Plant of the day is: Doryanthes excelsa or gymea lily

Plant of the day is: Doryanthes excelsa or gymea lily

I should really write about an Amorphophallus or a Rafflesia given my current bleak mood towards the burning of Borneo.  Doryanthes is an interesting species for its relationship with fire, so maybe there is some similarity here.  Here is a nice video showing the plant in its full form and size.  

Doryanthes - A composite of two Greek words: doratos = spear and anthos = flower

excelsa - Latin derived from excelsus meaning high or lofty

Doryanthes excelsa (Gymea Lilly), Birrarung Marr, Melbourne, Victoria Australia 

(CC BY-SA 2.0) Photo Credit: Rexness

Taxonomy, etc.:  Actually the type genus for the family Doryanthaceae.  Pretty neat.  A great way to learn a new family while we're at it.  We don't have a whole lot of looking to do into the family as it contains just one genus!  What!?  Yep.  Not only that, but there are only two species (both of which I recently got seed for).  First described in 1802 by the Portuguese priest, statesman, philosopher, and botanist (seriously dude...) José Francisco Corrêa da Serra a close friend of the famous Joseph Banks (Endeavour voyage with James Cook...some crazy cool history there).  This family used to be included in the Agavaceae family.  

Rainbow Lorikeet enjoying the fruits of the Gymea Lily

(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Photo Credit: Merrillie Redden

Really gives an idea for how big that inflorescence is right?

Description,etc:  Kind of a hodgepodge of information in this section tonight as it's getting late.  It forms a large rosette with many sword-shaped, strap-like leaves up to 2.5 m long!  Oh alright, it's 8 feet.  Crazy right?  When grown from seed they can take upwards of 8 years or more to flower.  They are a VERY large plant with thick underground rhizome that is gradually pulled deeper into the soil by contracting roots during dry weather.  Forms a scape when flowering that can reach upwards of 4-6 m.  That. is. bonkers.  The head of flowers itself is around 30 cm or 10 in in diameter, pretty impressive in it's own right and clearly large enough for a good sized bird to get down on.  The head is surrounding by brownish bracts that can make it difficult to see the flowers from below.  The seeds are dispersed in oval woody capsules (watch video for a nice view of them).  In the late summer they split open (dehisce) and release seed.

Range:  Both species of Doryanthes are endemic to Australia.  This one in particular is found along the central coast of New South Wales.  Here is a nice page with further information and a map.

Culture/Propagation:  Absolutely MUST have very well drained soil, lots of sand helps but there are certainly other amendments.  You'll want it well drained deeply (rock garden, etc.) as it's a beast of a plant and has quite the rhizome/root system.  It is NOT very frost tolerant and typically not winter hardy anywhere near here (Saint Louis).  Considering the deep rooted nature of the plant, I am curious to see how it handles container growth.  I'd venture it still manages quite well considering the plants wide usage in Horticulture.  It is definitely a mainstay of many an Australian garden, and rightly so.  Worth noting that despite the requirement for well drained soil it DOES require quite a bit of water.  You can see one in it's native environment in a sandstone woodland below.  Relatively fresh seed should germinate readily within 2 months (fingers crossed!).  

Fun facts:  It seems that this species can be prompted into early flowering by either setting fire to a portion of the rosette or by placing a heavy rock in the center of it.  I'm intrigued by this rock idea and will have to do more research.  Unsure if this actually works.

Enjoy!

Sandstone woodland 110227-0440 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Photo Credit: Tony Rodd

I love this photo for the comparison in size to the Doryanthes to the nearby trees.  Click the image for a closer look and the marvels of Australia near the southern outskirts of Sydney.  I see ferns.

Plant of the day is: Callicoma serratifolia or black wattle

Plant of the day is: Callicoma serratifolia or black wattle

    I've been away from work for a few days and I'm getting a little antsy to check germination on several Australian species.  I like the flowers on this one, they really remind me of Croton flowers but they are morphologically quite a bit different (different families).  It's called the black wattle because of the flowers resemblance to Acacia actually, which it also isn't.  Whatever you want to call it, it was an important part of early Australian settlement.

New thing:  When not overly difficult to find, going to include the definition of the Latin names.  It helps me and others to remember a plant.

Callicoma: Greek- kalos = beauty and kome = hair.  In reference to fluffy flower heads

serratifolia: Latin - serratus = saw-toothed and folius = leaf.  In reference to serrated margins as seen below

Callicoma serratifolia leaf underside (CC BY 2.0)

Photo Credit: John Tann

A great image of the leaf underside, note the strong serration on the leaf margins.  Really earning the serratifolia designation.

Taxonomy, etc.:  If you've never heard of the Callicoma genus, it's probably because it is monotypic.  Callicoma serratifolia is the only species in the genus.  It was first published in 1809 by Henry Charles Andrews.  He was not only a botanical artist but an engraver, colorist, and publisher.  He published The Botanist's Repository which was the first serious contender to Kew's famous Curtis's Botanical Magazine.  If you're wondering what I'd like for Christmas.  First edition copies of any of these would suffice :).  As a random fun fact, he married the daughter of John Kennedy, who helped him with descriptions of his illustrations.  If you'll recall back a few weeks ago to the Lee and Kennedy write up.  It's all connected folks.  

Callicoma is a member of the Cunoniaceae family, a relatively small family of about 26 genera and 350 species of woody plants.  Many of them are laurifolia species.  I had no idea that a laurel forest was a thing.  They are subtropical forests with high humidity and relatively stable mild temperatures, usually with broad leaf evergreen species.  Learn something new every day.  Species are usually opposite or whorled and evergreen, often with conspicuous stipules.  Flowers have four or five (rarely 3 to 10) sepals and petals.  Also these are Antarctic flora so...southern hemisphere.  Most of the them are found around Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and New Caledonia.

Callicoma serratifolia (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Photo Credit: David Midgley

Extreme close up!  Whoaaaaaaa

Description:  A busy shrub or small tree.  Wiki lists it as reaching 20 m in height but from the looks of things and other more credible sights, it looks to usually from 6-12 m depending on site conditions.   Leaves are simple, opposite, have stipules (remember that trait!).  Upper surface of leaves is a nice glossy green while the underside have a very light colored pubescence (visible in photo above).  Flower heads are about 10 to 20 mm in diameter and have a pretty pronounced 10 to 30mm long peduncle (that long green thing attaching to the flower in the photo above).  Small (2 mm) sepals that are yellowish.  For some great images and description check out the floragreatlakes.info site.  Worth noting that young stems often have villous stems with reddish bark.  Can live over 50 years.

     

Habitat/range:  It is typically found in moist gullies close to creeks (think of it as an Australian Cephalanthus).   It is found along the coastal areas of New South Wales from the Braidwood district to south-east Queensland.  Or you can see it on a map here.  Often a regrowth plant.  Is fairly secure but Australia is certainly battling a lot of invasive species and land development like we all are.  If you're traveling and want to see a few, hit up Wallingat National Park.  Can be grown in a wide range of environments as long as it is fairly shady and soil stays fairly moist.  

Callicoma serratifolia shrub (CC BY 2.0)

Photo Credit: John Tann

Ethnobotany:  Was the main species used in 'wattle and daub' huts by the first European settlers to Port Jackson.  Hence the name 'Black wattle'.  

Propagation:  We'll see how seed does.  Can be struck from cuttings taken in March/April (in Australia).  Semi-ripe material with an IBA treatment.  

Plant of the day is: Niemeyera whitei or rusty plum

Plant of the day is: Niemeyera whitei or rusty plum

VULNERABLE

I keep trying to spell this with the e before the i.  I don't know why.  I'll just have to try.  Received a couple (2) of these seeds the other day and said out loud something like "What are these!?!?".  Amazing looking seeds, very large.  Best part...one was already starting to germinate!  They look almost like a moon of some distant world.  Maybe my imagination is getting the best of me.  They also have a pretty cool scar on them that looks a bit like an eye.  The rusty plum's a watchin ya!

Check out additional picks at the google image factory.

Niemeyera whitei seeds

Photo Credit: Justin Lee (CC BY-SA 3.0 US)

Taxonomy, etc.:  Sapotaceae.  A Mexican word for a plant of the family that was Latinised by Linnaeus as Sapota.  Fun fact.  Kind of a different one for me, probably because the distribution is pantropical (basically between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn).  Not a huge family, only about 65 genera and 800 species of evergreen trees and shrubs.  The good news is that many of them have edible fruit, including our Niemeyera here.  Niemeyera is a very small genus with just 4 accepted members that are all endemic to Australia in the states of Queensland and New South Wales.  I'm learning a fair bit of Australian geography and I like it.  I like it a lot.  Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller may have had a very long and pretentious name but he used Niemeyera to reference another plant (an orchid actually).  Look, long story short, it was rejected for that plant but still kept around.  Exhilarating.  I wish it were easier to find at least a morphological description for the genus.  Missouri Botanical Garden does an excellent job with several genera...but come on folks.  Lets get this out on the webs.

Niemeyera whitei seed - The scar or hilum showing where it was connected to the ovary wall.  Think of it like a seed belly button.

Photo Credit: Justin Lee (CC BY-SA 3.0 US)

Description:  Good description here.  It is a small to medium sized tree up to 20 m tall and a stem of about 50 cm.  The trunk is not your standard trunk, it's "irregular and fluted".  Sadly not really any decent photos show up for that :(.  I lied..I found one.  Bark is a greyish color with a corky quality.  Has bumps and pits.  Poor thing.  Branches are thick and covered with hair and, when broken, produce a milky sap.  Leaves are alternate, oblong-elliptic to oblanceolate, with a pale lower surface.  Venation is pretty distinctive on this.  Leaves/stem are a pretty good ID feature for this.  Primary veins come off midribs at ROUGHLY 80 deg. with about 15 20 pairs of raised and curved secondary veins.  Bottoms of leaves are pubescent.  Many descriptions list these flowers as green/brown.  They look pretty durned white to me.  It LOOKS like the flowers form right on the stems of young growth  for such a large seed they are surprisingly quite small at about 20mm.  Fruit is a monstrous berry 2 to 7cm in diameter initially red then fading to a dark purple/black.  Inside is the large spherical seed that is 2 to 3cm in diameter.  

Looks like flowers...actually new leaves.  Colorful.  

Public Domain (yiss!)

Range/Habitat:  The Atlas of Living Australia says it better than I can with a sweet heat map to boot.  Found in gully, warm temperate or littoral rain forests and adjacent understory of moist eucalypt forest.  Found on poorer soils in areas below 600 m (from sea level).   

Propagation:  Not sure about cuttings and it's getting late.  Seed is best sown fresh but does keep for at least a few months.  You'll obviously want to remove the fruit/flesh from the seed and clean.  I put my two in their own gallon containers, covered with a fine layer of grit (to keep the funk down), and now I wait.  Somewhat impatiently.

Brought to you by:  Lane 8's Winter Mix tape and Firestone Walker's Easy Jack.

Plant of the day is: Backhousia citriodora or lemon myrtle

Plant of the day is: Backhousia citriodora or lemon myrtle

It smells great.  Kind of a citrus like smell but just slightly different.  I had written a really nice flowery and sentimental passage about smell and plants and then due to blogger's ineptitude at handling drag and drop images...lost it all.  I love plant smells.  It's a thing.  There.

Backhousia citriodora (Lemon myrtle)

Photo Credit; Tatters ❀ (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Note the "poofiness"  That's a word right?

Taxonomy, etc.:  A member of the Myrtaceae family, it does qualify for the myrtle designation.  Fun fact about the family.  There is phloem on BOTH sides of the xylem.  Crazy right?  But seriously, it IS pretty cool.  Let me google a wonderful graphic for you depicting a normal woody species vascular cambium, phloem, and xylem.    Members have a base number of five petals but in some species they are absent or very small.  It's a fairly large family of over 5650 species and has included previous plant of the day candidate Syzygium samarangense, which was very tasty.  Also includes Melaleuca (which I also planted today).  The family tends to have very showy stamens, and this species is no exception.  That ...soft, poofy, fluffiness?  Stamens.  Think of a "Mimosa" tree here in STL.  Mimosa in quotes because it's not and it will forever irk me.  Albizia julibrissin.  Anyways, the genus was named in 1853 after the English botanist James Backhouse.  Not Jason Stackhouse.

Flowering Lemon myrtle tree

Photo Credit; Tatters ❀ (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Description:  A small to medium size tree.  Usually only reaches about 8m tall with a low-branching habit.  Wiki mentions that it can reach up to 20m but I think that is extremely rare.  Sometimes the branches will actually touch the ground and take root.  These can actually be dug up and started as new trees.  Leaves are opposite, evergreen, and have a nice green oval/lance shape and have a very strong lemon scent to them.  Very slightly toothed margins (quite small).  Young foliage is reddish and you shoots tend to be hairy or pubescent.  Flowers occur on long-stalked clusters.  Flowers have 5 petals and 5 persistent calyx lobes.  Page here has some photos of fruit so you get an idea (if you want). 

Range/Native Habitat:  Naturally occurs in the Queensland coastal forests from Brisbane to Mackay.  Those places are in Australia.  East coast Australia to be exact.  

Culture:  Is not tolerant of frost/freezing so ya better keep it warm.  It likes plenty of sun, can handle some pretty humid temps, and also handles a wide variety of soils.  Well drained soils are better but apparently it can handle some pretty poor soils.  It's younger juvenile stage is more shrubby and as it matures it tends toward a single trunk.  I'll mention something on this in propagation in a sec.  

Propagation:  So, as is a very popular practice with older, dried seeds, I soaked these in water overnight.  I picked apart the little seed capsules and used a syringe to suck the small seeds out of the water and surface sowed them.  Not sure if I could have just planted a capsule and had some good germination but I wanted to try to spread out my chances of several seedlings.  They are fairly easy to root from cuttings.  You can bypass the juvenile stage of the plant by taking cuttings from mature growth...cool right?  The catch, typically, is the more juvenile growth tends to be easier to root.  In this case, however, it is definitely possible to root older growth.  I'm sure applications of IBA help with rooting.  

Etc.:  I'm not going to get too into this, but it is a widely cultivated and utilized plant for a spice and it's delicious compounds.  As I've been researching several Australian species I've discovered this thing known as bushfood.  This plant in particular was used by Aboriginal Australians long before the Western world discovered it.  It is the highest natural source of citral which about 1-2% of people are allergic to.  Those poor, poor people.  It is supposed to have a "cleaner and sweeter" aroma than even lemongrass.  Go Backhousia Litsea, you just got schooled.

Enjoy.

Plant PERSON of the day is: Barbara Everard

Barbara Everard

Last April I had the great privilege of meeting her son and staying at his home.  Airbnb and the universe somehow aligned the universe in a great way.  Her son, Martin, had a wonderful garden that had me very impressed as soon as we arrived.  I had no idea, at the time, who his mother was.  Just before we left he did bring out a lot of her original prints and let me look them over.  They were absolutely beautiful.  Botany and art have always had a strong relationship, and many botanical artists help, to this day, in correct classification and historical documentation of plant discoveries.

Her work is still under copyright so I cannot show you the images directly from this site.  Please click on the following link to see a wonderful gallery of her work.  I actually saw a few of these prints in person.  Notice the wonderful detail of morphology, highlighting the structure and life cycles of plants.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a botanical illustration can show a more detailed picture of plant structure and development than a photograph (check the venus flytrap one..it's fantastic).

Barbara Everard Gallery

Barbara Mary Steyning Everard:  (27 July 1910 - 17 June 1990) A botanical illustrator who's work included everything from greeting cards to botanical publications and gardening magazines.  In 1936 she actually worked at a fake antique business in Soho, London.  She made fake Chinese wallpapers.  Forgery at its finest.  She was initially paid very little but soon rose to a senior position and was commissioned to work at Fortnum and Masons for murals and decorated teatables for the Dominion Theatre (wonder if some of her work is still there...hmmm).  While working on the job she took night classes at the Ealing School of Art while she further honed her amazing talent.  Her son told me that the white spaces in her works are just the paper background.  Seeing some of them up close, it confounded me how I would even begin to attempt something of that level of detail and think of some elements as a negative.

During the Great Depression she actually worked as a lady's companion (I had no idea such a thing existed...it's fascinating and you should check it out).  She married her husband Raymond Wallace Everard in secret and lived apart from him for a time because he was stationed to work in Singapore and his employers did not know of his marriage.  With the outbreak of war in Europe they decided to have a child, Martin.  In February of 1942 Singapore fell to the Japanese and Raymond was taken prisoner while Barbara and Martin escaped on the last boat to evade the Japanese.  Raymond spent three years as a prisoner but was eventually freed and even came back to Malaya to help develop rubber plantations for Dunlop.  Barbara and Martin joined him in 1946 and she began to paint large watercolour still lifes and display them in Singapore, Malacca, and Juala Lumpur.

She and Raymond returned to England in 1952 where she embarked on a 30 year journey of botanical illustration.  She drew many amazing works of orchids, wild flowers of Britain, and many paintings of endangered species, including the Rafflesia (the worlds largest single flower) on Mt Kinabalu.  Some 250 plates and sketches can be found in the Library and Archive at Royal Botanic Garden Kew.  Sadly I was unable to get a look at these at my brief visit to Kew.  Perhaps another trip.  If you would like to see the Rafflesia illustration.  Another gallery can be found here as well as merchandise.  She also has an autobiography titled Call Them the Happy Years

The Barbara Everard Gallery

Some of work can be found in:
Wild Flowers of the World by Brian D Morley (I saw many originals from this)
Trees and Bushes of Europe by Oleg Polunin
Flowers of Europe by Oleg Polunin
Flowers of the Mediterranean by Oleg Polunin

I'm humbled and touched that the randomness of the world but me in touch with someone so amazing and afforded me the opportunity to visit with her son (a very gracious host) and view the art and talent that her hands and heart created.

An remarkable woman with a remarkable story.

Thanks Barbara.