A Neotropical Savanna

My long posting hiatus is continuing, but this video came my way today and I thought it might be of interest to some of you.

Ian Ramjohn of Further Thoughts has posted edition #20 of the plant carnival, Berry Go Round. It’s a collection of interesting posts, put together in such a thoughtful way (no wonder his blog has “Thoughts” in the title!) that you’ll really want to read each one. Do visit.

Yesterday Steven Alexander of Tropical Biodiversity published a beautiful image of a Senna tree in flower. It was incentive enough for me to go look at our own Senna, Senna hayesiana, which has been in bloom since August.

The pre-dawn light and my camera settings make the flowers look a brighter yellow than they are. Imagine a paler shade. If you have Steven’s image up for comparison, the color of the Panama flowers are somewhere between the two images.

This particular Senna is among the few trees in our area that are in bloom this time of year, and because they tend to grow at the edge of woods, their color really stands out against the various shades of green.

Or, for that matter, against the brown of a rock wall or the blurry brown of a Lab in motion.

The flowers are pollinated by insects. There’s a Senna hayesiana behind our bodega, near our compost bins. If the tree is in bloom when I empty the compost into the bin, I inevitably hear the buzzzzzz of bees. This morning I saw a bumblebee nearly half as large as the flower itself, but of course, I had a compost container in my hand rather than my camera.

I do have a picture from three years ago of a bee at work on the flower, but I’m putting it after the break because the color of the flower is so jarringly different from the colors in today’s images. (Camera differences, ambient light conditions, among other variables – I’m not knowledgeable enough with photo editing software to make color corrections.)

You’ll see the bee poised at the end of the green, curved pistil, the female reproductive structure.

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There are times when one must simply let life, which can be pretty insistent, take over. So it has been for more than a month now and it looks to remain so for the near future. When I can, I will resume posting but will not go into the identification detail that I usually do. Not, at least, until life eases up some.

Here are two overdue announcements.

1. Sally at Foothills Fancy has a put up a great collection of plant posts for Berry Go Round #18. I enjoyed reading her “potluck,” as she called it, awhile back, but today I’ve had the time to follow some of the links and read the originals to which she refers. Do make a visit. It’s an excellent selection.
2. More than a year ago I began a project in which I did some online digging about some specimens that Darwin collected and which had been newly re-discovered. The names were completely unfamiliar to me, so I decided to find out what they were and to see whether I could find any mention of each of them in his Voyage of the Beagle. I’m afraid that during this frenzied time I let the domain name for that project – The Accidental Botanist – expire. My plan is to rescue the posts and take them over to Wordpress, and when I do so, I’ll announce it here.

So for now, do enjoy your visit at Berry Go Round #18 and leave a comment for Sally.