GIANT SPIDER-FLOWERSIn the Mexican countryside around houses of regular people I can't recall having ever seen a flower garden whose plants were set in straight rows. Here if one day you happen to gain possession of a handful of seeds, a rootstock or a slip, you just put it where it strikes you at the moment to put it, maybe it'll grow and maybe not, who knows, no big deal, but it'll know it's welcome by the frequent watering and hoeing it'll get. That's the way it was with both my grandmas and I think that once it was the same with most North Americans. Rows came later, with houses in rows, with assembly lines, with robotic life.
Above you can see a corner of my neighbor's flower garden. Chickens and baby turkeys scratch around it all day long, an occasional pig wrecks havoc, there's the usual plastic bottles and bags littering the soil and it has no clear boundaries, but what a pleasure just walking by it several times each day, soaking up all that color and informal exuberance! The white flowers at the left are Giant Spider-flowers, CLEOME SPINOSA, whose blossoms can range to rose-purple. Until recently the genus Cleome was placed in the Caper Family, the Capparidaceae, close to the Mustard Family, but recent gene analysis indicates the it's closer to mustards than to cappers, so now many taxonomists assign it to its own family, the Cleomaceae. Whatever its affiliations, the curious thing that makes it different from other families can be seen below:
In that picture of a teacup-size flower, the yellowish, elongate ovary -- which will develop into a fruit very similar to a mustard fruit -- is at the far left, at the end of a long, straight, stiff stalk referred to technically as a stipe or gynophore. It's always fun to note how blossoms use certain tricks to assure that their female parts aren't pollinated by pollen from the flower's own male parts. The genus Cleome has come up with the idea of holding the whole female ovary way, way away from all the male parts, atop a pole-like stem, plus its male parts, or stamens, are made to lean far away from the female part in the center. By the way, maybe the same way that the French language has many words for culinary concepts we lack in English, in Spanish they have different words for a vegetable garden, which is a "huerta" (WHER-tah), and a flower garden, which is a "jardín" (har-DEEN). |
