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!
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.
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