If Botanists used Public Lavatories…

Relax, it’s not toilet humour…. or perhaps it is.

Before I became a botanist I did sometimes use Public Conveniences and often they would be less nice than I would have liked.

Quite often there would be graffiti on the walls, sometimes it would be quite explicit in it’s nature.

This morning I wrote a post about Bellis perennis (Pretty Forever) and I did some sketches to illustrate the composition and particularly the different male and female parts of the flower. Something about my pictures, maybe the colour, reminded me of toilet doors and I just thought….

Well if botanists peed, what would they draw on the walls?

(We don’t)

Bellis perennis, The Common Daisy

Bellis perennis, the name translates from the Latin, Bellus meaning Pretty and perennis meaning perennial or forever.

“Pretty Forever” you may know it as a Lawn Daisy. The common name Daisy is a corruption of “Day’s Eye” and is a reference to the way that the flower closes at night and opens in the Day.

       

Native to the UK and Europe it is widely naturalised in most temperate climates including the Americas and Australia.

Flowering time is often given as from May to September but here in the UK it is one of those flowers that can be found at any time of the year when it is reasonably mild. I will put it down as February to November but do not be too surprised to see it outside of that season. There are many more flowers in the warm summer months.

There are many flowers that look like Daisies so how do you recognise Bells perennis?

It is the only UK “Daisy” with a leafless flower stem.

        The leaves are all at the base of the flower. They are spoon shaped, sometimes round and they are slightly toothed.

Behind the flower head are the bracts. These serve to enclose and protect the developing buds.

Now we come to the difficult bit to explain.

A Daisy is not a flower. It is a flower head or inflorescence made up of dozens of little flowers. Each of the yellow bobbles in the centre is a whole flower in itself and is called a disc floret. Each of the petals is also a flower in itself, a different kind of flower called a ray floret.

Starting with the petals, how can a single petal be a flower?

I have done a sketch to try to explain. Each petal is a whole flower, the petal itself is the corolla, a name we use when the petals of a flower are fused together. At the base of the corolla there is an ovary, where the seed will develop and coming out of the ovary are the stigma, the female parts that collect pollen. A Daisy’s ray floret is a female flower.

If you look closely at this next photograph you will be able to see the stigma of the ray floret at the base of each petal. (Click to enlarge)

The yellow disc florets in the centre are hermaphrodite, they have both male (anthers) and female (Stigma) parts. This time the corolla is fused into a tube that surrounds each little flower.

The disc flowers open from the outside first and the youngest flowers are in the centre.

Many of our common wildflowers are like this. They are members of the Asteraceae family, sometimes called the Composite family Sunflowers are composed in a similar way to a Daisy but other members of the family like Dandelions and Thistles are missing the disc florets and only have ray florets. Common Groundsel only has disc florets.

Taxonomy:

Kingdom: Plantae

Order: Asterales

Family: Asteraceae

Genus: Bellis

Species: Bellis perennis

Wildflowers in winter.

I think that if we understood our own world better then we might understand our own selves a little bit better and that this is why botanists write on toilet walls (even though they don’t need to pee)

Is reproduction love or power?

Too late to ask me, I am old and I don’t care 🙂 Take it up kids.

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..