Elaeagnus pungens

Last week, I gave my students a tour of Dumbarton Oaks, so we could catch the last of autumn color and see what was otherwise notable in the gardens. We were passing the shrub below with little interest until we were almost knocked over by the fragrance.

The fragrance was a touch more pungent than a gardenia, and incredibly strong.  I recognized the smell right away as an Elaeagnus.  This particular species is appropriately named Elaeagnus pungens. It's a large spreading evergreen shrub with rough scratchy green leaves and brown stems (the stems are worth noting since - as you can see in the above pic - it does muddy up the overall color of the plant).  The undersides of the leaves are silver with the occasional brown scale.

This time of year the plant is teeming with small tubular white flowers - the source of the fragrance.  The flowers are very easy to miss, were it not for their scent (and on an evolutionary angle, that makes sense - the fragrance is key in drawing in pollinators when the flowers are relatively unremarkable).

In April, cherry like drupes occur on the plant in modest quantities - they are easy to miss, though the birds usually find them.  Native to Japan, this plant is not as invasive as its cousins, E. umellata and E. angustifolia.

Peach Watch '11 Concludes

A few weeks ago, I posted about the peaches I'd been watching since March.  At the time, they still needed a few more weeks to ripen.  Yesterday, I drove by the farm (in southern New Jersey) and they looks ripe for picking!

In fact, the farmer's market down the street had tons of them, and they were perfection!

Peach Watch Continues...

Back in late March, I took some photos of a peach orchard in southern New Jersey and decided to watch the orchard over the next few months, culminating in a harvest of delicious peaches.  In early May, the tiny baby peaches were evident.

Yesterday, I drove by the orchard again, and took a few pics.  At first glance, I was worried the somewhat larger peaches I saw in late May had been harvested, but no worries. 

 

They are ripening steadily, increasing in size and even developing a peachy color.  

 

Peach Update

In late March, I posted on Prunus persica or the peach tree as I began watching the orchard I pass on my way to the beach develop fruit.  By early May, the peaches had begun to form, though they were very small. 

This weekend I passed the plants again and the peaches have been developing steadily. 

It's fun to track a specific plant in "real time" and truly appreciate what goes into getting a simple piece of fruit.  More so, you can appreciate the financial risks involved for the farmers.

Baby Peaches

A little over a month ago, I posted about the peach tree, Prunus persica.   I had prepared to take photos of the trees in flower and then of the fruits themselves develop.

But alas, it's been a really busy spring and I missed the flowers!

Instead I can share these pics, taken yesterday, of small peach fruits developing in the place of the spent flowers.  I'll try to catch them again as the fruits get larger.

Drunken Birds

A few weeks ago in class I related a story to my students regarding the berries of Cornus florida.  After the first frost (or soon after) the juices in the berries of the tree ferment.  The birds then flock to the tree and eat them, consequently getting a bit drunk and falling out of the tree.  I've seen this happen at my folks' place on the occasional lazy Sunday when I was growing up and it's pretty remarkable. 

After class, one of my students asked me where I had heard documentation of this phenomena (a fair question!) I remember hearing something, perhaps on All Things Considered about the dogwood specifically, but I went looking on line. And while I didn't find much specific to Cornus, there is no shortage of reports of birds getting drunk on fermented Hawthorne, Photinia and other plants.

It seems the cedar waxwing has the most tendencies to enjoy a tipple. In 2005, USA Today reported that in Columbia, SC, dozens of the birds died by accidentally flying into glass buildings after eating fermented holly berries.  The same species was reported drunk and disorderly in Memphis in 2009, as indicated in an AP report.  And, just this past winter, in Romania, dozens of dead starlings were found in town.  They were autopsied and it was determined they got drunk on grape 'marc' which is a leftover pulp in the winemaking process.

Of course all this talk about bird death brings to mind the blackbirds that had been found dead in shocking numbers in Arkansas.  According to Science News, they died of blunt force.  Some speculation exists that a noise disrupted and scared them after dark.  They are not good nighttime navigators and thus may have crashed into buildings, trees or each other and then died.

As for the partying I saw on my parents' dogwood, fortunately the tree was quite small so the birds weren't injured when they fell off the branches. 

Prunus persica

My family has been going to the Ocean City, New Jersey for the beach since I was a little kid, living in South Jersey myself.  My mother's family has been going to this town since the 1950's so it has a pretty dear place in our hearts.  Given my own childhood of moving every three years, I'm especially fond of it, since I have memories of being there when I was three years old up until now, when I'm ___ years old!

Whenever we make the drive from the DC area, we pass through a lot of farmland, on Route 40, between the shore itself and the Delaware River Memorial Bridge.  It's beautiful country and always reminds me more of the midwest than a place that's geographically a few hours' drive from DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Most times, I'm making the drive by myself and feel too rushed to stop and snap pictures, but my mom and I were in the car together this last time and we began "Peachtree watch, Spring 11."  Or something.

This orchard is just budding up and I'll post pictures of the trees' progress in the weeks to come.  Even in winter it's beautiful.  The silver hue of the old bark sparkles in a gray winter January landscape and the new growth is, well, peachy colored.

The genus itself, Prunus should sound familiar.  Just last Sunday I posted on a far more recognizable species of Prunus - the cherry tree.  Also known as Prunus x. yedoensis, Prunus serrulata, etc.

Indeed, cherries are more popular for ornamental purposes whereas peaches are mainly grown for producing fruit.  The species name, persica literally means "peach" in Latin.  It was believed the plant was from Persia (Iran) but now we know that it is originally native to China but its origin became confused on its trip to Europe via the Silk Road.

Now then, as a former resident of Athens, Georgia, I will not contest the quality of Georgia or South Carolina peaches.  I get it.  But Jersey peaches are damn good.  And of course ecologically, who doesn't want to buy local?  The geology of the region lends itself to good produce (ergo the "Garden State") - low flat land with sandy soil and a high water table (typical for the Atlantic Coastal Plain) makes for good farming.  

In fact, my family loves Jersey produce so much, we play a terrible game.  Go to the farmer's stand and pick one thing.  What do you get?  For me, it's an easy game until I get down to the final three: tomatoes, blueberries and peaches.  All delicious.   

 

Though peaches do make the best pies. 

Pygmy Date Palm

My aunt (of the "Norwegian Maple") has been in Florida this week and has been sending me pics on her iPhone.  It's been fun to identify the plants, or if they are unfamiliar, to look them up.  I'll be posting most of them next week, wrapping up the last of these escapist, tropical themes before we move head-on into spring. 

I was delighted with the photo she sent me above, as it's a nicer pic of Phoenix roebelenii than any of my own.  The genus name should sound familiar since I blogged about its cousin, Pheonix dactylifera, just last week.   

Here's a shot of a pygmy date palm, growing in a lackluster spot in Jean Nouvel's Parc del Centre de Poublenou.  Pygmy dates, as the common name suggests, is a smaller version of the regular date palm.  It's often used in containers or in small areas.  It demands a regular supply of water but can handle both full sun and partial shade. You can eat the dates on this species, but they aren't as fleshy or sweet as the regular date palm.

 Those of you New Yorkers may remember the June we had two years ago where it rained 25 days of the month.  I had a desperate rant about it on NYPAOS and posted this photo of a rooftop bar.  At the time, I was focusing more on this band of people, happily drinking a magnum of champagne, ignoring the deluge.  I had failed to point out the Phoenix roebelenii.

Carica papaya

Perhaps one of my favorite fruits is the papaya.  One of the things I miss about New York is the ability to pick up a container of cut papaya at any bodega.  It's not quite as thrilling as having access to all that fresh pineapple in Hawaii (as I recently blogged about), but it's good nonetheless.   

The specimens above are growing in a food garden at the Honolulu Zoo.  You can see that the stalk is self-cleaning, dropping its large, lobed leaves as the plant grows upward.  The fruit are cauliflory, which means they grow directly attached the stem.  Papayas when unripe, like the ones above, are often used in cooking, particularly in Thai cuisine (though the plant is native to Mexico).  When ripe, the fruits turn yellow and have a deeply sweet (cloyingly so, to some) flavor.

Date Palm

Yesterday, I posted about Datura with some hesitation.  Not because the plant is not worthy of a post, but because it's a summer annual and here we are in the middle of February.  I try to keep this post relevant to the seasons, but this is a tough time of year to find much inspiration outdoors (though now that some of our snow has melted, I have spied some daffodil foliage!).  I'll keep looking for remarkable flora for February, but for the rest of this week, we're going to focus on palms.

Above, Phoenix dactylifera is growing in a Versailles box at Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.  Date palms are easy to spot, as they almost look like a Chrysanthemum firework that is slowly drifting back to earth.  The leaves (or fronds) are long and pinnate, with leaflets reaching up to 14".

The shots above and below are at Park Guell in Barcelona.  The texture of date palms are so fine - almost furry looking -- it's hard to miss them.  Date palms have been cultivated since at least 6000 BC and they are thought to be native to the middle east.  Though it's hard to know for sure since they are now found in any tropical or Mediterranean climate.

The plants are dioecious, which means there are males and females.  Obviously, only the females have the wonderful edible dates.  I must have had dates on the brain this week, since just yesterday I had a terrific salad -- arugula, dates, ricotta salata and walnuts.  Delicious.

 

Above, date palms in Oahu, Hawaii. As you can see the crown or head of the palm works its way up, leaving dying and dessicated leaves further down the trunk.  Often these are removed manually as part of the tree's maintenance.

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.)

 

Skimmia reevesiana

Most people probably see the name Skimmia and think of Skimmia japonica, the more popular landscape shrub in this genus.  It's certainly the plant I thought I was encountering at Longwood Gardens on Monday. 

 

Instead, the tag handily tells me this is Reeve's skimmia or S. reevesiana.  This species is shorter; S. japonica can, at rare times, reach 6' high, whereas this species is always shorter than 2'.  It's also bisexual, which means that one plant will flower and fruit (S. japonica is dioecious, which means you need around at least one male for every six females).

 

Above, you can see the flower buds are set - they will bloom between March and April - and fruit from last year's blossoms. The foliage is a darkish green, though far lighter than the leaves of other broadleaf evergreens like holly or rhododendron.  

The pith of the Skimmia stem has a tangy fragrance to it, and indeed most plants in the Rutaceae family have strong scents - this is the family that includes the Citrus genus.  Which means the plant you are looking at in this post is a distant relative to oranges, lemons, limes and other citrus fruits. 

More Ilex verticillata, who can resist?

Some of you may be tiring of Ilex verticillata, but not me.  Here's a shot as we passed Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, time didn't allow for a quick visit, but perhaps someday soon I'll get back there and take some more photos (the only photos I have are, shamefully, on film. I don't have any digital shots!).

Symphoricarpus orbiculatus

I stumbled across this plant last November and was dually stymied and excited to be confronted with another plant mystery.   I don't mean that to come across the wrong way - I, by no means, am capable of identifying every plant in the world.  But I do know most of the plants that are popular in the landscape trade.  This one was a mystery.

 

I don't know what I'd do if I were in this profession forty years ago -- I'd have spent hours going through plant books, hoping to stumble across a drawing that was close to what I was looking at.  I still do that now, of course, as evidenced by this week's gift list.  But the internet and google do make plant detective work that much easier.  I simply searched the terms: pink berries clusters opposite leaved shrub.  And by the fourth page of results (after many photos of the wonderful Callicarpa) I found Symphoricarpos orbiculatus, or coralberry or Indian currant.

Now, granted, I'm not 100% certain this is the same shrub, but I'm 98%.  As you can see the fruits were fattening up in November.  By now they should be fully formed.  Coralberry is a loose, sprawling shrub and is in the Caprifoliaceae or honeysuckle family.  This plant was rambling along a path and looked very much like it could be related to Lonicera.  Anyone recognize it and would like to agree or contest?

Symphoricarpos orbiculatus shares a genus with S. albus or snowberry.  This plant is a smaller, lower growing shrub with (as the common name suggests) white fruit.  Since the fruit is showy, it makes sense that (like Callicarpa) "carpos" is in the genus name, since that means body or fruit.  Symph- is derivative of the Greek word that means "in agreement or concord" (like a symphony playing together, or being sympathetic to a friend) and essentially the genus means "fruit borne together."

Ilex verticillata

I was at the University of Maryland on Friday, participating in the final studio review at the Architecture School.  Approaching the building, I was reminded of how much I like Ilex verticillata or winterberry holly.  

 

One could say that it's appropriate enough that these shrubs (which look lovely when they sprawl through large spaces) are trimmed and hedged in a very architectural manner.   They are, after all, outside of the Architecture School's building.

 

I blogged about Ilex verticillata last year, when I saw one specimen growing in the High Line (come to think about it, there had to be a male there somewhere).  

I was desperate to use these this autumn when I renovated my folks' place in Virginia.  As beautiful as it is, it's sadly quite tasty to deer as well.  Instead, I opted for Aronia arbutifolia.

Ficus carica

As excited as I was to find the quince tree in Dumbarton Oaks last November, I was equally delighted to find fig trees (Ficus carica) lining the walled vegetable garden.  Figs have been a favorite of mine and my family's for generations. My Italian grandmother (who is 100 years old) loves nothing more than a perfectly ripe fig in the late summer.

Figs are easy to recognize, due to their straggly habit and large, deeply lobed leaves. If you were unsure that you truly were looking at a fig (or at least a member of the Ficus genus) you could simply snap off a leaf and wait for the milky, latex-like sap to appear.  

Of course, if there are fig fruits actually on the tree, like the one below, you probably don't need to hesitate in your identification.  But, calling this "fruit" is inaccurate.  The thing that we usually consider a fig is technically a flower.  The flower is blooming - and the fruit subsequently sets - inside the pod you see below.  Your next question, I'm sure, is how does the flower get pollinated if it's fully covered?  Ficus carica has a special relationship with the fig wasp, which burrows into the small hole at the center of the fig (technically called an ostiole) to pollinate the flower.

Figs have been popular for millennia. Fossil records dating back to 9000 BC indicate the fig was cultivated in the Jordon Valley long before wheat or barley - or even legumes, were grown for agriculture.  The plant grows best in Mediterranean climates but can survive in areas as cold as Hungary, so long as the summers are hot.

The 'fruit' are high in fiber and calcium, as well as many other nutrients, and are high in antioxidants too.  When they are fresh they don't travel well, so for large-scale agricultural purposes, they are often dried.

Inside the library at the garden, an exhibit of botanical art was on display and sure enough, Ficus carica was featured in the title art.  In addition to the plant's rich history of agricultural and commercial use (fig newtons, anyone?), it's featured repeatedly in the bible and in early Greek literature.