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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.
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.
In the chill of showers of snow and hail here this morning this pretty Tulip anyway had pushed its way into light. Its kin no doubt is used to this kind of weather for it hails from the mountains of northern Afghanistan. In 1974, Christopher Grey-Wilson (1944-) published his self-effacing but exciting 'Some Notes on the Flora of Iran and Afghanistan'. He describes the eight-month long botanical expedition led by Thomas Frederick Hewer (1903-1994) - whose main job was pathology and oncology - and himself in 1971. Crossing the Hindu Kush - towering 3800 m. in northern Afghanistan - along the pass cut by the Salang River at 2400 m. they found this pretty, ground-hugging Tulipa, which they recognised as a 'kolpakowskiana'. Though I hate the cold, I'd have loved to be with them! Anyway, this Tulip caught the attention of Leonard Wouter Dirk van Raamsdonk (1955-). His close examination - 'A New Species Tulipa heweri related to T. praestans' (1998) - led him to distinguish it from Kolpakowskiana and to define it as a new species which he named for versatile Hewer.
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.
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.
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.
Henry Charles Andrews (c.1770-1830) was so taken by this pretty hybrid Tree Peony that he described and drew it twice for his The Botanist's Repository: in volume VI (1806) and VII (1807). He says it was introduced to England from China in 1794. In Japan 'Suffruticosa' is called the 'King of Flowers'.
Peonies had already been known in Europe for perhaps two centuries before. Lobelius (1538-1616), for example, discusses them. And there's a story that an English ambassador acquired the plant from the Dutch East Indies Trading Company in the early seventeenth century. But Peonies didn't become really popular until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a popularity that radiated from Britain. Indeed, I remember in my own youth a hundred and fifty years later my mother still associating Peonies with English Gardens.
It was chilly. Our Pair of Ducks was resting after foraging and in order to preserve body heat and relieve neck muscles they'd tucked feather-naked yellow bills under their warm-feathered wings. Sleeping they keep one eye open to warn them in case I'd come too close for comfort. The coloring of green head and blue wing patches (called 'specula' in ornithological parlance) is beautiful. That coloring is not caused by pigmentation. Pigments 'color' by absorbing light. But the green and blue of our Mallard are produced by special nanostructures in those feathers that reflect special wavelengths of light.
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...
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.
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.
Hortus Botanicus Haren
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