Pineapples

Since I already am on a bromeliad kick today, I thought I may as well share some a shot of a variegated pineapple (Ananas comosus) growing in Longwood Gardens' conservatory.

There it is, that wonderful tropical fruit.  Every time I went to Hawaii this year for site work, I couldn't wait to run across to the ABC store and pick up my day's supply of pineapple.  It's a simple but undeniable thrill to be able to eat an exotic fruit like this and know that it was harvested a mere 60 miles away. 

 

(ABC Stores, by the way, are a chain of Hawaiian bodegas where you can buy food, magazines, sunscreen as well as alcohol.  It's not just a liquor store, like our east coast ABC stores.  I had to explain this recently to an accountant, who saw frequent trips to the ABC store claimed as travel expenses, and began to wonder if I didn't have a drinking problem!)

Musa

A quick note to any regular readers: Sorry about my no-show yesterday.  I took a snow day.  Second, wow!: this is a snowy season.  All the more reason we should wish we were all on a tropical island right now.  Eating bananas. 

So, with banana daiquiris and sandy beaches on the mind, today's post is on the banana, or Musa.  Now, I won't dare assign a species name to this plant.  Most bananas (or plantains) are derivative from M. acuminata or M. balbisiana.  So much so that cultivar names are as specific as one can hope to be when deriving the nomenclature of a banana. 

The genus is fascinating, however.  Though it can get quite tall, it is not a tree.  Instead, Musa is always a herbaceous stalk.  More specifically, the "trunk" of banana trees is actually a set of fused petioles, or a pseudostem.  It's also considered by many to be an annual -- after flowering the stalk will die and a new stalk (or pseudostem) grows in its place. 

The leaves are, obviously, enormous.  When I was a kid in Malaysia, I remember we would go to a restaurant where, in lieu of plates, our food was served on the thick, leathery banana leaves that were abundant in the region.  (In fact, Musa is best suspected to be native to Southeast Asia, though with most tropical plants, tracing back its ancestry is difficult.)

 

Portea

Last week, at Longwood Gardens, I saw the bromeliad below, which is called Portea and is native to Brazil. 

It reminded me of a plant I had seen at the Philadelphia Flower Show last year and when I got home to my computer, I checked the NYPAOS archives.  Turns out I was thinking of Aechmea. 

The similarities are great -- they are both in the Bromeliadaceae family, which means they are closely related to pineapples, and they both have hard, serrated leaves.  Aechmeas are more popular -- most people have seen the 'Silver Vase' Aechmea before - but Porteas are equally prolific in their native habitat on the east coast of Brazil.

Protea

A long, long time ago (well, almost three years ago) I posted some pics of hothouse flowers from a Parisian shop.  One of the shots was of Protea nerifolia, or protea. 

Here's a few thriving in the Longwood Garden conservatory:

This was in their Mediterranean collection, which is a greenhouse kept at lower temperatures than tropical stock and in a drier environment.  Mediterranean plants must be the toughest to house in a conservatory; they demand lots of sunlight and very little moisture.  And even then, this specimen looks like it's struggling a wee bit.

 

The species name, nerifolia of course refers to the leaves' similarity to the foliage on Nerium or oleander.