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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.
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.
The great OED writes that 'Calamint' seems to be derived from the ancient Greek for 'beautiful mint', but concedes that this is 'perhaps only popular etymology'. The 'nepeta' is an ancient word for 'from Nepi', a town in Etruria, Italy, apparenly already used by Pliny.
Here are the pretty delicate lavender flowers in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam. Their visitor is a Common Carder Bee, Bombus pascuorum.
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.
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!
Zulu Spur Flower, I suppose, is a rather boring name for this pretty Plectranthus. In Afrikaans it's called, much more evocatively, Zoeloemuishondhaar, which translates more or less as Zulu Striped Polecat Hair. The Striped Polecat is South Africa's Ictonyx striatus, a kind of Skunk, a Zorilla. Why our Flower got this name, I don't know. It doesn't look like Polecat hair, and it smells rather like Hyacinths.
Apparently it was first collected by ill-fated William Tyrer Gerrard (1831-1866) who was active in KwaZulu-Natal. In 1865 he thought adventure in Madagascar would suit him. Whether he liked it there is lost to me in the mists of history. But he died of yellow fever at appropriately named Foulpoint, today Mahavelona.
Zoeloemuishondhaar wasn't scientifically described until 1909, by Theodore Cooke (1836-1910).
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...
Our curiously strange, paradoxical plant has as far as I know no common English name; its four generic names are Morisonia, Roemera, Capparis and Steriphoma. Imported from Venezuela it was first grown in Berlin in 1797. The scientific description is by Stephan Friedrich Ladislaus Endlicher (1804-1849) in 1832 as Steriphoma paradoxum. A far more exciting description which in a long footnote also discusses the geography of the area near Caracas where he saw it, is by Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten (1817-1908), who traveled in South America in the 1840s and 1850s: Auswahl neuer und schön Blühender Gewächse Venezuela's, vol. II, 1848, pp.9ff.
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.
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'.
Bluish-purple Grape-hyacinths are among early garden flowers in many gardens and also in the Hortus. For us humans it's hard to see the stamens and pistils because the flowers hang downward. So in the photo I've added an inset more or less from a Bee's point of view.
This is a male European Orchard Bee. They're not common in the northern Low Countries but more so in Flanders. I've garnered that tidbit of knowledge from a wonderful field manual for the bees of Great Britain and Ireland by Steven Falk, well-illustrated by Richard Lewington (2015). It was translated and edited for The Netherlands and Flanders by Guido O. Keijl and Menno Reemer (2017).
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.
Great Carolus Linnaeus in his naming of this beautifully pink Mallow followed Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708). The latter named this mallow for his friend, the Zürich-educated physician and naturalist Jean Rodolphe Lavater. Lavater spent time in England 1704 to at least 1708 when he became a fellow of the Royal Society. In England he befriended Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose collections helped found the British Museum, the British Library and the Museum of Natural History. Sloane is one of the first in Europe - it is said - who enjoyed chocolate milk; one might imagine Jean Rodolphe and Hans indulging as they traded naturalist gossip perhaps in a garden with this Mallow.
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.
Yes, those flowers look like gaping mouths and they remind me of my encounter with mumps as a lad. Opening my mouth I saw those swollen lymph nodes... Anyway, the common name Figwort refers to the nodes on the roots of this plant which resemble figs. In folk medicine these nodes were thought to be a cure for a variety of scrofulous diseases like mumps and the like. Those flowers entice insects and this morning there was a host of Tree Bumblebees quickly flitting to and fro.
Chilly today at about 7C. I saw a couple of Honeybees struggling and then falling into coma because of the cold under 10C. But Bumblebees can fly at rather lower temperatures, sometimes even in snow.
Here's a foraging Bombus hortorum on a Springtime English Primrose. Apparently sated and warmed by cold nectar, it soon soared high and away.
The Hortus here has a large collection of various Pelargoniums. One of these is the small-flowering Pelargonium carnosum. The 'carnosum' is for the fleshy stalks which carry pretty small flowers. Those flowers are quite attractive to insects, especially to tiny bees. The photo shows two Green Furrow Bees (leucopus) on the same flower; and for a better look I've put in an inset (but here, I think, the species is 'morio').
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...
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 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.
In the welcoming warmth of the Tropical Greenhouse of the Hortus I noticed these miniscule white flowers. They're of Petiveria alliacea, which hails from the tropical climes of the Americas. In Suriname - formerly a Dutch colony - it's called Bakruwiwiri, something like: plant used as a herb against jungle demons. There are several recipes to prepare such a brew in the highly informative book by Tinde van Andel and Sofie Ruysschaert, Medicinale en rituele planten van Suriname (2011).
Our plant - whch smells strongly of garlic - has many other uses among which as a mosquito repellent and apparently, too, as a medication that eliminates cancer cells from the blood.
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 Åšniadeckiego 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.