Author Archives: George Rogers

Polygala species

(Polygala means “much milk.”)

Polygalaceae

Polygala setacea.  All flower photos today by John Bradford.

Halpatioke Regional Park near Stuart, Florida, was the venue today where John and I encountered a WWII Vet (repeat:  WWII, do the math on your cell phone calculator) out alone with canteen on his belt and armed with one of those grabber tools cleaning up litter.   Some folks have a sense of purpose.

P. rugellii

We also encountered scattered members of the genus Polygala.    Polygala is one heck of a genus…a few hundred species around the world, twenty-some in Florida, several in our general area.    You could scarcely find a more variable and more colorful plant group, our local rainbow including orange, yellow,  violet,  and white blossoms.   The flowers can be single,  or in branched candelabras,  or in congested heads or spikes.    The plants can be an inch tall, or three feet. (In other regions they can be big and woody.)

P. lutea

That kind of color and variation remind you of any other plant group?    Methinks Orchids, and the flowers do have features in common with Orchids, including extreme bilateral symmetry,  similar  overall shapes,   often a decorated or complex  “lower lip,”  and precision pollination.   At least one species of Polygala reportedly forces the pollinator to enter a tunnel and scrape inward past the pollen-receptive stigma, and then to exit via a different tunnel, brushing over the pollen-producing anthers.  That would not be dismaying in an Orchid, but Polygalas are completely unrelated.

P. grandiflora

Polygala fruits and seeds have odd features.  Most have furry seeds.   I don’t know why but a guess is protection from the ants usually responsible for seed dispersal.  Most Polygala species offer a food packet on the tip of the seed.    Ants drag the seeds with benefits back to their nests for lunch, and maybe the hairy coat deters overzealous munching.    Some species have no ant help, and have the seed hairs modified into hooked VELCRO, apparently snagging fur or feathers of passing creatures.      Additionally, some species have thin wafery wings on the fruits, suggesting a role for wind in relocation.  Most or all of our local species seem to be ant-dispersed.

Winged fruit, and hairy seed, the food packet at the tip.  From Flora Malesiana.

Because the genus is beautiful,   and has historical virtues, and is in Europe, let’s see what they thought of it in Merry Olde England.  Well, how handy, I have a reprint copy of Gerard’s 1636 Herbal at my elbow.   Now read together from Gerard:

I always assumed the modern name “Procession Flower” for our Polygala incarnata to reference the inflorescence blossoming over time into a “procession” of individual flowers, but, looky there,  Gerard  already had the name in the air centuries ago with an entirely different meaning.

Procession Flower, P. incarnata

Speaking or processions, Rogation is the Christian celebration immediately before the Ascension, traditionally observed with processions, apparently enhanced in Gerard’s world with garlands and “nosgaies.”  Wouldn’t Rogation time be soon,  with the Polygalas here in Florida on schedule?

P. cymosa

These are bioactive plants, some having wintergreen essence in the roots.   Being worldwide and conspicuous, no surprise they have a catalog of historical medicinal uses, too many to probe here, and not that interesting.    Except for one,” procuring milke in the brests of nurses.”   That would explain the common name we really use for Polygalas nowadays,  milkworts.  I love the sources that say the name has to do with cows in pastures, yea, sure, a pre-GMO BST.   In fact, Gerard goes on to say milkworts to promote lactation date back into ancient times.  Does it work?  I do not know.  But I do know it contains poisons procuring vomit.

P. cruciata

So don’t eat the milkworts, just head out anywhere open and moist, and seek out the color.  To quote Gerard one last time, ”these  plants or milk-worts grow commonly in every wood or fertile pasture whereforever I have travelled.”

P. balduinii

This afternoon was hot!  John and I sweated  90 degrees to sink to our ankles in warm stink-mud near Jensen Beach, Florida to behold a zillion Bladderworts.  The site is about half overpowered with invasive exotic species and about half restored to an intriguing dried pond carpeted with carnivorous yellow Bladderworts.

Bladderworts in the mud.  Photo by John Bradford.

Because we’ve covered these greedy meat eaters previously, let’s turn to the invasive exotic species.  For most of the hundreds of unwelcome escaped plants in Florida it is easy to surmise how they got here:  running away from gardens, or feeding livestock,  or hitchhiking as seeds or spores.    Some pests have have more-interesting histories.

Let’s take a shot at the novel cases, with a disclaimer that just because somebody introduced a species once does not mean nobody else did before or after.   That is impossible to pin down, and records are murky.

Sisal Agave

Sisal is a Category II invasive exotic species looming large in hot dry habitats locally.  It dates back to Florida’s first well documented horticulturist, Dr. Henry Perrine.(1797-1840).   Dr. Perrine had an eventful life, first as  “The Little Hard Riding Doctor” in Illinois, where, oops,  he accidentally drank a bottle of arsenic.   That mishap drove him to Mexico, the toxic damage causing a craving for a warm climate.  In Mexico Perrine  doctored a cholera epidemic, which he caught of course, and yet survived as his second brush with death.

Sisal in Jensen Beach, by JB

In addition to doctoring,  Perrine served as U.S Consul to Mexico, coming under a presidential executive order to ship Mexican crop plants back to the U.S.   He sent them to Indian Key in the Florida Keys, and took a special interest in Agaves, including Sisal, writing a book on the plants.  Sisal was and remains a commercial source of fibers.  To this day Indian Key houses Sisal Agaves, as does much of South Florida.   Perrine retired from Mexico moved to Indian Key to tend his introduction garden, and to be a doctor where one was needed, but never lived to see the literal fruits of his labor, as he suffered “strike three,” death at the hands of angry Indigenous People in 1840, and thus ended Florida’s first botanical garden.

Water Hyacinth

Water Hyacinths are lovely floating plants with spikes of  attractive purple flowers.

All well and good if under control, but Water Hyacinth broke out and conquered Florida waters and beyond, sometimes smothering watery  acres with millions of  itself, clogging waterways and interfering with ecology.   Maybe it should become a biofuel.

Hyacinth to the horizon

How did a bad deed like that get started?  A careless lily pool owner?   No.  Hyacinth Hell traces back to the 1884 New Orleans Cotton Exposition (World’s Fair), where they had a mammoth greenhouse with mind-blowing horticultural exhibits.    Not bad for 1884!    But that is not exactly where the Hyacinth originated.     Each Fair visitor received one as a keepsake, only to go home all over the South and unleash the scourge.   CLICK for cinematic documentation.

Showy Rattlebox

Mirror mirror on the wall, who was the biggest plant introducer of them all?   That is easy, David Fairchild (1869-1954), namesake of Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami.   No space here for a long biography, so suffice it to say  Fairchild had a penchant for cultivating the rich and famous, and for marrying their daughter.  He was Alexander Graham Bell’s Son in Law, and hob-nobbed with luminaries of the era, oh say Orville Wright for instance.   The opportunities and funding from his VIP connections put Fairchild and his team in a position to travel the world and introduce, via the USDA maybe 200,000 different plants into the U.S.

Showy Rattlebox, by JB

Included in his voluminous records are species of Crotalaria, beautiful yellow-flowered Rattleboxes, species now scattered abundantly in every disturbed site locally.    Some gardeners know Sunn Hemp (yes with double-n) as one example, although it is not commonly escaped in Florida.  A similar, gorgeous species is all over our area, well named “Showy Rattlebox.”    It is so colorful this species must have come as a garden ornamental.  Wrong.

Fairchild and his crew cultivated Showy Rattlebox and related species as companion crops for citrus and other fruit species.   Fairchild thought C. spectabilis dated to around 1920 in his Miami experimental gardens.

Showy Rattlebox nitrogen fixing nodules

Beyond good looks, the species has nitrogen-fixing nodules, as a good legume should.  And willing to prosper unwatered on terrible soil in brutal sun.    Maybe that ability should have been a red flag,  but trouble took time to appear.   In the meantime, Fairchild and others waxed eloquent on the virtues of Showy Rattlebox, not only for nitrogenating fruit crop soils, but also for fighting soil parasitic nematodes attacking Papayas.

Quercus minima

Fagaceae

Today John and I haunted Jonathan Dickinson State Park, near Hobe Sound Florida, finding  the flora abloom, at least in  marshy meadows,  nature’s garden complete with blooming butterworts,  orchids, meadowbeauties, milkworts, sundews, tillandsias, and too much splendor to portray with a list.

Butterwort today.  An insectivorous plant.  All photos today by John Bradford.

The practical mission  is John’s serial  long-term photo record of “what happens after a burn.”

The blaze was about a year ago, and by now the scorched earth lies under fresh green oak boughs.   Oaks resprouted “from scratch” in a year?    Well yes, about a foot tall with no  ambition to rise higher.    These are dwarf live oak, Quercus minima, resurrecting to new life from fireproof subterranean rhizomes.

Quercus minima towering to 9 inches tall.   The first-formed leaves are toothy lobed.

Are dwarf live oaks tiny representatives of the big  live oaks (Q. virginiana) shade trees festooned with Spanish moss across the South?    Almost.   Harvard University botany demigod Charles Sprague Sargent long ago perceptively classified both as extremes of a single species.

Quercus virginiana can be huge and old.

The same question extends to a second locally abundant small oak plausibly interpretable as a variant of big Quercus virginiana.   This is sand live oak, Quercus geminata.   With variation, it is most often a shrub or smalli tree intermediate in size between big virginiana and little  minima.

What is the relationship among the three? Molecular data can settle kinship, whether for  Maury Povich or for curious botanists.    A useful DNA-centered study for today’s tree trio shows  live oak, sand live oak, and dwarf live oak together to comprise one exclusive branch on the oak evolutionary tree.  The three are most closely related to each other than any is to any other oak.    In short, it would be “legit” to see three varieties of one variable species,  or alternatively as three sister species, the latter interpretation prevailing nowadays.

Sand live oak

There is a compelling case for giving each its own species designation.  Chevrolet and Buick are varieties of GM yet have their own “species” identities.   Our three live oaks have diverged from a common origin over time into fairly distinct identities.    Oaks are famous for hybridizing, yet live oak, sand live oak, and dwarf live oak, all living intermixed, seem to have evolved barriers to criss-crossing, although Q. geminata and Q. minima can form a rare hybrid called Q. succulenta.     More prevalent is hybridization by each with distant cousins outside the trio.

The DNA study mentioned above is the 2015 work of botanist Jeannine Cavender-Bares and collaborators.  They noted how our  three live oaks diverge most saliently along lines of response to fire:  Q. virginiana massive, long-lived, sturdy, and intolerant of fire;  sand live oak mid-sized with grudging ability to regrow after fire; and  dwarf live oak dependent on fire.   Maybe it is all about diversification into habitats with different fire patterns.

This looks like a hybrid, maybe, between dwarf live oak and Chapman’s oak.

All that said, there is an asterisk.  Quercus virginiana seedlings make a thick underground tuber before the tree grows into a mighty oak for 500 years.  Should the baby seedling be grazed, burned, or flooded it can resprout from its tuber for a second chance.   Could Quercus minima be sort of an “infantilized” live oak that remains small and took that original fireproof  temporary  “tuber” from its ancestor and expanded upon it?

Dwarf live oak has an odd foliar feature.  The earliest leaves on a branch have lobed toothy margins.  As the branch elongates, however, the younger leaves develop toothless.

Why make a transition like that?  Here is a speculation.  I think teeth and lobes on leaf margins help dissipate heat.  Maybe when the twigs are young and close to the sun-baked Florida sand below the cooling wind, where fire burned away all shade, perhaps the leaves need to shed heat.   Later, as the branches rise into the breeze, and as overhead shade increases during fire recovery, the overheating problem diminishes, making the lobed heat-shedding leaves obsolete.  Only a guess.

Carya floridana

Juglandaceae

Small Scrub Hickory.  All photos today by John Bradford.

Today John and I botanized  a local coastal hammock remnant, Maggy’s Hammock (aka Rocky Point Hammock)  near Stuart, Florida,  species galore in a square mile.   As tempting as it is to start listing, we better pick one species and stick to it.    The alpha trees are Florida hickories, some with trunks, oh say, a yard in diameter.   Florida hickory is well named, being restricted to Florida, living in high dry  habitats.

They are in full bloom today, although their wind-pollinated flowers are not showy.  The males dangle clustered in spikes called catkins.  The females stand solo.

Flowering twig.  Male flowers in catkins.  One green female flower at the twig tip.

Hidden within, the trees have a secret, phylloxeran galls*.

Huh?

To explain the galls it is necessary to refer to another wonder of Florida nature:    Koreshans.    Phylloxerans  have much in common with Koreshsnas, just on a smaller scale:  they both lived on the inside of their globes.

The Koreshans were a utopian community  a couple generations ago at Estero, Florida, near Ft. Myers.  Their village persists  as a state park.  There’s a ton to tell about them, but to stay on-topic, the important thing is that they lived  inside the globe.   Koreshans knew the rest of humanity had the world-wrongside-out.

:This button may help you see where they lived:

Koreshan Unity button. 19–. Color photoprint. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.

Today’s phylloxerans are the micro-Koreshans of Maggy’s Hammock.  They live on the inside of their little globose gall the diameter of a grape.    Slice it open…there’s a utopian world within.  Hundreds of tiny Koreshan phylloxerans.

We live inside

OK, cut the crazy crap, what’s a phylloxeran?   They’re kin to aphids, with many species infesting many plants.   They get along famously with grapes and hickories, entailing economic consequences for both.    The most important cultivated hickories are pecans, bothered by phylloxerans.   The pests are more infamous in vineyards, where root-infesting phylloxerans from North America  brought the European wine industry into peril, forcing grafting vines onto imported pest-resistant rootstocks.

See the little rascals inside thei hickory hostel today on our microscopic phylloxeran-cam:

CLICK

They wiggle within a 100% enclosed chamber.  How bizarre.  How did they get in?  A  pregnant female founded the gall.  It formed around her.  She probably died full of viable eggs, populating the gall with siblings.   What’s so great about living in a bubble?    Protection, no doubt.   What is their exit strategy?   Somehow the bugs induce the gall to rupture.   Hold on there:  They can tell the gall to open sesame and make a portal to the infinite universe?  Apparently so.  And it gets weirder:

Phylloxerans can throttle down the plant’s protective chemicals just as the HIV Virus hobbles our human immune system.  Way back the 1890s biologists found phylloxerans to force the host (grapes) to develop extra stomates.  Stomates are little gas exchange valves essential  for photosynthesis.   More stomates = more photosynthesis = more sugar for the tiny lodgers.  We all know it is silly for a parasite to kill its host.   These wise little parasites understand and go a step beyond, helping the  host to help themselves.

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*Galls are growths on plants caused by insects, mites, or fungi.  They are usually larval homes for the arthropod that induced them.

Toxicodendron radicans

(The misnomer “Poison-Oak” is applied sometimes to this species, although in Florida that name is probably best reserved for the close relative Toxicodendron pubescens and relatives in the Western U.S.)

Anacardiaceae, the Cashew Family, many of which can cause dermatitis

Continuing our month-of-Fridays probe into the botany of the Kiplinger Nature Preserve today in perfect weather, John and I found the plant most interestingly in bloom to be poison ivy.    Too bad it is nasty, because the species has a certain charm and fascinating natural history otherwise.

Leaflets 3 let it be.   All photos by brave John Bradford.

Poison Ivy is not “a” species, but rather the most mind-boggling complex of Mother Nature’s messy handiwork you can find.   Anyone who wants to reduce botany to simplistic species and easy rules better first look at this perplexing tangle of variation ranging across much of Asia, North America, and parts of Tropical America, but neither Europe nor Africa.      Different people can look into the complex and see different species, subspecies, varieties, and even different genera,  with our well known eastern Poison Ivy more similar to the same species in Japan than it is to all the numerous variants in the rest of the U.S. and Mexico.   The big ol’ mess was sorted out painstakingly by Michigan State University botanist William Gillis on the shoulders of predecessors.  The late Dr. Gillis and I shared the distinction of our careers intersecting with the only botanist convicted of booking  a hitman to murder his wife.

A good segue into Poison Ivy.  The writing on P.I. as a poison are infinite, so to pick the weirdest aspect of that history  I know of, as documented by Gillis, hereyago:  indigenous men in California used the irritating plants to oppress women.  When the men wanted to meet and keep the women apart, one guy would strip naked, be body painted, and run around all crazy threatening the women with wet poison ivy branches suspended around his head.   Who would volunteer for that job?  The hazards are numerous.  A better use of the plant, despite the itch, was in the Netherlands to reinforce dikes. Worked better than a little boy sticking his finger in the leak.

Would you believe Poison Ivy has a role in ornamental horticulture?    It develops red fall color and contributes to the subtle autumn hues in South Florida.     It has served in that capacity cultivated in gardens in climates where fall color is otherwise deficient.

Poison Ivy has the ability to resurrect dead trees.   The vine climbs hugging the defunct trunk, and way up high decides to branch out like the original limbs on the tree.   From the distance such a tree looks like a very odd species. Here is the vine covering a dead tree in flames. CLICK

We’ve been trying to catch it in bloom, so today was a minor triumph.   The flowers are separately male or female, on distinct plants.    In some locales, the male plants have foliage differing from the females, a weird occurrence.  Why?

Blooming P.I. today 2/17/17

The flowers draw bees, and Poison Ivy honey is not unheard of.   No thank you. The blossoms mature into little “berries” which are not berries; they are related to and resemble mini-mangoes: lopsided, flattened, and with a “stone.”  As the fruits age, the outer layer separates from the stone leaving a hollow space, and the outer layer can crack open along lines.

To wrap up, one more oddity.  Commonly allergic reactions come from proteins.    Poison Ivy causes a horrid allergic reaction yet its toxin is not a protein.   Oh however can that be?  Apparently the plant’s poison, urushiol, binds and alters proteins in human skin, and then those altered self-protein complexes kick off an allergy, sort of a vine-mediated auto-immune disorder.    The itchy oil is almost a varnish.   It can collect in sufficient quantities on the leaves to dry into a black spotty paintjob, a skull and crossbones reminder.   Fact is, the Chinese Lacquer Tree is itself likewise a species of Toxicodendron.