flowerishness - Tumblr blog

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Cornus nuttallii and Cornus florida (western or Pacific dogwood and the eastern or Florida dogwood)

The western and eastern dogwood trees are native to North America but they are grown in temperate gardens all over the world. Look in anyone's back garden and you'll see globalization in action - the United Nations of horticulture. I have flowers from six continents in my small corner of Planet Earth. Everybody seems to get along. The petty squabbles of human politics are left behind at the garden gate.

As you can see from the first photo, dogwood blooms are actually like a community of small flowers. For example, this pink eastern dogwood typically has 20 little flowers clustered in the middle. If you look closely. each tiny flower has it's own equally tiny petals. By surrounding this 'village' with larger petal-like bracts, the dogwood saves energy, maximizing it's reproductive potential with minimum effort.

Incidentally, the Pacific dogwood is the official provincial flower of British Columbia and the eastern dogwood is the state flower of Virginia, Missouri and North Carolina.

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Tulipa (tulip)

I've seen tulips blooming all over town for weeks now but somehow the ones that grow in your own garden are special.

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Equisetum telmateia subsp. braunii (giant horsetail)

Strange things are going on - on the other side of the tracks.

In the spring, horsetails produce these alien spore cones, technically called a strobilus. Horsetails are very ancient plants, the earliest ones go back to the Devonian, 380 million years ago. Land plants had just invented roots, leaves and seeds at this time and horsetails were right there at the beginning: Act 1, Scene 1. Equisetum telmateia has been accurately described as a 'living fossil'.

Horsetails have an interesting connection with the energy industry. In the Carboniferous period horsetails grew a hundred feet tall (30m) and those swamp forests produced over 90% of the world's coal deposits. As luck would have it, just as I was taking these photos, a CN freight train rumbled by with a hundred tanker cars of petroleum heading south. Of course oil is another type of fossil from Earth's ancient past. That's why they call it a fossil fuel.

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Acer palmatum (Japanese maple)

A Japanese maple starts to unfurl it's red leaves, like fingers stretching after a long winter sleep. Meanwhile, it's tiny flowers offer any passing insect the usual list of just two ingredients; pollen and nectar. These two essential substances make the the insect/flower partnership work. What a dull world it would be without this ancient contract.

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Magnolia denudata (Yulan Magnolia var. 'Yellow River')

In my neighborhood there seems to be a regular schedule to flowering in magnolia trees. First come the white star magnolias and then the pink magnolias start to bloom. At the end of the spring flowering season these pale yellow ones put on one last show. Soon the curtain will fall and there will be no more performances until next year. My advice? Enjoy your local magnolia flowers while you still have a chance.

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Erythronium americanum (yellow trout lily, kondo)

On my recent trip to Van Dusen Botanical Garden, I ran into several plantings of this interesting wildflower. I knew it was some kind of lily but luckily they had a stem in a labeled vase next to the entrance.

The yellow trout lily is native to eastern North America but I've never seen one growing on the west coast. It gets its name from the mottled appearance of its leaves which, supposedly, look like the skin of a brook trout. I must admit, I really have to put my imagination on 'high beam' to see the resemblance myself.

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Prunus serrulata (Japanese flowering cherry)

The term 'Japanese flowering cherry' is complicated. Most of the flowering cherry trees you see are complex cultivars and they don't produce edible fruit because they have been selected, purely on the basis of their 'prettiness', for hundreds of years. On Saturday, I went to the Sakura Days Festival at the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver but it was quite crowded and there were simply not enough cherry trees for my liking. However, I found this beautiful, highly-doubled specimen a few blocks away and I was delighted.

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Trillium ovatum and Trillium erectum (Pacific trillium and red trillium)

They say good things come in threes.

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Primula vulgaris and Primula hybida (Common primrose and complex primula hybrid)

The word primula is derived from primis, Latin for 'first'. This refers to it's peak flowering season in early spring. Photos one and two are easily identified as the common primrose, Primula vulgaris, which originally had pale yellow flowers. Colored forms did not appear in Europe until 1656 when Primula acaulis rubra, a mauve primrose, was introduced from Turkey by John Tradescant. Thus began the Elizabethan primrose craze.

The final two primroses are complex hybrids, often the result of crossing and recrossing several species over centuries of cultivation. These fancy primroses look like cancan dancers to me and they certainly bring a bit of excitement to a spring garden, so I say, " Vive la différence!

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Cactaceae (cactus family)

Planet Earth is covered in plants. Some are very ancient like moss, which may have evolved 470 million years ago, but cactuses are the new kid on the block. Based on molecular evidence, they evolved about 35 million years ago. Cacti had a 'Great Leap Forward' between 10 and 5 million years ago, when global climate changes produced more desert environments. This resulted in a massive expansion of their range with an equal increase in the number of genera and species.

Cacti are native to South, Central and southern North America. The plant family Cactaceae now includes 127 genera with 1,750 known species. With global warming also expected to increase the size of desert areas, 'Great Leap Forward number Two" could be just around the corner. This is good news for our friends in the cactus family.

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Tulipa (tulips)

Tulips were first introduced to European gardens in 1554, a gift from the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople. Originally a small mountain flower, the Persians had already produced tulips with bigger blooms in many colors but European (especially Dutch) gardeners started to work on developing new varieties immediately.

This led to the famous episode of Tulipmania from 1634 to 1637; a speculative frenzy centered in the Netherlands. In one month a single bulb of the red and white striped tulip 'Gheel ende Root van Leyden' went from 46 to 515 guilders and some lucky florist made a lot of money.

It all came to a crashing halt on February 2, 1637 when a florist in Haarlem auctioned a quantity of Swisters bulbs (a yellow tulip feathered with red) for an opening bid of 1,250 guilders. Finding no takers, he lowered the price to 1100, then to 1000... and all at once everyone in the room knew that the tulip bubble had burst. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price. While on the subject, does anyone remember the cryptocurrency boom?

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Fritillaria meleagris (snake's head lily)

I recently noticed our ancient snake's head lily flowering in a shady spot next to the fence. Some people think that this plant is called a snake's head lily because of the way the flowers bob and weave in the breeze. One of the flowers broke off as I was trying to set up that 'perfect shot' so I decided to do a bee's eye close-up. Now that's a different perspective!

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Saxifraga rosacea (Irish saxifrage)

Spring is just roaring along out here on the west coast and new flowers are showing up every day. In it's European homeland this little saxifrage is found on the banks of mountain streams but it also grows on cliffs and scree slopes. Now it adds a little color to rock gardens and and it's an attractive ground cover too. Incidentally, the Latin word saxifraga means "stone-breaker" and it was used in ancient times as a medicinal herb to treat bladder and kidney stones.

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Acer macrophyllum (big leaf maple)

Big leaf maple is native to the west coast of North America and, true to it's name, it has the largest leaves of any maple tree, sometimes 60cm (two feet) across. The flowers are hermaphroditic (bisexual) bearing both male and female flower parts on each raceme. The female flower emerges first (see photo one) and the male stamens come later. This avoids self-pollination.

Big leaf maples are big trees. Some are a hundred feet tall (30m) with an equally wide canopy and they can live to be 150 years old. We planted a baby sapling in our back yard a few years ago but it won't start producing its typically maple 'whirligig' seeds until it's about ten years old.

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Acer platanoides (Norway maple)

Last year, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't doing enough about tree flowers. Unfortunately, it was already late May and most trees bloom in the spring. Welcome to the Norway maple at the end of my street. Native to temperate Eurasia, it was introduced to North America in the mid-1700s as an ornamental shade tree. Now it's a common street tree in the endless suburbs.

Urban trees need to be carefully planned. Norway maple may have pretty flowers in the spring and colorful leaves in the autumn but it can lead to sidewalk heave and expensive pruning and leaf pickup, all paid for by municipal taxes. My advice is to do a little research before you plant a tree. Case in point: the roots of the Douglas Fir in my front garden have torn my driveway to pieces.

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Sansevieria trifasciata recently reclassified as Dracaena trifasciata (snake plant)

Snake plants are native to tropical West Africa from Nigeria east to the Congo. The stomata on its leaves close during the day and open at night to reduce evaporation. This makes Sansevieria trifasciata drought resistant and in winter it can tolerate two months without water. At this time of year, I give my snake plant a little sip of the wet stuff every two weeks or so but that's only if I remember.

Supposedly, it can be difficult to make snake plants flower but these magnificent specimens, under a skylight in a local shopping mall, are in full bloom. Coincidentally, the one in my living room is flowering too. I'm not surprised, snake plants thrive on neglect. Indeed, you can kill them with kindness - root rot from overwatering is the leading cause of snake plant death.

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Prunus serrulata var. 'Kanzan' (Japanese flowering cherry) and Apis mellifera (Western honey bee)

Hanami

When people talk about cherry blossoms they usually mean this species, Prunus serrulata, the Japanese flowering cherry. In Japan Hanami (花見, "flower viewing") is the traditional Japanese custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers (花, hana) but it almost always refers to pink flowering cherry trees(桜).

In Vancouver, the history of cherry blossoms dates back to the 1930s. Two of the main Japanese port cities, Kobe and Yokohama, donated 500 trees to the Japanese cenotaph in Stanley Park to honor Japanese Canadians who served in the First World War.

There are now over 45,000 cherry trees in Vancouver. We have an annual Hanami Festival and I think this year's must-see event is the Sakura Days Japan Fair at the Van Dusen Botanical Garden (April 13/14). I'll be there. I think I'll take my camera. I'm hoping for a sunny day.