Shooting Star

Here's another spring perennial from the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden in DC.  Seriously, if you need some inspiration for spring perennials, take a walk through these lovely gardens.   This plant is Dodecatheon meadia or shooting star.  Its basal rosette of leaves (leaves which have some relief to them) and elongated stems on which the flowers sit (those stems are called peduncles) are typical characteristics to the primrose family (Primulaceae), to which this plant belongs.

It's a gorgeous plant and native to boot.  It's found in the eastern United States from Georgia to Michigan.  It's typically found in wooded shady locations and prefers moist soils.  It has a high tolerance to alkaline soils as well.  It aestivates by mid-summer (i.e., it loses its leaves and goes dormant) but spreads easily and can be divided without trouble.  It is endangered in some states, primarily due to overcollection.

The common name, shooting star, is pretty obvious.  But Dodecatheon -- that's a bit more obscure.  Evidently, a similar primrose was christened with this name by Pliny the Elder himself (one of the first botanists).  He named it because he believed this plant was under watch by gods, twelve of them in fact.  In Greek, dodeca means twelve and theos means God.

Pachypodium

Since yesterday's post was on Vinca minor, a member of the Apocynaceae family, I thought I would post today on one of Vinca's odder relatives, Pachypodium.  I won't distinguish a species, however since I'm not so good at spotting the differences between P. lealii and P. brevicaule, though the former is more common in southern Africa and the latter is specific to Madagascar.

 

Pachypodiums are desert plants and you don't have to be a plant nerd to assume that the water the plant needs to survive drought is stored in the trunk.  Below, you can see the flower is not too different from Vinca.  
 

Though we think of elephants when we hear the word "pachy" - that's really Latin for "thick."  Thus, pachyderm means thick skin.  Pachypodium means thick foot (I suppose the "foot" in this case is the swollen trunk).

Bottle Palm

Below, a specimen of Hyophorbe lagenicaulis, in Waimea Valley Botanical Garden, Oahu.  Bottle palms are named such for its trunk, which suddenly enlarges at the base, looking much like a bottle.  This specimen, is quite old and is reaching its species height limit of 30-35'.  Most bottle palms have a more obviously bottle-like trunk, because they are usually found in shorter sizes.

Bottles rarely have more than 5-7 leaves on them and they are self-cleaning.  That means that when the frond senesces, it simply falls off, unlike today's earlier royal palm, which has persistent leaves.  The leaf texture is much more coarse, with thicker leaflets.  This does make it easier to appreciate the clear, jade green color of the leaves.
 

A younger specimen of bottle palm is below.  Bottles are endemic to Mauritius Island, where wild stands of this tree are very rare and diminishing. Bottles are however, very popular as container plants due to their small size and striking silhouette.

Pritchardia Palms

When I first started working on projects in the tropics, I was intimidated by all that I didn't know about palms.  For a while there, they all looked the same.  But eventually with enough exposure you begin to notice the finer details separating one species from another.  

The very first step in that direction is by noticed whether or not the leaves are fans or fronds.  The way that here on the east coast, when encountering a tree, the first thing we note is leaf orientation (opposite or altnerate?) with palms, noting if it's a fan leaf like the tree in this post, or a compound frond like this morning's date palm, narrows down the possibilities.

The genus in this post is Pritchardia or Pritchard palm, named so after William Thomas Pritchard, a British consul at Fiji during the turn of the last century.  If you pressed a gun to my head (please don't), I would speculate that this is Pritchardia affinis or loulu palm, which can become quite tall (many species stay shorter) and is more common than the other 28 species.

P. affinis is endemic to Hawaii and is registered as an endangered species. There are another 18 species of Pritchardia that are also endemic and all are in decline.  The genus is unusual in that the flowers and fruits occur on the same stalks.  Note the bright yellow flower buds above and the unripe fruit below.

Heritiera longipetiolata

Yesterday's post about pineapples made me miss Hawaii. At this point, it looks like I may not return for a few months which is frustrating (particularly during this snowy, rainy winter!).  So to get me through the cold days, I thought I'd post a few pics from my travels there.

 
This grove of trees, when viewed from afar, don't seem particularly spectacular. But when I took a closer look at them (growing at the Waimea Valley Botanical Garden on the north shore of Oahu), I was enchanted by the network of buttressed roots.

The plant is Heritiera longipetiolata, and is endemic to Guam.  The plant is also highly endangered.  Though it is one dozens of websites due to its status as an endangered species, the information is somewhat scant on details.

The etymology of the genus name isn't very telling either.  It's simply named for Charles Louis de Brutelle L'Heritier, a French botanist, who also named Eucalyptus.

The species name however, should be fairly obvious.  Longipetiolata simply means long petioles.  And as you can see from some of the pictures, this indeed is true.  The plant has petioles that are as much as 2" long.