plant was named for him by the famous and wide-ranging Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles (1745-1804). The treatise discusses how to cool drinks with snow and also how to use it medicinally. In fact, it seems to be the first treatise in European history that discusses this.
In well-known Curtis's Botanical Magazine of 1834 a fine description is given by William Jackson Hooker. That description also shows the politeness of scholars then. Hooker disagrees with a colleague about this plant. He nicely writes: "I am sorry that I cannot concur with my valued friend, Dr. Graham (=Robert Graham [1786-1845], RP), in considering this species of FRANCOA different from F. appendiculata".
Here Bridal Wreath is being visited by Pieris rapae. The inset shows the heart of the flower. Rapae is after the light-yellow-green nectar glands surrounding the pistil (the structure smack in the middle).