Ceropegia kamon

 

 

I have always liked the kamon, Japanese clan emblems. Particularly the flowery ones. Very nice examples of graphic design. For a long time I have had a hankering to make one with a ceropegia flower. I finally got round to it yesterday. I am not an artist, I think of this as computer collage. The finer details I often do pixel by pixel until it looks right. Based on a photo of a Ceropegia bulbosa flower.

 

 

 The original photo that I took in May 2022. I virtually shaved the hairs off to make it simpler.

 

I haven't added anything to this blog for a while, I really should look through all the photos I have been taking and see if there is anything worth putting up.

Kewa flowers

 

My little Kewa salsoloides plants have been flowering continuously for months. Very pretty, pale pink and with a sweet floral fragrance. That is as near as I can pin it down, it evokes memories of other fragrances but I can't say which ones exactly. Perhaps the candied notes of Night Phlox (Zaluzianskaya capensis) flowers but not so much the sugared almonds of which the Night Phlox remind me. More flowers keep developing, providing a constant display.

Parakaryon myojinense - unique wonder or misleading mash-up?

An ultrathin section of "Parakaryon myojinensis".

Drawing based on Fig. 1 of the 2012 paper.¹ 

Artist: Ian Alexander for Wikipedia.

I have just added to the Wikipedia entry for Parakaryon myojinense. This name was given to a single specimen found on a polychaete worm from a hydrothermal vent on an underwater volcano south of Japan. The discoverers claimed it was a new domain of life, neither prokaryote nor eukaryote. No other specimen has ever been discovered.

I added some extra bits to the Wikipedia article that I thought could give readers a clue to the probable overenthusiasm that inspired the claim that this is a new form of life. Unfortunately, no microbiologists seem to have commented on the find, other than the team who discovered it. A pop biochemist called Nick Lane got very enthusiastic about it. Otherwise, there is a strange lack of any comment on the internet, positive or negative.

I had to stop myself commenting further as Wikipedia does not allow opinions unless they are properly citable and I am certainly not a microbiologist. I had to get my comments down somewhere. Who knows, someone might find this little rant if they do a search. This specimen just doesn't seem to live up to the interpretation that the authors proposed. Most of what I have written is off the top of my head, not as polished as my usual long articles.  

Wall Weeds

I have been doing a very interesting free foraging course run by Lad from the Boiler House. This is my homework. All of these photos were taken on 19/10/23, except the chicory flower.

I thought I would go on a 15 minute walk from home and see how many edible plants grew by the pavement. At least, they would be edible if we had not used lead in petrol for so many decades and paved our roads and pavements with asphalt.

 

UPDATE (1/8/2024): The Natural History Museum has just published a guide called Pavement Plants: A guide to plants frequently growing on pavements in the UK. As well as paying for a physical copy, it is available for free to download at this link.

The first plant I saw was a garden escape, an exotic Adria bellflower with the ridiculous botanical name of  Campanula portenschlagiana. Many of the Campanula species have edible leaves, though some are more chewy than others. Some have edible tuberous roots. Native species include bellflowers, harebells and rampion.

 

 

On the Origin of the Manchester and Salford Bee: New Edit

 

Cotton flower in a Manchester mini-greenhouse with a Manchester hoverfly. 

I tried to get a photo with a bee but the cotton was late flowering and 

there were no bees around on the few sunny days that a flower was open.

 

This article arose from annoyance that so many reports about the Manchester Bee just stated that "it represents Industry". I knew that there must be more to the story. I was not prepared for how much more there was and how carried away I got while researching the history of symbolic bees in Manchester and Salford. 

I wrote most of this article 6 years ago. I have finally got around to editing it properly over the last couple of months. I have reorganised the sections so that it makes a more readable progression, hopefully. I have also added a few new things, not just the photo of the cotton flower that opened this week.

The Manchester and Salford Bees appear to have been chosen as symbols by those Councils out of respect for the reforming Prime Minister Robert Peel, whose coat of arms included a Bee. Peel had helped carry through the changes in local democracy that allowed the Manchester and Salford councils to be set up. He also changed the tax system to remove a huge burden on the poor against the wishes of his Party, almost destroyed the Tory Party and sacrificed his political career. By that act he changed Britain into a fairer and more inclusive country, relative to the horror show it had been before. The Manchester and Salford councils had both been ardent supporters of those law reforms and celebrated Peel's success. Peel and the cotton kings who formed Manchester Council were all representatives of reforming, non-conforming Industry, opposed to the oppressive landowners of the Establishment. 

The Manchester Council motto may also have come from a 17th century bee-keeping manual.

I also put together some appendices on the local history of other bees in Manchester and Salford.

This article is dedicated to those who lost their lives or were wounded by the bombing at the Manchester Arena on the 22nd of May 2017 and all those killed or scarred by all the wars and atrocities throughout human history. 

We all just get one short life and to decide to destroy that life is an unspeakable treachery against humanity.

My version of the "terrestrial globe, semée of bees volant".
Midsummer Manchester unusually hidden by clouds.
Thanks NASA

 

 

↓ An excessive amount of reading follows the jump break, with quite a few nice illustrations.

Canal Towpath Orchids

 

On May 31st this year, I visited the Bridgewater Canal by Stretford Mall to check out the orchids. Yesterday afternoon (August 11th), I visited again to see whether the fruit were ripe. As you can see from the second picture above, they were. The Council stopped mowing them sometime in the last thirty years, so they can seed themselves. They have spread to produce a really healthy population and a beautiful show in May/June.

Cotton buds

 

I've just noticed that I have got buds on two of my cotton plants. The plants are not terribly happy, I think I have not been feeding them enough. I was hoping they wouldn't get too big for the miniature greenhouse. The weather has also been pretty grim. However, I am very excited that I might get a flower or two. 

This variety is GreenCot from Cotton Acres. and produces naturally coloured olive-green cotton. This is what the seeds looked like when they arrived.

I found out that you don't have to shave the seeds to get them to germinate. In fact, it seemed to stop them germinating. All of the seeds sprouted that I just shoved into pumice as they were.

 

 

Gagaimo

 

I only have one individual of this plant, now 2 years and 4 months old. Last year it produced just one fruit, despite the fruit coming in pairs. This year it has had eleven fruit already and is still flowering.

 

Common Milkweed fruit

 

I had a bumper crop of Asclepias syriaca fruit last year. Compared to the one fruit I have had in the previous eight years, any crop is surprising. I now wish I had spent some time photographing the insects on the flowers last year, as I have done before. I have no idea what insect did the pollinating.

Stephanotis updates

I have added some updates to my original article on Stephanotis floribunda (warning: Too Much Information, now over 19,000 words). The pictures are from the first re-flowering of my Stephanotis since I got it.

Most of the updates come from this Open Access article that expands the genus Stephanotis. Previously Stephanotis was only found on the island of  Madagascar. Some of the new species now included in Stephanotis are found across Africa and Asia. Some of the authors are recognised internationally as the experts on the family Apocynaceae.

Liede-Schumann, S, Reuss, SJ, Meve, U, Gâteblé, G, Livshultz, T, Forster, PI, Wanntorp, L & Rodda, M (2022), "Phylogeny of Marsdenieae (Apocynaceae, Asclepiadoideae) based on chloroplast and nuclear loci, with a conspectus of the genera" Taxon (2022) 71(4): 833-875     https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12713    Accessed 6/10/2022

Apteranthes (Caralluma) tuberculata type specimen

 

Apteranthes (Caralluma) tuberculata

Herbarium sheet from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew¹ 

UPDATE: 16/9/2024

David Goyder of Kew Gardens (specialist in Angola, Madagascar and the Apocynaceae) has kindly looked into this for me. It seems the Kew Herbarium specimen is a combination of the specimens from Fleming and Stocks. The top row seem to be from Stocks. As the flowering specimen and "SEE SPIRIT COLLECTION" envelope are clearly from Stocks, the type specimen is Stocks 596. The catalogue should now reflect that Fleming's specimens are also on this sheet. I haven't altered the article below yet.

*************************************************************************************

The herbarium sheet above is the holotype specimen that was used to define the species Caralluma tuberculata when that species was first described by the Kew Gardens botanist Nicholas Edward Brown in 1892.² The plant was renamed Apteranthes tuberculata in 2002 but this herbarium specimen still decides what plants are included in that species. If a plant is too different from this herbarium specimen it must be a different species.

When I saw this specimen I realised I had seen the handwriting before and it did not look like the handwriting or style of label used by the plant collector it was supposed to be. The collection was credited to Dr John Ellerton Stocks and given the collection number 596.¹ 

I believe it should be credited to Dr Andrew Fleming, a less well-known collector who also worked for the English East India Company in what is now Pakistan. He collected far fewer plant samples than Stocks but his main job at the time he collected this plant was a geological survey.

When referenced in botanical articles, a herbarium sheet is called by the name of the collector and the collection number. NE Brown referred to the Kew Herbarium specimen as Stocks 596, so it must have been misfiled at some time before 1892. This one should be called Fleming 78. I believe I have some convincing proof.

Ceropegia bulbosa

I first read about Ceropegia bulbosa over 30 years ago and have finally got to eat the tuber. Of course, I could have visited India and found it there but I am too fussy for travelling long distances. The tuber becomes bitter soon after harvest and, as far as I know, it is not generally exported as a vegetable. So, I grew it from seed. 

Alpinia formosana

 

This plant was sold to me as Alpinia formosana and I have no reason to doubt that. The usual common name is "pinstripe ginger" because it has very smart thin pale stripes on the leaves. It is a member of the same plant family as ginger, the Zingiberaceae. It is in the same genus as the galangal, another spicy root used in a lot of east Asian cooking. This species does not appear to be used in cooking, though it does have slightly smelly tubers that, like ginger and galangal, run parallel to the surface of the soil. The leaves smell very nice if crushed, a woody, resiny fragrance that is not quite like any others I have smelt.

Hoodia hybrid

I have been growing this plant since I received it in October 2020 under the name Trichocaulon flavum. That is an old name, that plant is now usually called Hoodia flava. It flowered last week and I now know that it is definitely not Hoodia flava. It appears to be a hybrid between two species of Hoodia.

Huernia hystrix

 

The photo above was taken last Saturday, the first of January 2022. I am immensely pleased that it flowered so soon.

A Citation

 

Ceropegia bulbosa, with edible leaves and tubers

much sought after in India. My photo from September.

I was looking up some descriptions of new species of Ceropegia on Friday night. I found one on Researchgate from 2015 for a species called Ceropegia terebriformis. The specific name terebriformis means "drill shaped" and refers to the tightly spiralled top of the corolla looking like a modern drill bit. It was only found once. The living plants they had collected grew very well for a while but all died. No uses were recorded.

The origin of the name Caralluma

Stapelia adscendens, from Plants of the Coast of Coromandel ¹ 

Picture file from the BHL Pro Flickr albums.

What is the origin of the name of the genus Caralluma? In short, we don't know. That will not stop me writing about it.

First, I will quote from Wikipedia. I wrote this part of the entry, so I think that it is allowable.

In 1795 William Roxburgh published the name Stapelia adscendens for a plant found in India. He commented that the name for the plant in the Telugu language was Car-allum and that the succulent branches are edible raw, though bitter and salty.¹ The name Caralluma was coined by Robert Brown for a new genus in an article published in 1811. At the time he only described one species in the genus, the plant that he renamed Caralluma adscendens.²

In 1996 Helmut Genaust published the suggestion that it was sensible to conclude that the generic name is derived from the Arabic phrase qahr al-luhum, meaning "wound in the flesh" or "abscess," referring to the floral odour. Genaust was unaware that the genus Caralluma existed east of Palestine. He specifically ruled out its existence in India, where it was first described and named. Genaust presumed that the name would have first been applied to Caralluma europaea in North Africa.³

So, it is clear that the name is from the Telugu language from southern India, but what does it mean? Neither Roxburgh nor Brown seem to have recorded that and did not give the spelling in Telugu script.

The origin of the name Ceropegia

Linnaeus named⁹ the genus Ceropegia in 1737 in his Genera plantarum.  Linnaeus referred to the description and picture of a plant in the Horti Malabarici as the plant for which the genus was created. In 1753 he named this as Ceropegia candelabrum.

Downloaded¹³ from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Open in a new tab to enlarge.

Above we have the iconotype of the Indian plant that Linnaeus named as Ceropegia candelabrum in 1753, as depicted¹³ in the Horti Malabarici of Henricum Rhede (or Reede) tot Drakestein published in 1689. The candelabrum bit gives it away when you see the way the flowers are arranged. Of course, some of you born after the invention of electric light may not have seen any candelabra or chandeliers.

There have been two possible explanations of the origin of the word Ceropegia. Linnaeus never explained it, as far as I know. 

Little fluffy flowers

I received this Hoya carnosa from Italy last September as a stunted succulent with a little bundle of roots that fitted with plenty of room to spare in a 7.5 cm (3 inch) pot. A bargain for €3. It has obviously appreciated being watered and fed a lot more with high humidity and a constant temperature of 23-26°C. It now has one metre of vine with several branches. These first flowers opened yesterday.

New Duck

I found a much larger original photograph of the Star Carr pendant. I decided that I wanted to make a new version of the coloured one I made in 2018 to show why I think this piece of jewelry from 11,000 years ago represents a duck. So I spent this evening colouring and modifying it to make the 19 megapixel image previewed above. I don't know why most of the images of this pendant have it upside-down.

It really is worth right-clicking on the image and opening in a new tab to get the full image. I like that it is a bit glossier, like a real duck.