This Grass Almost Made Me Miss a Wedding

Masses of 'White Cloud' Gulf Coast muhly

Matt and I were in Atlanta last weekend for my cousin's wedding. We went to the Atlanta Botanical Garden during the day, where we saw the awesomest grass--'White Cloud' Gulf coast muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris).  It makes frothy masses of pale blond billows, and it is very aptly named: it's like being surrounded by a fluffy, luminous cloud.

In my excitement over sharing pix of this beautiful new grass with my brother, I kept the three of us from leaving the hotel on time, which meant we had to slip in the side as the bride was processing up the aisle. Oops. The irony is, my brother doesn't really care about plants at all ("Sure. It's awesome," he said, appeasingly.  He did not say, "Can we go now?" but I'm pretty sure that was in the subtext.)  The further irony is that none of my pix really do the plant justice.  You'll just have to take my word for it: in real life, it's awesome.  AWESOME.

More 'White Cloud' in the background

Anyway, the ceremony was very nice (flowers were very stylish--terra cotta orange lilies and lime green accent flowers. And the boutonnieres were made of moss and yellow globes of the disc flowers from some sort of asteraceae--very funky.  And at the reception:  sashimi!).  I don't think anyone noticed our late entrance, aside from my gimlet-eyed grandmother.


And we really enjoyed the botanical gardens (good thing, too. Admission was $20 a pop!  Yeesh.)  It wasn't a super-geeky bot. gar.--labeling and signage was spotty; you got the feeling it was more into design than botany.  But it was very pretty, and intelligently pretty.  Sometimes this kind of pricy destination garden depends on waves of gaudy annuals (yuck) to wow the visitor.  But when the heart of your gardens is perennials and shrubs, you have to know how your plants will work in all four seasons.  In Atlanta, for example, they left spent hydrangea heads on the fading shrubs, which is wonderfully seasonal and melancholy; not the Disney World approach.


My second favorite plant, after the inestimable 'White Cloud' was this radioactive Japanese maple, 'Yama Kagi' or "Full Moon" maple.

Acer japonicum 'Yama Kagi'

Here's a closer view, showing the brilliant color and interesting leaf shape (click for a bigger version).  I started making sounds about digging a really deep hole, filling it with peat moss and sulphur, and trying to grow this glorious thing back in Texas.  Matt just snorted.  Maybe he was remembering my earlier attempt at this kind of thing with the doomed farkleberry. Ours is a cruel, cruel climate.

Closer shot of 'Yama Kagi'

Also of interest was this espaliered loquat--who knew you could grow them this way?  Matt thinks it's insincere, but I think it's a very clever way to enjoy your loquat without having to find space for a giant, shaggy monster.

Espaliered loquat (Eriobotrya japaonica)

Other than that, my favorite thing was the orchid house, which was really a wonderful place: tons of freaky strange orchids, several very nice water features, and three staghorn ferns that were bigger than stags.  No lie. Beyond that, it was just a place that felt nice to be in, maybe because it featured a stimulating balance between formality and wildness.

Orchid house with giant staghorn ferns

This was one of many nifty weird orchids in the orchid house.

Strange pink orchid

Finally, my other favorite thing of the whole trip. I give you--Bugscuffle, Texas. It's better than Oatmeal, Dime Box, or even my old favorite, North Zulch. To whomever named this town: my hat is off to you.

Bugscuffle, Texas

Sparkly San Antonio

I've been AWOL since early December--busy month. So here's the first installment in the backlog: our annual trip to San Antonio to see the Christmas lights on the riverwalk.

We spent the night at the St. Anthony Wyndham, which is a few blocks from the river (and therefore a little cheaper than the places that are directly on the water). It was built around the turn of the last century, and as you can see from the lobby, it's très chi-chi.


The bit we liked best, though, was the doorbell.

Each room room has a brass plate with a button on the outside; push the button, and a clapper chimes on a couple of pieces of metal inside. We know this because we were fascinated by it and pushed the button over... and over... and over... Our poor neighbors.


I would pay good money to buy such a device and install it on our front door--so cool, so analog, so fin-de-siècle.

This is mostly what we came to see: the lovely lights blinking in the trees and reflecting in swirls on the water. We never found a camera setting that could really capture all the color, but this trippy picture was oddly the best. Drink enough overpriced margaritas, and this is roughly what the riverwalk looks like.


The next day, we visited the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

It was in the throes of a lovely explosion of fall color. I think--but wouldn't swear to it--that these are chalk maples--Acer leucoderm.


The baldcypresses were also changing, which looks especially nice against clumps of palmettos.


I always like visiting the fachwerk house they have on the grounds. They had to replace or resurface the plaster and replace the roof, but the beams are original. I'm not sure what kind of wood they are, but these gnarled old beams are neat.


Although it was quite crisp out, a number of plants were in flower, like this Turk's cap (Malvaviscus arboreus).*


*Actually, technically, a giant Turk's cap, Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii--good catch, Bob!

San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum

San Francisco Trip, Part 2

Eucalyptus bark. I couldn't believe how huge these things get in CA. And they're everywhere.

Our other big hort excursion in SF was the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Golden Gate Park. Wow, was that humbling. In general, I'm glad that I majored in horticulture rather than botany, but on trips like this, I remember the drawbacks to a horticentric education: my plant knowledge is so location specific. If I had spent more time studying plant taxonomy & morphology, I wouldn't be so utterly bewildered when dropped in an alien ecosystem.

Fortunately, the signage at the SFBG was really pretty good, and we were able to identify most of the plants were interested in. And these were many. Most would probably fry in our heat, but I'd like to try at least a few.

We started out in the prehistoric plants section, where, interestingly, the plants are said to be microchipped.

Presumably, some are so valuable that people steal them. Perhaps this nifty sago--I know big cycads can be worth a lot of money, and this one has an especially ferny quality to it.

Cycas pectinata. Tight like Fort Knox?

Or this neat tree fern--someone would pay a lot for that black quill-like bark, right?

Dicksonia squarrosa

There was also a dwarf equisetum in this area. It's native to only the very top of the US, and it's listed as endangered in a few states. This blows my mind. It's possible to endanger an equisetum? How? With plutonium?

Equisetum scirpoides: adorable, grass-like, and ancient

Elsewhere in the garden, we found this Cuphea nudicostata, which Matt would like to grow. It has the nicest deep cherry red flowers. Green is my favorite color, but I never do get tired of deep cherry red.

Cuphea nudicostata - unusually large flowers for a cuphea

In a similar vein, I was delighted by the big fuzzy spikes of the red velvet sage, Salvia confertiflora.

Salvia confertiflora. That has to grow here, right? All salvias grow in Texas.

Then there's this elegant Kashmir cypress, Cupressus torulosa var. cashmeriana.

Cupressus torulosa var. cashmeriana

Dave's Garden only has two members growing this one, but one is in Houston. So there's hope! It's got the most artistic-looking flat zig-zaggy leaves, and I love its graceful droopiness.

Kashmir cypress leaves

Then there are the plants I'm not even going to try. This beautiful dome-shaped tree, Maytenus boaria. It's from the cloud forests of Chile. It looks like it doesn't know the meaning of the word "August."

The delicately ferny foliage of the Maytenus boaria

This exuberantly flowered little tree with the absurd moniker of Fremontodendron. It goes from sulphur yellow (in the background) to that awesome peachy-orange in the foreground. Despite the leathery leaves, it just doesn't feel to me like it could live here.

Fremontodendron 'California Glory'

And finally, awesome though it is, I have no hope at all for this beautiful and unexpected orange passionflower, Passiflora parritae. Apparently, it drops its flowers once the temperature reaches 90 degrees F. Beautiful, but wimpy.

The beautiful but finicky Passiflora parritae

Calling Plant Nerds

Less talk, more action? Scroll to the bottom for the bit about the petition.

The Problem
Russia is on the verge of bulldozing a major plant collection in Pavlovsk. According to the Guardian (initial story| follow-up), which has been following the story, this is the world's oldest germplasm collection, with the world's largest fruit collection. They claim, moreover, that over 90% of the plants in the collection are not found in any other plant collection. There are 100 varieties of gooseberries, of raspberries, and of cherries, 1,000 varieties of strawberries from 40 countries, apples from 35 countries, 893 varieties of blackcurrants from 30 countries, and plums from 12 countries (BBC, change.org, Nature).

The Pavlovsk station--from the BBC, who got it from Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust

Why It Matters
One summer during college, I interned at a research center in Oregon that was affiliated with a germplasm collection center. When I was there, a couple of researchers had just returned from a major plant collection trip to China, where they gathered scores of rare and unusual species and varieties of Rubus (the blackberry and raspberry genus). There were thornless specimens, specimens with giant simple palmate leaves, and many other oddities, often unrecognizable to my eyes as a Rubus at all.

Why is this significant? Because about 30% of China's landmass is affected by desertification, and 36% of its virgin forests are under pressure. This is what plant germplasm collections do: perserve fragments of diversity in the form of seeds, tissue, and whole plants. They include ancestors or near-ancestors of cultivated crops as well a far-flung wild cousins.

This would be valuable even in a world rich with healthy, robust ecosystems that act as natural seed banks: from these strange relatives we can get new flavors, colors (like purple carrots), desirable traits (like thornlessness), hardiness, and disease resistance, among other qualities. The National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis made interesting and promising specimens available to the small fruit breeders at my research station, who worked on/funded research that would be useful to Oregon's farmers (mostly for freezing--the big money in fruit is in processing. If you want a good strawberry, choose a variety that was grown for freezing, not for fresh sale. Fresh fruit are bred for storage first; flavor is an ancillary consideration. Flavor and color are much more important to the processing industry.)

In our world, though, with its besieged wild places, germplasm collections are even more important as a hedge against extinction. This is why the uniqueness of the Pavlovsk collection makes its potential loss so alarming. It is impossible to know what challenges future generations will face--what diseases will threaten their crops, what meteorological catastrophes may occur, what technologies may require changes in how we raise plants or the kinds of plants we raise, or what new medical uses may be discovered for rare and wild plants. Germplasm is a sort of global nest egg--an insurance policy against the unknown.

For all of these reasons, the potential destruction of the Pavlovsk center (which apparently cannot readily be moved owing to the volume of live specimens) would be a catastrophe--things that are unique or extremely rare would be irrevocably lost--so that a bunch of robber baron oligarchs can have pool parties behind the closed gates of a new private housing development. (That last bit may be unfair. I don't actually know the income bracket of the prospective new homeowners--only that it is a private housing development.)

Do Something
To this end, the Global Crop Diversity Trust (an international organization that promotes crop diversity and food security) has put together a petition that you can sign to be submitted to the Russian government. There is also, for the tweeters among us, a movement afoot on Twitter to do... whatever it is Twitter does. This is described at the petition link above and in the second Guardian article.

Plant nerds and all people who like eating, please consider signing, tweeting, and generally making a rumpus for a worthwhile strawberry-lovin' cause.

Lois, Belatedly

A couple of weeks ago, Matt & I went to Houston to visit my brother & sister-in-law, who are expecting (shout-out to my small prospective nephew!).

As luck would have it, the day of our visit was also the second-to-last day when the Houston Museum of Natural Science's corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) would be on display. Naturally, as plant nerds, it was our clear duty to truck down there at 9:45 at night on a Sunday to take a gander.

Sadly, "Lois" was well past her prime by the time we got there. Even so, she was an impressive--if somewhat obscene--sight. (All arum lilies are at least a little obscene, from the flagrantly rampant antherium to the more modest calla lily, but Lois kicks it up a notch or two.)



You've all probably heard this on the news, but Lois is only the 2nd corpse flower to bloom in Texas, and only the 20-somethingth to bloom in the US (the 1st in Texas was at Stephen F Austin's arboretum in 2004--which we completely missed, much to my chagrin. Theirs is named "Big Jack," apparently). They're rare, ginormous (Lois is just a little adolescent), and unpredictable in their blooming.

There was no noticeable stench coming from Lois when we saw her, though it was hot, humid, and packed with people, so it's possible that her smell was drowned out by the people-smell.


In addition to an impressive--if now deflated--spadix (the central flower spike that puts the phallus in Amorphophallus--the name means "misshapen penis"), Lois also has a very nifty Elizabethan ruff in mottled Goth purple.



HMNS says Lois got close to 6 feet tall. You can see on the measuring stick above that by the time we got there, she'd wilted down to three.

For a nifty graphic of the growth stages of the corpse flower, see this pic from the Huntington Gardens (home of another corpse flower, named Stinky).

The HMNS opted not to fertilize Lois this go round:
This is Lois’s first time to bloom. She is young and small (7 yrs old, 30 pound tuber). Often the first blooms are not even fertile. Flowering uses a lot of the tuber’s stored reserves, and fruiting uses even more. We were advised by the head of the arboretum at Berkeley (they have several titan arums) not to pollinate her the first time around. When she has a much larger tuber, perhaps next time she blooms, we may attempt to pollinate her (we will have to get pollen from another botanical garden – it can be frozen apparently. Artificial insemination for plants!)

Lois pretty well stole the show, but we were also impressed by this disgusted-looking iguana in the butterfly center. He clearly thinks all the brouhaha is a complete crock.