A Neotropical Savanna

Welcome to Berry Go Round #5, a blog carnival in praise of plants.

May is the month of the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, who was born on May 23. (You’ll find some references giving his birthday as May 13, but that is according to the calendar as it existed in 1707, which corresponds to May 23 on our calendar.)

Linnaeus, of course, is considered the “father of modern taxonomy” and also one of the “fathers of modern ecology” (wikipedia). You’ll find a few more thoughts and links about Linnaeus, his opus on plants, Species Plantarum, as well as news about Darwin’s garden at the end of this post, but let’s start with the blogs.

Taxonomy and Plant Identification

In honor of Linneaus, we start today’s Berry Go Round #5 with evolgen’s outrage at the outdated taxonomy taught by a participant on NPR’s Whad’ya Know quiz show – Whad’ya Know About Protists? The post itself clarifies where both land and aquatic plants fit into today’s taxonomic scheme, and shows just how passé the grassland ecologist was in her quiz answers about seaweed. But don’t stop reading at the end of the post – some of the comments get into the difficulty of teaching biology with today’s textbooks and other issues.

Identification and naming of plants are essential to any system of taxonomy. It can be frustrating or as much fun as a detective story. For me, finding the scientific name of a plant is like solving a mystery, and after finding the name one of the first things I want to do next is to learn how it got its name. MMW at Two Gardens writes in The Ides of May about how the firecracker flower got its scientific name, Dichelostemma ida-maia [because MMW's image of D. ida-maia is in the background, I asked permission, kindly given, from xerantheum at Flickr, to use his image, which is at the right]. Was it named after Ida May, a woman, or the after 15th of May, when it is in bloom? It must have been fun to find out – and don’t take the name of the post as giving away the answer! Bonus – the image from The Ides of May post, with Ixia viridiflora in the foreground, made Botany Photo of the Day on May 22.

All parts of a plant are useful in identification, but it takes a little practice before a novice botanist can recognize a bract with confidence, they are so variable. The term itself, from the Latin bractea ‘thin plate of metal,’ was first applied to plants in the 18th century (Oxford American Dictionary), most likely within the lifetime of Linnaeus if not first by Linnaeus himself. Wayne at Niches tells of the finding of an unusual bract in a buckeye – a mutation. Along the way he writes in his inimitable way about the biology of bracts and mutations in plants. A fascinating post.

Leaves tell, and hold, many secrets about the plants that grow them. When I first moved to the tropics, I was intrigued by the number of plants here that have pointy tips. Laurent at Seeds Aside has written about them in Drip tips drain leaves more efficiently… and there I learned why it’s important for leaves to drain away the residual from tropical rains.

In Praise of Plants

Several blogs this month revealed the sheer joy of plant appreciation: Modern Green Man has a touching tribute to one of my favorite tropical trees, a tree known here in Panama as the Flamboyant tree or Poinciana, but one that is known in many parts of the world as The Flame of the Forest, the title he gives his post. His images are much nicer than mine, at left, so go take a look and enjoy the grace of his writing. Tracy of Outside loves Bleeding Hearts, with the pictures to prove it. Gravity’s Rainbow took a trip to Lotusland – yes, there really is a place called “Lotusland” and it was established by an opera singer! – during spring break and has distributed her images among 8 posts.

Corey at 10,000 Birds explores the spathe and spadix of the cool-looking Jack in the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) near his aunt’s house in upstate New York. Nice pictures, too. We learn from Aydin Örstan at Snail’s Tails about the Tulip Tree in Liriodendron tulipifera: a good place for snails. Another one with nice images. More on Tulips in the Trees at Niches as well.

Food and Agriculture

We can’t really let a plant carnival go by without recognizing some blogs about food. The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog highlights a recent study on diet quality in resource-poor areas. The finding, not too surprising, is that Dietary diversity improves nutrition. Programs to alleviate hunger concentrate on providing only a few of the needed micronutrients. Green Me went to pick asparagus to fill her yellow bucket and had a hair-raising experience on the way home, which she describes in My Asparagus Adventure.

Seeds Aside suggests that the pomegranate (Punica granatum) might be the Best fruit ever – you should see the list of why this is so. Mark Schauss of Toxic World Blog – Detoxify and Heal Your Body has discovered that those numbers plastered on your fruits and vegetables actually mean something – you can use them to distinguish organically grown, conventionally grown, and genetically modified fruits. Read What do the Numbers on Your Fruits and Vegetables Mean? to learn the easy-to-remember codes.

And you can’t think about agriculture without thinking about droughts. Mama Joules looks into the definition of drought, coping issues, and a few surprising statistics in Drought for thought. And you can’t think long about drought without thinking about global warming. The Tao of Simplicity has listed the Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming. Here’s one: Faster satellites. Can you guess why?

Linnaeus and Darwin

Now for those extra words about Linnaeus:

Last year was the 300-year anniversary of his birth, and there’s not as much of a fuss being made about him this year. Unless you consider a fuss, as I do, the announcement of a “landmark” book co-published by The Linnean Society of London and London’s Natural History Museum. Titled Order out of Chaos: Linnaean Plant Names and their Types, by Dr. Charlie Jarvis, it was published on his birthday this month, May 23. It’s much more than an English version of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, which was published in 1753 – it gives the current name of each plant, reference to relevant literature, type specimen information, and more. Well worth the 80 pounds sterling plus postage and packing – if only I could afford it! And, bye the bye, want to bet the intention was to publish this volume last year? Botanists have been working on it since 1981, but with the rapid changes in systematics and taxonomy in recent years, it’s amazing they missed their (presumed) deadline by only one year!

Meantime, the rest of us have access to Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum at the Missouri Botanical Garden. What’s amazing to me is that Linnaeus covered in the two volumes of this book all the plants known to European naturalists at the time. He based his organization on the sexual features of plants and came up with the idea of giving each plant two names – binomial nomenclature. With his system a novice could simply count the pistils and stamens in a flower and come up with a list of genera the plant could belong to (wikipedia).

A little more than a century after the publication of Species Plantarum, Darwin made his own observations on the pistils and stamens of primroses at his home, Down House, leading to experiments that helped him develop the theory of evolution. The New York Botanical Garden currently has an exhibit on these and other plant experiments called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

Finally, we can’t leave this round without acknowledging a carnival named after the Linnaeus – it’s called Linnaeus’ Legacy, featuring blogs about classification, taxonomy, and systematics of all forms of life.

Berry Go Round #6 will be at Seeds Aside . If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this convenient submission form.