Made in the shade: Limodorum abortivum (Violet limodore)

You wouldn’t want your son to go out with this Violet. Dresses in black or sickly purple. Spends all the time in the dark, underground or in shady places. Smells of mould.  Reputed to be a parasite. Usually has sex with itself.

But first, there’s no danger my son, or anyone else’s, will go out with a plant. And second, Limodorum abortivum is a simply stunning orchid.

Limodorum abortivum

I wrote a couple of posts ago  (here) that most orchids have developed close relationships with fungi, and have special zones on their roots called mycorrhizae to exchange water and minerals for carbohydrates. Limodorum abortivum has taken this already rather sci-fi relationship to a futuristic extreme.

It has a network of underground shoots (rhizomes) as well as roots, which are in association with a fungal network (family Russulaceae), and also with the roots of trees such as oak, beech or chestnut. Thanks to the fungus, it can live on decaying organic matter such as leaf humus, and may also be partly parasitic on the tree roots. Seedlings develop very slowly, spending up to ten years underground, and the plant can even flower, pollinate itself, fruit, seed and germinate, all below the surface. It has dispensed with the need for chlorophyll or photosynthetic pigments and indeed with leaves and photosynthesis – the name abortivum comes from the stunted ‘leaves’ which clasp the shoot.

Flowering shoot of Limodorum abortivum – note small leaf-scales clasping stem

 

What shoot? Ah – every few years, more often in damp years, less often in dry ones – it sends up a tall purplish flowering shoot and produces stunning flowers. The only advantages of doing this may be occasional insect pollination and thus cross-fertilisation (without which variation and continued evolution would be difficult) and the physical dipsersal of seeds. So it may be the damp spring here this year which has brought forth this magnificent specimen. It’s native to Central Europe, and in France is pretty much confined to the south and west.

Map of Limodore distribution in France (from tela botanica)

 

Impressive, beautiful in a rather strange way, this is a plant which could haunt your dreams – discovering it certainly made me feel a bit  discomfited. It doesn’t do what you expect plants to do: come up  into the sunshine, wave about greenly and then produce pretty flowers.

It’s more like a cicada, which for most of its life cycle – between two and seventeen years, depending on the species –  exists underground as a nymph, living on tree root sap. They’re just about due to emerge here too.

If you thought the title meant you were going to get the Stones, you were mistaken.  I preferred this:

Coming up next: More orchids (I know, I’m spoiling you)

Birthday at the bank

1 – Iris

On this day one year ago I started this blog – and the year has simply flown by. How to mark a first birthday? Most of us at that age just gurgle a bit then go to sleep. Tempting though that is today after a good lunch, I’ll carry on with the post.

2 – Allium roseum – pink wild garlic

Over the year I’ve been fascinated by the trails which seem to open up behind each plant, trails marked out by language, history, science and imagination. I’d like to thank everyone who’s viewed the blog, and especially those who’ve been interested enough to subscribe as followers and/or leave comments.  The stats show that there have been to date nearly six thousand views (I’m writing the number this way to make it look bigger), or to put it another way, an average of almost a hundred people read each post.  I feel very happy to have the chance to share my enthusiasm with that many people.

3 – Galactites tomentosa

To mark the day and show my gratitude to followers and commenters I’d like to offer a couple of giveaways: first, I’ll send to all of you a list of plants featured in the first year, with Latin, English and French names, and dates when they were photographed and blogged. You can find this by going to the blog page and using ‘Search’ or by clicking on the list of categories, but I know I sometimes prefer to have info in print. Just delete the email headed ‘Plant list’ if you don’t want it.

4 – Euphorbia characias – large Mediterranean spurge

Second, the photos in this post are recent ones which haven’t made it to the blog. So this is a sort of exclusive offer: if you’d like a fairly large copy of any one of these photo files to print or use as a desktop background on your computer, tell me which one you’d like in a comment and I’ll send it to you. The full size photos are about 10 Mb which won’t go by email, but if you have or want Dropbox installed, I can send the full file that way.  Of course if you happen to want another image that has appeared during the year I could send that as an alternative.

I hope you like the new masthead picture – taken a few days ago on a bank on the road out of my village. You should be able to spot: Cistus albidus, Cistus monspeliensis, Euphorbia serrata, Galactites tomentosa, Tragopogon porrifolius, Thymus vulgaris, and Spartium junceum. Some have been on the blog, others will be soon.

Thanks again for keeping me company during the last year, and here’s the inevitable song as a masterclass in improvisation:

 

Malta Wild Plants: signs of growth?

When I started this blog last May, one of the sites I had been inspired by was Maltawildplants.com – I give details in the Resources section.  This site had then been online for ten years, the labour of love of a passionate Maltese botanist who had recorded details of around 1,000 species on the island, illustrated with some 11,000 stunning, high quality photos. For anyone who was interested in plants, it was a veritable treasure trove.

Then in July 2012 Matawildplants went offline. Though the site had over 30,000 visitors a month the man who ran the site had run out of sponsors, time and funds.  I contacted to ask what support bloggers like me could offer, and here is part of his reply I recently received:

Thank you for your email and encouragement. I am trying to save the website and seeking for financial sponsors or advertisement. I have the pleasure to inform you that I already found one and seeking for few others. I am asking sponsors for 500Eur and adverts for 120Eur a year. If you know someone who might be interested, please pass on the word.

 

So please help if you can, including spreading this message through your own contacts.  You can contact the site at info@maltawildplants.com.

Coming up soon: Being a plant: it’s a lifestyle choice.

 

Across nature’s borderlines

I’d like to share with you the best book on plants I’ve bought this year: Weeds, by Richard Mabey, published in 2010 by Profile Books (HarperCollins).  OK, it’s not exactly hot off the press, but it’s so good I had to write about it.

It’s hard to know where to begin with the superlatives: Mabey is one of the best writers in the world on natural history, sharp-eyed and with a gift for adjectives and images that go instantly to head and  heart. His aim is to change our view of nature, and especially to show that those neglected or despised parts of it hold hope for our future. ‘Many of them’, he writes of these plants, ’may be holding the bruised parts of the planet from falling apart.’ He makes us rethink many of our values, especially towards outsiders and outlaws.

Richard Mabey

Watch him speaking at a recent writers’ event here.

This book also shows his breadth of cultural reference, with insightful forays into art (for example, Dürer’s Large piece of turf ,  and burdock in the work of Lorrain,

Durer’s ‘Large piece of turf”

Stubbs and others), poetry (especially John Clare), Shakespeare, and fiction , including a long analysis of Rose Macaulay’s oddly unsettling 1950 novel The World my Wilderness. Encouraged by Mabey, I found the novel on CL’s shelf of course, and read it: it’s an intriguing dissection of the state of immediate post-war  Britain and France – it’s set partly in Collioure.  Chiming with Mabey’s view of weeds as the supreme chancers, the ‘spivs of the vegetable world’, Macaulay holds a fine ambivalence towards weeds and wildness, both human and botanical, in the undergrowth of the bombsites of London.  It features more named plant species than any other novel I’ve read.

Mabey views weeds not just as ‘plants out of place’, that is, not wanted in spaces cultivated by humans, nor  even in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s more positive view  as plants ‘whose virtues have not yet been discovered’, but as our ‘familiars’: plants whose history is inescapably linked to our own. They gave us our first vegetables, our first medicines, and our first dyes. If weeds had been eliminated when agriculture began, the dry soils of the Middle East would have simply blown away: goodbye farming and human civilisation. He argues for a ‘rapprochement with weeds…our most successful cultivated crop’.

I started looking for quotes and began to note so many just from the first chapter that I decided to tell you to read it for yourselves: you can get a taste here.

I have a couple of minor caveats: the pencil sketches don’t very well illustrate the text, and I often wished for colour photographs.  These would, of course, have made the book much more expensive. Secondly the flora referred to is mostly British, but the wider issues are just as applicable to the Mediterranean.

Splendid weeds at the edge of a vineyard – photo taken yesterday (31st March)

Weeds on our borders: in ten metres along the vineyard above I saw: fumitory, coltsfoot, false rocket, grape hyacinths, irises, mallow, mallow-leafed crane’s bill, mercury, marigolds, henbit deadnettle, chickweed, sun spurge,thistle and groundsel..

And to illustrate the range of Mabey’s  cultural sources, here’s a song he mentions, ‘Polk salad Annie’ – this version the funky original, recorded in Muscle Shoals in 1969 by the man who wrote it, Tony Joe White. Polk, or poke (Phytolacca americana) is an edible weed growing in the southern states of America, and by coincidence I recently came across it in another novel I’d recommend: Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven. In both song and novel, collecting poke confers the stigma of the underclass, and shows how far we’ve come from what’s good for us.  There’s also a video for readers of this blog in the southern USA showing how to find and prepare poke – you HAVE to cook it.

Coming up soon: The social life of plants – they’re not just standing there, you know

Oral gratification: Lamium purpureum – red (or purple) deadnettle

Lamium purpureum – near

….nearer..

…nearest

Also known as purple archangel – though the name is usually used for the yellow-flowered  L. galeobdolon.  This powerful name came from the Latin archangelica, recorded as early as the 10th century, which also covered other Lamium species and was later applied to the plant now called Angelica, which everyone knows from the candied stalks. For the latter, it was said that an angel revealed its medicinal value against epidemic infectious diseases, but the origin of the other angelic names for deadnettles is lost in time – Grigson suggests that there may be a lost legend about an archangel relieving these plants of their sting in recognition of their healing properties.

Leaving supernatural revelations aside, we should still be truly grateful to the plants of the family to which deadnettles belong: the Lamiaceae, formerly Labiatae – both names because the flowers have upper and lower lips resembling a mouth. They’re a pleasure for the palate too, since they include many if not most of our aromatic herbs (thyme, oregano, marjoram, savory, mint, lavender, basil, lemon balm and sage), and many more of them can be used in salads, sauces or to make tisanes. The production of large quantities of aromatic oils is an adaptation which reduces water loss by evaporation, enabling these tender herbs to survive hot Mediterranean summers. Young leaves of red deadnettle can be used in a salad, especially for their colour I imagine, but their taste in cooking is apparently nothing to write home about.

I’ll come back later to the more aromatic plants in this family. I’ll just mention that they’re even more valuable to insects: red deadnettle can flower all winter in a mild climate – I took the pictures above last week –  and so it’s a useful source of both pollen and nectar for bees when there’s not much else available.

I’ve just found a stunning video which really relates to my last post and the orchid Anacamptis pyramidalis. I found it on the ARKive site – worth a look for wildlife videos, especially for schools. The film shows exactly what Darwin was writing about, as the moth collects nectar and can’t avoid getting pollen sacs glued to its proboscis, and then takes them to fertilise another flower.  More oral gratification for the moth – but I wonder how it gets the pollen sacs off again – must be worse than a bit of sellotape on your fingers. You can find the video by clicking here.

What else could I play now but ‘Lucky lips’, by Ruth Brown, from 1957.  Her energy and bounce were incredible, and she sold so many records for Atlantic that it became known as ‘the house that Ruth built’. If you watch her lips closely on the video, you’ll see that she’s singing another song, but hey, what do you want for free entertainment ?

Light and dark: Mirabilis jalapa – Belle de nuit

 

My neighbour and I were very happy to discover this plant growing at the foot of the wall of the garage that we share, and since then we’ve been looking after it tenderly. It’s an unusual flower coloration for our village – almost all others are red or yellow, and you can have both on the same plant.   It seems to love cracks at the edges of roads or pavements, growing up fast in mid to late summer and in full bloom at the moment. The plants grow from tubers, like dahlias, and can also reseed, thus quickly becoming invasive once established. It’s a garden escapee, now naturalised.

One English name is the four o’clock flower, and the blooms do indeed open late in the afternoon -  earlier on grey days  –  and stay open all night to attract moths. The plant originates in Peru, and this nocturnal habit is an adaptation which is more common there or in Mexico (Jalapa is a Mexican town), where temperatures can be too hot for a flower in the daytime.

The plant has some significance to botany since it was studied by Carl Correns, who was one of the rediscoverers of Mendel’s genetic laws in 1900. Correns researched into the causes of the variegated leaves of some plants of M. jalapa and showed that the white mottling was a characteristic inherited from the seed (‘mother’) plant, rather than from the pollinating plant.  This was the first demonstration of cytoplasmic inheritance: the fact that all sexually reproducing organisms from pine trees to humans inherit DNA from both male and female parents, but can also inherit factors in the cell from the female line only.  In the case of plants, this inheritance includes the cellular organelles called chloroplasts containing the chlorophyll which turns sunlight into sugars, and gives all plants their green colour. The fact that some cells in leaves of M. jalapa lose their chloroplasts and their colour is due to such a cytoplasmic factor.

Light and dark. I’d like to play At the dark end of the street (1967), sung by James Carr (1942-2001). He was a powerful and moving soul singer, and this performance of a song written by Chips Moman and Dan Penn is his masterpiece – one of the few records I think of as perfect, unimprovable.  Unfortunately Carr seemed unable to cope with his success in the late 60s, and made few further records.   For the rest of his life he engaged in a long struggle with bipolar disorder.

Coming up next: a bunch of roses.

Appearances can be deceptive: Eryngium campestre (field eryngo)

 

So this is another thistle in the garrigue, right? Wrong. It’s not a member of the thistle family at all – they’re with daisies, cornflowers and chicory in the family Asteraceae (used to be called Compositae), and Eryngium is, like fennel,  in the family Apiaceae (used to be Umbelliferae).  One clue is in the repeated branching of the stem into umbels (stalks or rays branching off from one point), and  another is in the stamens, which are not fused together as in thistles, if you look closely.

 

One name for this in French is the ‘herbe aux cent têtes’, due to the umbels, another is  chardon roulant, rolling thistle, and the similar l’èrba rotla means the same in Occitan.  Why? Because although the plant is a perennial, the stem can break off when it dries and blow in the wind to scatter seeds elsewhere.  But normally, the hooked seeds are dispersed by furry animals – it relies on mammals to spread.  Another characteristic is its long root system of up to 5 metres, which, like its leathery and spiny leaves ,is an adaptation to dry conditions. The root is also often  parasitised by a fungus, Pleurotus eryngii, which produces edible mushrooms, or by the parasitic flower Orobanche.   So it’s not just a solitary thistle in the wilderness, but a whole ecosystem.

 

Pleurotus eryngii

It’s that kind of shift in view which characterises the work of one of my favourite writers on natural history, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). A New Yorker who became Professor of Geology and Zoology at Harvard, he is best known for his long series of monthly essays which appeared under the heading ‘This view of life’ in Natural  History magazine, and which he collected in many books. He wrote little on botany but his overall approach to the history of life on earth offers much to those seeking to understand plants, and to those who appreciate good  prose style.  At their best his essays are at the same time intricate and clear, profound and entertaining, personal and research-based.  In his collection Bully for Brontosaurus he distinguishes two sorts of nature writing: the Franciscan (after the saint) which produces a kind of nature poetry, and the Galilean which takes a ‘delight in nature’s intellectual problems’. He put himself firmly in the latter group.

 

Stephen Jay Gould

His relevance to botany? His consistent desire to understand how evolution works, rather than being satisfied with the formula ‘If it exists, it must be adaptive’. With the biologist  Richard Lewontin, he coined the term ‘spandrel’ in evolutionary theory, after the triangular gaps between arches he noticed in St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice: a feature which might have no function or evolutionary advantage, but might arise as a consequence of other structures (arches and a dome, in the case of St Mark’s).  Male nipples might be one example, existing only as a developmental relic of the necessary female equivalent, as he explained in his essay ‘Male nipples and clitoral ripples’. A botanical parallel might be some colours in flowers which are not visible to the insects the flowers attract (insects detect more ultraviolet than we do).

He appreciated just how plain weird many living things are, often resulting more from contingency or ‘happenstance’ than adaptation or design. Why else does the fern Ophioglossum reticulatum need 630 pairs of chromosomes (that’s right, 1,260 per cell)? As he explained in the essay ‘The ant and the plant’, some polyploidy or doubling of chromosomes can encourage variation, but in this fern the mechanism has gone beserk.

 

Ophioglossum reticulatum - Adder’s tongue fern

He realised that evolution was not a gradual process of accumulating small variations as Darwin had proposed, but sometimes ran very fast,  producing radical changes, while at other times there were long periods of stasis: the theory known as ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972). This remains a major explanatory hypothesis for animal evolution, though it may play a smaller, if still significant, part in the evolution of plants.  To illustrate his style, when objectors called his theory ‘evolution by jerks’, he replied that gradualism was ‘evolution by creeps’.

I also admire Gould for the breadth of his interests and for his awareness of the social context of science. He understood how religious beliefs had hindered the interpretation of fossils, for example, and this is a major theme of his fascinating book Wonderful Life. He was a committed campaigner against creationism and its attempted inroads into American education. He knew that science cannot be ‘value-free’ and his book The Mismeasure of Man is a passionate but also scientific explanation of why the concept of IQ testing is flawed and inherently racist. Does this apply to plants? Of course. Just as the word ‘intelligent’ can be a useful adjective, but can also parade as an objective phenomenon to be studied and measured scientifically, so too a plant can seem a biological organism to be described and understood as an individual, though it never exists on its own. To the farmer, Eryngium campestre is an invasive weed, to the mushroom hunter it’s just the food source for what he wants to collect, to an animal it’s an annoying burr, to the botanist a good example of a xerophyte adapted to dry conditions.  And plant, fungus, animal, climate and soil (maybe even botanist) are all developing together in an evolving ecosystem. In another example of putting genetics in context, Gould’s colleague Lewontin campaigned against genetically modified crops, seeing them as an advantage to agribusiness rather than to the farmer or consumer.

Gould and Lewontin were both members of what was known as the ‘radical science movement’, together with the American psychologist Leon Kamin and the British biologist Steven Rose.  There’ll be more of their radicalism to come in future posts, including reference to their 1984 manifesto Not in our genes, and Rose’s stimulating book Lifelines.

On to some music, and the radical poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron with one of his earliest and most influential songs, The revolution will not be televised, from his first album, Small talk at 125th and Lenox. Yes, radicals, revolution and rolling thistle – you were there before me.  But there’s another parallel. The song gets its power from the two ways of looking: our familiar and comfortable trappings of life suddenly seem ridiculous when the streets erupt.

 

 

Abram Wilson – Jazz Warrior

I didn’t expect to do this post, and I would rather not have to do it in this way.  I turned on a radio podcast this morning, and heard the presenter annouce the death earlier this month of Abram Wilson, the jazz trumpeter and singer, at the age of just 38.

Now if you’re a jazz fan, you should get used to losing your idols, but this has affected me more than most.

I saw him play in Swansea in about 2005, coming on as a special guest to support his friend Soweto Kinch.  I already had Abram Wilson’s UK debut album Jazz Warrior and loved it, so this was a real thrill for me. He played beautifully, with a rich, slightly brassy, joyful tone – surely a heritage of the city of his birth, New Orleans, where, as he told us, ‘every trumpet player can sing’.  Which he then did, showing that he could have made it as a soulful jazz singer too.

He helped a wave of new talent on the UK scene in the last decade, breaking new ground by introducing jazz into many musical contexts, and was a tireless campaigner, educator, and supporter of humanitarian causes – a true jazz warrior.

There’s more about him on his website, and in many obituaries – here’s one from the Guardian.

I’ll give a few video links – I gather these don’t always work n the US, but I hope some will. Try them.  Buy his records. Remember one of the good guys.

Here he is talking about his life, New Orleans, and playing blues and ballads at a college inTruro:

Here he’s playing Jazz Warrior at a festival in Lithuania in 2005:

Here he’s playing J’espere,  the tune he wrote to support those devastated by the earthquake in Haiti:

And here’s a bluesy album track,  After the storm:

My sympathies to his family, his many friends, and his very many fans.

 

 

Asphodelus aestivus – common asphodel

How do plants come to have such meaning for us? I am still under the influence of these flowers which I saw some weeks ago (and were photographed by Chaiselongue), and I’m still stirred and moved.  Is this where the French Presidential election excitement comes in?  No, that connection will be later on.  It is just that these flowers have such . . . presence. They are members of the Liliaceae family, and therefore among the ‘lilies of the field’ which exceeded Solomon’s glory.

Perhaps  the late spring here after a bitterly cold February has meant that plants grow or geminate late and have benefitted from more daylight and warmth than usual.  Certainly the flower displays seem more stunning and numerous this year, and none more spectacular than the asphodels which appeared in wide drifts on the hillsides rather than small groups.  It’s a plant of high, dry ground, often where it is grazed or trampled, because it’s not eaten by beasts and its basal rosette of tough leaves resists feet and even tyres. They are sustained by underground tuberous roots, which can be eaten, though they have also been used to make glue, so my taste buds are not thrilling at the thought. On a trip south to Pyrenées-Orientales we saw only the shorter A. fistulosus, which we rarely see here – I don’t know why.

But back to the majesty of these metre-tall flower spikes, which seem to say ‘We were here before you. We observe you. We will be here when you have gone’.  They have always seemed to me like white ghosts.  They bring you up short.  They make you think.

So it was no surprise that Geoffrey Grigson* should write that they are ‘the flower of the Elysian Fields, the “asphodel meadow” inhabited by the souls of the dead, according to Homer’.  More prosaically he tells us that Tudor botanists used the name ‘affodil’ – from which the more common daffodil gets its name.

Here we go back more than 3, 000 years, because the idea of Elysium, an ‘Island of the Blessed’ for dead heroes in the afterlife, is a relic of Minoan, pre-Greek civilsation.  The Isles were located in the far west – i.e. beyond the then known world, but were gradually assimilated into the idea of the Underworld (Hades )– a drearier place for ordinary folk who were waiting for reincarnation.  Homer is supposed to have written the Odyssey in the 8^th centuryBCE, and describes Elysium like this:

Men lead there an easier life than any where else in the world, for in Elysium there falls not rain, nor hail, nor snow, but Oceanus breathes ever with a West wind that sings softly from the sea, and gives fresh life to all men….”

(Homer, Odyssey, bookIII)

How do the asphodels grow without rain?  Anyway, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is sent by Circe to the far west, to Oceanus  (the Atlantic beyond Gibraltar?) to bring back a prophecy.  Landing on the island, he digs a hole a cubit square, and surrounds it with a libation of honey, sweet wine, water and barley-meal before sacrificing sheep into the pit.  Sitting beside this portal to the Underworld he is beset by many hungry souls of the dead.  Among them is ‘swift-footed’ Achilles,  his comrade from the Trojan campaign, recently killed by Paris.  After a conversation, Achilles departs ‘with long strides across the field of asphodel’,  his heel evidently much recovered.**

Virgil’s Aeneid also uses the setting of the Elysian fields, now relocated patriotically to Italy and set in Hades rather like a bit of parkland is set in the centre of a  city.  He says of the ‘happy souls’:  ‘In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds’.

In Book VI  Aeneas descends to the Underworld and meets his dead father, Anchises, who shows him visions of a glorious Roman future by calling up souls of great people-to-be.  These days, if you look for the Elysian Fields, say on a French search engine, you’ll get this vision, which I’d call infernal.

So, we’re now in Paris and today François Hollande moves into the Elysée Palace, formal home of the President of France, backing on to the Champs Elysées (Elysian Fields), but before time has yet established whether he is going to be a hero or not. The palace, incidentally,  was  given its name by a pre-revolutionary aristocrat, the Duchess of Bourbon, who bought it in 1787 for 1,300,000 livres.  She didn’t have long to enjoy it.

I don’t envy this new Elysian  either– I’d rather have a patch of garrigue any day.

What music can be a reminder of Greece  (a big issue for Hollande), of its long history, of the illustrious dead? The Charles Lloyd Quartet,  their Athens Concert with Maria Farantouri in 2010, and the song ‘Requiem’, by Agathi Dimitrouka, a song as dignified as the flowers.

Shadows longing

to be loved

to bloom and be resurrected

in light and love.

And to finish with the austerity pact too, I should imagine.

* Geoffrey Grigson, A dictionary of English plant names

**Homer, The Odyssey book XI, The land of the dead

Michel Portal – Citrus juice, from ‘Bailador’ (and take it from me, the cover’s pink – couldn’t get image of it with video)