lilies

“Megasporophylls!”

ESPatch Jun 6, 2013 7 comments

school-out-for-summer “School’s out for Summer!”

And what better way to celebrate than a trip to Dave & Buster’s right after school.

As we approached the front door I naturally began eyeing up the two mature sago palms…hmm, I wonder?

After writing my previous post about my own strobilus exploits my awareness has been heightened to these ancient plants. I have stopped and peered into the hearts of multiple plants on my travels the past few weeks to look at their…ahem, organs.

I had seen numerous strobili but, as yet, no females / seeds.

I could see from the cone that the left hand sago was a male but I could not see anything in the right hand plant.

I held my breath, heart racing (okay not really)…

and…

There it was, sago palm coral, a heart of seeds.

It takes a couple of months for the seeds to develop and ripen in the feathery scales of the megasporophylls and about twice as long to learn how to pronounce and spell it.

As the female cone begins to disintegrate it releases all the seeds across the ground under the mother sago.

Now I need to cut off my own strobilus and buy a trench coat and trilby for dramatic effect, (not necessarily in that order) for the subversive nocturnal act that I now feel compelled to perform in front of D&B.

“Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s going on ‘ere then?”

I think I will stand less chance of getting apprehended if I perform the pollen shaking deed during the hours of darkness. The tricky part is going to be collecting all the seeds after pollination…

…”No, no, you don’t understand officer, you see I pollinated this plant some time ago and I was just climbing back in here to collect some of the seeds, you see cycads ar…”

I started to plan a better response in my head as we entered the building.

We played our usual games, won our usual 6K tickets and exchanged them for the usual array of cheap Chinese products that usually stop working somewhere between exiting the establishment and the opening of my car door in the parking lot, but they had fun, they were on summer vacation.

Moving On:

My potential annual Darwin Award activity took place last week on the roof of my house as I cut off some post oak limbs that had been scraping and banging above our heads every time there was a breeze. I was also not delighted to find an enormous and foul smelling pile of raccoon excrement waiting for me under the eaves, directly above the blocked gutter.

Well that’s just great.

My boots had zero traction on the metal roof so to get to the offending branches required a rather painful shimmy backwards down the length of the roof. I always choose an overcast day to get up here to avoid getting branded by the corrugated metal roof.

I should have taken some pictures up there.

A tiny grasshopper watching my rooftop kerfuffle.

Lots of humidity and lots of blooms this week,

tropical looking shell flowers emerging from the husk.

Shell-flower,

Alpinia zerumbet

is commonly called shell ginger or shellflower due to it’s shell pink flowers and buds that look like sea shells.

They remind me of the Coquina Clams she obsessively collected at South Padre Island:

http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2011/06/across-the-gulf/

Say ahh.

Opuntia in full swing,

and a new one for the Patch:

white shrimp plant,

Justicia betonica, J. pallidior

pink tubular blooms will eventually emerge from this spike of white calyxes.

This plant is zoned for 9, 10 & 11 so fingers crossed.

Coneflowers are popping up,

great against a dark foliage backdrop.

And the sunflowers

continue to attract a host of pollinators.

Talking of which, I have some business to attend to.

Stay Tuned for:

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intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“Brains”…Case Closed!

ESPatch May 2, 2013 13 comments

Welcome to what I hope is a leaner and meaner ESPatch website.

I have reduced the size, consolidated the sidebar and tried everything I could to speed up the load time (including waxing and greasing the inter-webs, naturally).

Tell me you no longer have time, while it is loading, to make an entire cup of tea…Annie?

Now, onto those brains:

I am happy to announce that I finally have closure to the “floating brain” anomalies that have been showing up in my pond for countless years.

“Aye, since I was a whipper snapper those brain anomalies have been showing up in his pond.”

And this is it in a word:

“Viviparous”

A reader who was conducting research on waterlilies kept coming across this word and subsequently searched it on Google and low and behold my “floating brain” mystery was solved…thanks for solving this brain teasing puzzle Max P, and for informing me.

Here is the definition of being viviparous:

1. Producing living young instead of eggs from within the body in the manner of nearly all mammals, many reptiles, and a few fishes.
2. Germinating while still attached to the parent plant (or) producing plantlets.

It turns out that my Madam Ganna Walska tropical water lily happens to be one on the list of the most popular viviparous tropical lilies on the market today.

The brains start life as gelatinous looking growths in the center of a lily pads. The brain grows until the original lily pad decays and completely disintegrates, leaving only a floating ‘brain’.

Ack, ack, ack, ack!

The brain eventually gets large enough and heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the pond where it can take root and start growing in the organic sludge…ingenious.

Talking about things that look like other things.

Here is another rather strange video from the director (ahem) that gave you the internationally (ahem) acclaimed short: “Looks Like..1”

Moving along:

You can wipe your butt with its soft fuzzy leaves.

You can make a medicinal tea out of it to treat coughs, sore throats and bronchitis.

You can even extract oil from the plant’s flowers to relieve pain from earaches and infections, hemorrhoids, inflammations, rashes, sunburns, and bruises.

Mullein,

Verbascum thapsus L.

also called Wooly Mullein, Velvet-leaf, Flannel-leaf, Jacob’s Staff and Quaker Rouge, a most versatile plant indeed.

Pick it after a heavy dew to achieve that extra ‘fresh’ feeling…

What?!

The plant is often called “cowboy toilet paper,”

but beware, overuse of the plant externally can irritate the skin and if you harvest the plant from the roadside there is always the risk of pollutants, and you most certainly do not want any of those anywhere…

down there.

Quakers were not allowed to use makeup way back when, but rubbing wooly mullein leaves on their cheeks (facial) resulted in a desirable ruby blush…hence “Quaker Rouge.”

Finally:

I found this fledgling Blue Jay huddled against my back deck, its mother was up in an adjacent pecan tree beckoning to it.

It was not at all afraid of me as I took a couple of pictures, I took this one a few inches away from it, just before it let out the most unearthly scream…so much volume for such a small bird. Then it blundered to the relative safety and cover of my Hoja Santa plants.

Luckily for it, this current cold snap has all the local cats hunkered down in much warmer places…

…Fly Mr Blue Jay…Fly.