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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.
Eduard August von Regel (1815-1892), director of the Imperial Botanical Garden at St Petersburg, Russia, and his colleague Friedrich August Körnicke (1828-1908), keeper of the Herbarium there, had a sharp eye on their collection of trelitzia augusta. When the plants began to flower in 1858, our formal German Botanists lost their usual scientific cool even in their scholarly description. Miightily surprised, they exclaim: 'Wer hätte nun aber geglaubt, das unter den als Str(elitzia) augusta in den Gärten verbreiteten Pflanzen, zwei ganz verschiedene Arten enthalten seien?' (Who would have thought that two different plants in the garden go under the same name Strelitzia augusta!). They wax eloquent on their find of an unknown Strelitzia and with almost embarrassing unction name it for the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich (1831-1891), Czar Nicholas I's third son, 'grand protector' of the Gardening Society of St Petersburg.
Strelitzia nicolai must have come undetected in a shipment of plants from southern Africa. In 1889 Curtis's Botanical Magazine notes that it is still unknown from where in southern Africa it hails. Soon afterwards it was determined to grow in eastern regions of southern Africa all the way up through KwaZulu-Natal to Mozambique.
This photo is of a flower in the Tropical Greenhouse of the Hortus in Amsterdam (see inset).
Collegium Śniadeckiego w Ogrodzie Botanicznym.
Krakow's Botanical Garden has a long tradition. It is now the oldest garden of this type in Poland, as it was set up in 1783, in the times of Enlightenment - time fostering the development of all science. The garden covers an area of 10 ha. It includes two, open to the public, blocks of greenhouses, three ponds with water and marsh plants, two alpinaria with mountain plants, and an arboretum, a collection of trees and shrubs. Altogether, there are about 6,000 various specimen.
Taken with my lovely Leica R6.2
Lens 80-200 Vario-Elmar
Film Ilford HP5+
Self-developed in Ilford Microphen(stock), self-scanned with Nikon LS9000 + vuescan(linux) + darktable (linux)
What an amazing collection of plants from different points of the globe! You can see it in the Botanical Garden of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Of course in Liège I visited the wonderful Botanical Gardens. The Garden itself, with a pleasant pond, has scores of fine trees, but the real treat is the marvellous glass houses and their collections. Those glass houses were constructed between 1841 and 1884 in the then prevalent English style. Though severely damaged by wars and the weather, they've been maintained in great state. The collection of plants is truly worth a visit.
The inset shows the flower of Malabar Spinach, Basella rubra. I'd not seen it before. Usually you'll find only pictures of the beet-like foliage, but here's a cluster of flowers, one open to the public.
Our Basella was first described for the West by that intrepid Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) warlord and naturalist at the same time, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein ( 1636-1691). He wrote a botanico-anthropological work on the Malabar regions which he governed between 1669 and 1676. In it he writes about this Basella rubra; its name he coins in neolatin from a local language. Its Dutch name - the plant was grown in the Botanical Garden at Amsterdam from 1685 - is Beetklim. That name derives from the Beet-fashioned foliage including the color of its stems and the fact that it's a climber ('klimmen' in Dutch means 'to climb'). The English Malabar Spinach refers obviously to the foliage.
So Olymp thought it would be nice to show you Basella's minute flowers.
You might imagine that a Frog like myself is delighted when a botanist also takes interest in Our Family. Richard Baron (1847-1907), a missionary to Madagascar from 1872 onwards, was a botanist, too, and a tireless geologist and herpetologist. He's the author of the first handbooks for geology and botany of the island in Malagasy. He loved Frogs, and one of our beautiful Malagasy relatives - Variegated Golden Frog, Mantella baroni - was named for him by a great, stay-at-home-in-Belgium naturalist, George Albert Boulenger (1858-1937) in 1888. How can I so green and black not be jealous of Baroni's golden-black markings?! I'd love to see that Family in person. But Madagascar...
Baron will not have encountered Baroni - who loves the dense, humid forests - where he found Aloe deltoideodonta. The Malagasy name Vahombato refers to the dry, granite areas where that plant grows. I needn't tell you much here about that history because Jean-Philippe Castillon in 2014 published a fine, updated article-length study of these Aloes: 'Nouvelle remarques sur l'identité de l'Aloe deltoideodonta Baker'. Ah! Yes: why Baker? well, John Gilbert Baker (1834-1920) wrote a flora of Madagascar commented upon by Castillon.
The photo shows a flowering stem of var. ruffingiana in the Hortus Botanicus; the inset is a close-up of a drop of nectar. Nobody watching me, I tasted it. Exquisite sweetness! But I forget my role: Frogs don't like sweets.
Taken with my lovely Leica R6.2
Lens 80-200 Vario-Elmar
Film Ilford HP5+
Self-developed in Ilford Microphen(stock), self-scanned with Nikon LS9000 + vuescan(linux) + darktable (linux)
That 'tongue' - see inset - does look a bit like a Hoover, but it functions quite differently. Flies such as this Greenbottle don't chew or bite their food. Instead their mouthparts 'sponge', that is to say that they function by capillary action.
The labellum - the part of the 'tongue' that looks like the sucking end of our Hoover - has many grooves (visible only under a microscope) called pseudotracheae. If the food on its sweeping area is not sufficiently liquid they can emit a kind of saliva. The liquid mixture - in the case of these Alexanders flowers: nectar - moves upwards into Lucilia's narrow labium not by its own sucking action but through intermolecular forces in play between the liquid and the inner wall of the labial tube; so a bit like a sponge.
The Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam has a small but varied collection of plants from South Africa. Most are in the Temperate Greenhouse; this pretty, Platinum-White Pelargonium though is in the Arid House. It is said to be the widest-ranging of the Pelargoniums.
Perhaps it was first collected in South Africa by indefatigable Paul Hermann (1646-1695) who traveled widely with the Dutch East Indies Trading Company; from 1679 onwards he was the professor of botany at the University of Leiden and the director of the local botanical garden. In his catalogue of plants he describes it as growing there in 1687: 'Geranium africanum, alchemillae hirsuto folio, floribus albidis', as great Carolus Linnaeus has it with reference to Hermann. By 1693 it's already being cultivated by Jacob Bobart (1641-1719) in England. Its present scientific name was given it by Charles Louis l'Héritier de Brutelle (1746-1800) in 1789.
Interestingly, the Xhosa language of the Eastern Cape calls our Platinum-white Pelargonium by the name 'umtetebu'. That same word is used also for a totally different, vibrant orange or vermillion fllowering plant, well-known Cyrthantus contractus. I wonder how that can be...
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A gloomy and chilly late-spring morning in the Hortus Botanicus, but Nottingham Catchfly stood white against the dark soil. Two nights had brought forth in the pretty flower two consecutive rings of stamens, the male principles of flowers, with their pollen. The inset shows them still proud and straight with even a few pollen grains. But to prevent self-pollination our Flower's stamens shrivel on the third day, and it isn't until then that the female principle - those three styles with their purple stigmas appear; in the inset you can just see them peeping out, and they grow out amazingly fast.
The main photo shows the Masculine Shrivels and those proud Feminine Conduits to the flower's ovary. There its ovules will be fertilised by pollen from another flower.
Here in the brilliantly Sunny Amsterdam Botanical Garden is a Large Red Damselfly. She's just out of her nymph stage (thorax and eyes are still green; you can just see the red segments that give her the specific name 'Fire Body').
Our Dragon in Red is resting - drying out - on a flower of Rhododendron obtusum, an Azalea called 'Hiryū' (Flying Dragon) in Japan, whence hail many of these flamboyant plants.
Mid-February 1696 a plot was to have been executed to kill the King by Jacobites vehemently opposed to the Glorious Revolution (1688) which had brought the Dutch stadtholder and his wife to the English Throne as William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1677-1694). The plans were discovered, Orange prevailed, and the would-be assassins were made to feel the force of the law.
Mary had sadly died in 1694, so she probably wouldn't have seen these pretty Orange Canary Bell-Flowers which are attested for the gardens of their palace, Hampton Court in 1696.
Today our Bell-Flower is much beloved by gardeners around the Globe. But as endemic wild plants on the Canary Islands they are endangered. Environmental measures are being taken to protect them. William of Orange survived that plot by six years; it is hoped these Bell-Flowers have a longer wild future.