April 20, 2019
BASKET PLANT
Last month when I passed through Mérida on my way to Guatemala, on March 26th, I got to look around the backyard garden of my friends Eric and Mary, and see something I've been looking for. It's shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420ca.jpg
Up north often I've seen this plant filling indoor flowerpots. It's nothing very spectacular, just something that's easy-to-grow producing succulent greenness that looks cheerful in a wintry room when placed on a sunny windowsill. Down here it's commonly seen in walled-in backyard gardens like Eric and Mary's, where with time it can form a lush, solid ground cover, even in deeply shaded gardens. Thing is, I've never known exactly what the plant was, because I'd never seen a plant flowering. A plant in the picture is flowering.
I've always assumed that the plant was a member of the medium-size (±650 species in over 40 genera), mostly tropical and subtropical Spiderwort Family, the Commelinaceae, to which Day-flowers and Wandering-Jews also belong. That's because of the plant's semi-succulent, slimy-juiced (mucilaginous) , rosette-forming, strap-shaped leaves with parallel veins. I was surprised, however, by this plant's cluster of small, white flowers, which wasn't right for the usual genera. A closer look at the flowering cluster, or inflorescence, is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420cb.jpg
A close-up of one of the inflorescence's several flower groupings appears at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420cc.jpg
This shows several individual flowers forming a head closely subtended by scale-like bracts, which is typical of the family, though in other species often the bracts are much larger, often partly enclosing the clusters of flowers. None of the flowers in our picture bear fresh corollas. I assume that the white, irregular-shaped items atop each calyx is a wilted corolla. Corollas in the Spiderwort Family are famous for their quick withering, especially among the dayflowers with their blossoms lasting one day. In Eric's scorchingly hot garden, I'd not be surprised if they last only an hour or two in early morning.
The inflorescence's structure led me to the genus Callisia, at which point on the Internet it was easy enough to find pictures of our plant (keywords Commelinaceae topical ornamental) because of its wide use as an indoor and garden ornamental.
It's CALLISIA FRAGRANS, in English known by such names as Basket Plant, Chain Plant and Inch Plant. Originally it's from upland central Mexico, but not only is it much planted worldwide, but in numerous tropical and subtropical countries it's been naturalized, gone wild. The fragrans in the name refers to the flowers' sweet fragrance, of which our wilted flowers offered no hint.
Traditionally Basket Plant has been used medicinally in many ways. In Eastern Europe its leaves are used for skin diseases, burns and joint problems. In the lab it shows antiviral and antimicrobial action.
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PANAMA RUBBER TREE FLOWERING
In October of last year, toward the end of the rainy season, in El Rosario National Park in northern Guatemala's Petén department, the Panama Rubber Trees were neither flowering nor fruiting. We just got pictures of the tree's smooth trunk and its 45cm long (18inch), distinctively shaped and veined leaves, online at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/rubber.htm
Earlier this month, on April 1 -- now toward the end of the dry season -- along woodland trails through the extensive Maya ruins in Ceibal Archaeological Park about 15kms east of Sayaxché, the Panama Rubber Trees had dropped most of their leaves because of the dry season, and they were flowering. And flowering, they presented a curious spectacle, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420c5.jpg
At first I could hardly believe that Panama Rubber Trees could look like this, but zooming in on some leaves with the camera's little telephoto lens revealed that they were, as you can confirm at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420c6.jpg
While I was at it, I got a close look at the naked, flowering part of the stems and saw something interesting, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420c7.jpg
It looks like flowers have fallen off most of the stems' flowering spots, but here and there flowering structures remain, looking like small fruits. Being members of the Fig Family, the Moraceae, Rubber Trees produce unisexual flowers, and in this genus an individual tree may bear both male and female flowers (the tree is monoecious) or only flowers of a single sex (dioecious). These limbs were about 12m high (40ft), and at such distance I just couldn't be sure what I was seeing, in terms of male/female flowers.
However, farther along a trail the ground was heavily littered with strange-looking items about 25mm across (1 inch), one of which is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420c8.jpg
That's a Panama Rubber Tree flowering structure bearing male flowers.The white, grainy items are pollen producing anthers, so this structure is a kind of curved platform shaped somewhat like a distorted golfball tee, known as a receptacle, with overlapping, scale-like bracts on its bottom, and many closely crammed together male flowers on top. All the flowering branches were too high to see whether there were receptacles bearing female flowers. It makes sense that the trees would drop their male flowers once their pollen was shed, while the female structures would remain, to develop into fruits.
I was delighted with this male-flower-bearing receptacle because it fit so nicely with what I know of the Fig Family. To see what I mean, you can compare the above male fruiting structure with the female flowering structure of a Fig Family member, the Snakewort, commonly growing around the hut I live in, in the Yucatan, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/16/160703dt.jpg
The structures are very similar, yet one plant is our big tree, and the Snakeworts beside the hut are the ankle-high herbs shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/dorsteni.htm
And a fig "fruit," then, is nothing but a flowering receptacle like those of the Rubber Tree and the Snakewort, but completely curved in on itself, to form a sphere, with the flowers on the sphere's interior wall. When you eat a store-bought fig, you're eating a receptacle and the grainy flowers and fruits inside the receptacle. A typical fig, of the tree Ficus obtusifolia, is shown in cross section showing all this at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/ficus-o.htm
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"BIG SENNA" SPECTACULARLY FLOWERING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/cassia.htm we look at a so-called "Big Senna," Cassia grandis, that last October 1, toward the end of the rainy season, astonished us with its large, woody, legume-type fruits. At that time of year, only a few, mostly decomposed fruits lay on the ground, and no flowers appeared among the big trees' feathery leaves.
This was in El Rosario National Park, on Sayaxaché's east side in northern Guatemala's Petén department. This month, on April 3, I was back in El Rosario's campground and got to see fruits still hanging on the Big Senna trees, along with pinkish, redbud-like flowers, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sn.jpg
This time, however, it wasn't the legumes that were so impressive, but rather the pink blossoms. The big trees looked like huge heaps of strawberry sherbet. They were crowded among other species so no picture was possible showing the effect at a distance, but at least a telephoto shot of flowers high in the canopy showed how densely the blossoms arranged themselves among the branches, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420so.jpg
All the flowers were too high to reach, but the ground was prettily carpeted with dropped blossoms. If I'd had watercolors and a blank canvas, I'd have tried to paint the abstract picture shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sp.jpg
With so many blossoms falling, it's clear that only a very small percentage of flowers ever set fruit. If all them did produce the big, heavy fruits, the branches would collapse or the trees fall over. You can see a blossom retrieved from the ground at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sq.jpg
Cassias are members of the Bean Family. Flowers of most species in that family either are of the bean-vine type, with a large top petal, two side ones, and two below fused along their common margin into a scoop shape (they're "papilionaceous") or else they're very small and cylindrical, clustered in powderpuff-like heads. However, this blossom isn't like that. It bears five separate petals of almost equal size and shape, and its stamens vary greatly in length. These features assign cassias to the Caesalpinia Subfamily of the Bean Family, the Caesalpinioideae.
A flower feature not showing in the above photo is that the flowers' calyxes are distinctly large, tough and hairy, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sr.jpg
So, these "Big Sennas" are wonderful trees. At this torrid, most stressful time of the current dry season, when so many trees have lost their leaves and many herbs have simply died back, what a gift the Big Senna's flowers are to pollinators, and all those other beings dependent on those pollinators at other times of the year.
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BRAZILIAN FERN TREES FRUITING
Earlier this month, on April 1, I was following trails between Maya ruins in the extensive Ceibal Archaeological Park about 15kms east of Sayaxché. The trails were cut through dense forest, and were developed atop thin soil derived from white limestone. In one place the ground was littered with flattish, club-shaped, legume-type fruits -- a mixture of green, recently fallen ones and older, brown, decaying ones -- as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sx.jpg
A close-up of a 10cm long legume (4 inches) is seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sw.jpg
A legume is a simple fruit splitting along both margins, and derived from an ovary with only one cell, or carpel. When you find a legume like this, think "Bean Family." The vast majority of Bean Family species produce legumes with more than one seed, or bean, but this and all other legumes seen that day on the forest floor contained only one bean, so here was an important field mark for identifying the plant the legumes fell from. The forest canopy above that spot in the trail was dominated by a single large tree, mostly leafless now toward the end of the dry season, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sz.jpg
The tree's branches were too high to see whether they bore fruits like those on the ground, but the camera's little telephoto lens zoomed to its maximum settled the issue by revealing what's seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/19/190420sy.jpg
That picture also shows a few of the big tree's leaves, which seemed to be emerging in anticipation of the first rains. They were twice pinnately compound, like the Bean Family's acacia and mimosa leaves.
All these distinctive field marks led to a species we've already seen, but looking very different. It's the Brazilian Fern Tree, Schizolobium parahyba, and you can see what the species looked like when we first saw it in lowland Chiapas, Mexico, at https://www.backyardnature.net/chiapas/ferntree.htm
On that page, leaves on young trees are so big, over 2m long (6½ft), that the trees look like tree ferns. Leaves on the tree above our trail in Guatemala appear to be much smaller. My impression is that young, fast-growing trees bear larger leaves than do mature trees, though the scale of things high in a forest canopy is hard to determine.
The literature promises us yet a third spectacular appearance of the Brazilian Fern Tree -- when it's flowering. Apparently then it looks like a gigantic, brightly yellow, upside-down feather-duster.
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HARD TIMES FOR WASPS
Nowadays afternoon breezes are scorching hot, usually the temperature reaching 100°F or so (38°C). However, it's a crisply dry heat, so in the shade it's not bad at all if you can stay still, which I do in the afternoons. The forest is mostly dry-season leafless now, all gray and brown, looking like winter up north, despite how it feels.
Here wasps are part of everyday life the year round. The Maya workers think it's funny that I don't knock down their nests beneath the hut's thatch overhang, or squirt them with diesel, but wasps don't bother me and I like watching them. I think they've learned my odor, because sometimes workers passing by do get stung. The dogs get stung, too, but that's because they snap at the wasps, upsetting them. On a certain level I find my wasp neighbors more congenial and elegant than the smelly, panting, farting, slobbering, barking dogs programmed by their human breeders to fawn shamelessly over us humans.
For the last couple of weeks, wasps of a certain species have caught my attention because they're desperate for water. They cluster at my red-plastic wash basin, sipping. At first they landed on the basin's edge, climbed down to the water, drank, and when they started to fly off, I think they must have misjudged their weight full of water, for they'd fly directly into the water, and drown.
Woodchips and a floating saucer in the water didn't help. Eventually I discovered how to drape a washrag over the basin's side so that it wicked up water, and the wasps could land on the rag and drink without descending. A machete was laid across the basin, with the blade atop the washrag, to keep the washrag from blowing into the water. One day before I learned the machete trick, a wind gust blew the washrag into the water, and when I went there next about a dozen wasps were drowned.
I felt bad about that, about being so slow to understand how to help the wasps, not hurt them. Of course this led to the usual thoughts about wasps being such social insects. Philosophers have seriously suggested that among very social insects such as wasps, bees, ants and termites, the individual workers carrying water, gathering nectar, and such, may better be thought of as a single body's appendages, with the body's "brain" residing in the queen back at the nest. The whole colony is the individual insect, with the workers/appendages receiving their instructions not via nerves between a brain and them, but through hormones issued by the queen.
Maybe my negligence with the wash basin just diminished a single wasp being, then, instead of killing several.
When you start thinking like that, it just leads up and up. For instance, similarly you could say that all the individual beings constituting a species are just roaming-around appendages of that species' genome, in which resides information in chromosomes dispersed among all the various physical beings/appendages of that species.
Going on up, way up, maybe even all the things of the Universe are just appendages behaving according to natural laws dictating how the Universe be put together.
All this is just fun thinking. Still, this week with the scorching hot wind blowing through leafless, wintry-looking forest around my hut, and thirsty wasps dying in a red-plastic wash basin, this thinking exercise accomplished something.
For, it firmed up my impression that I, stationed at this obscure spot on our little Earth in a seemingly random corner of the swirling, turbulent, evolving Universe, am a kind of appendage of a single all-being presence. All appendages have uses, so what is mine? The only answer I can come up with is that I am to do this thinking and feeling about hot wind and dying wasps, as if I were a nerve ending -- less than a real appendage -- and to share my sensations, thinking and feeling with One Thing headquarters.
*****
Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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