Human Flower Project
Science
Denver, Colorado USA
Hollywood, California USA
Ho Chi Minh City, VIETNAM
Friday, February 03, 2012
Widely Winged
After years of assiduous transnational work, botanists at Kew coax an iris into bloom for the first time.
Iris stocksii bloomed in cultivation for the first time 1/23/12, at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
Photo: Andy McRobb
We imagine Tony Hall swinging through the door of a hospital maternity ward: “It’s an Iris stocksii!”
Congratulations to Tony, to Kit Strange, Juan Piek and everyone else involved in finding the rare bulbs in Afghanistan and handling them with such wisdom and care that the first flowered last month at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. (And our thanks to Allen Bush for informing us all along the way.)
We are delighted and grateful to post in full Tony Hall’s fine description of this beautiful flower, its “gestation” and birth. A more complete scientific description may be found here.
If you’ve ever wondered how a top notch working horticulturist thinks (hyper-observant, meticulously historical), this account is revealing. (We’ve taken the liberty of dividing Hall’s four paragraphs into shorter passages for ease of reading online.)
Self-portrait of a juno iris expert, Tony Hall
Image: Courtesy of Tony Hall
Iris stocksii flowers at Kew
By Tony Hall
“I observed two flower buds forming on one plant of Iris stocksii in late December 2011. I had not expected such recently collected bulbs (2010) to flower so soon, especially as this species come from a semi-desert habitat with searing hot summers (in my experience, junos from such regions are notoriously difficult to maintain and flower, e.g. Iris postii & I. edomensis from the Middle East). However, our hero Juan Piek had very carefully cared for and packed his bulbs before despatch so that, although the fragile storage roots were detached (which invariably weakens bulbs), the bulbs arrived at Kew in remarkably good condition.
An image of one of the bulbs of I. stocksii, taken by Kit Strange in September 2011, during repotting, shows how well its rootstock, with newly formed slightly fleshy roots, had recovered during its first year in cultivation. Kit is our Bulb Horticulturist in the Alpine Unit at Kew, who repots and cares for the juno collection from day to day, with some guidance and advice from me. The 1st flower opened fully at Kew on the 21st January 2012, and was taken to Kew’s photographic studio for Andy McRobb to photograph three days later.
Bulb of Iris stocksii, packaged with care by Juan Piek, arrived safely at Kew with rootstock intact, September 2011
Photo: Kit Strange
“Iris stocksii is well represented in herbaria although it has never been successfully cultivated before, as far as I can ascertain. Furse’s material of the closely related I. odontostyla was grown for a time and even flowered, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, at both R.H.S. Gardens, Wisley, and in the private collection of the late Dr. Jack Elliott, a very skilled grower of bulbous plants. Alas, few of those Paul Furse juno iris treasures from Afghanistan, collected in the 1960s, nor the slightly later collections of Kit Grey-Wilson & Tom Hewer, are still around and that includes I. odontostyla.
“This taxon is represented by a single type specimen in Kew’s Herbarium, although that is accompanied by wonderful notes and line drawings executed by Furse in the wild; unfortunately, the capsule and seed characters of I. odontostyla are unknown, but it is likely to have non-arillate seeds like I. stocksii.
“Iris odontostyla appears to be restricted to Herat Province in W. Afghanistan, whilst I. stocksii, although found in this Province, has a much wider distribution in W., E. & S.E. Afghanistan; it also occurs in adjacent Pakistan (N. Baluchistan).
“It is worth comparing the colour image of I. odontostyla in the British Iris Society’s 1968 Year Book with Juan Piek’s plant of I. stocksii...they are remarkably similar in overall habit and flower colour, although the former is said to have slightly more greyish tints to its flowers and its outer tepals (or falls) a slightly different outline, and not so widely winged as in I. stocksii.
“Another distinguishing feature of I. odontostyla (as its specific epithet suggests) is irregularly toothed or scalloped style lobes, but Andy McRobb’s images show clearly that this feature can be observed in I. stocksii as well.
Close-up: the fall of Iris stocksii, January 26, 2012
Photo: Andy McRobb
“The chromosome count and karyotype of Iris stocksii were unknown, but have now been studied at Kew’s Jodrell Laboratory by Jaume Pellicer; I. stocksii has a count of 2n=20.
“We were also able to sacrifice a few of Juan’s original seeds for DNA extraction, in time to be added to our molecular study of the junos (Ikinci, N. et al. 2011. Molecular phylogenetics of the juno irises, Irissubgenus Scorpiris (Iridaceae), based on six plastid makers. Bot. Journ. Linn., 167, 281-300). This study shows that I. stocksii falls into a small clade of rather distantly related species, primarily from the Hindu-Kush, which includes Iris cycloglossa and I. aitchisonii. Probably I. microglossa also belongs here (but is unresolved in the analysis), as well as I. odontostyla, which was not available to sample.”
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sed Qualis Illa Latine?
“But what is it in Latin?” With new international rules, plants will no longer have to be described in Latin.
The former Aster oblongifolius (now Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) has a complete description in Latin.
Photo: Illinois Wildflowers
Horticulturists, at least those fluent in English, just got a bye from the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN). As of January 1, 2012, plant scientists will no longer have to provide a Latin description of newly identified species in order to get these plants on the books, as it were. Now, such descriptions can be made in either Latin or English, and for the most part, the reaction among botanists has been very favorable.
By expanding the ways in which new species can be introduced, most experts say, discoveries in the plant kingdom can be more swiftly catalogued, speeding up research. Most critically, speeding up the international system of identification, many say, will make it possible to protect more endangered plants sooner, before they face extinction.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Ash Assassin
Taking out one endangered tree seems to cause more alarm than the threat to a whole species. Allen Bush takes out an ash and takes on the neighborhood.
The Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis B)
Photo: Zin
By Allen Bush
Arborists cut down our big white ash tree a few weeks before Christmas. It had stood in the front yard since 1974. My neighbors weren’t happy with me. My pleas for any understanding fell on deaf ears throughout the holidays in coffee shops, at parties, on the street. I promised everyone that there would be a better tree that goes in its place.
“Good luck,” I was told.
“We’re tree huggers!” one critic added. No one seemed to know what kind of tree it was, or even care why I’d taken it out. None of that mattered. Our tree was their tree. “What a bummer,” one passerby lamented.
At least the neighbors weren’t marching down Top Hill Road in solidarity, carrying Louisville Slugger baseball bats made from white ash wood, at least not yet. “I see you took the down the tree,” is not a neutral declaration. It means I have looted the neighborhood. I am the ash assassin.
Nobody cared that the tree removal was a preemptive strike, ahead of the emerald ash borer (EAB). This insect has already launched an assault on tens of thousands of ash trees in Louisville alone.
Our white ash (Fraxinus americana) should never have been planted in the first place, at least not in our front yard. (White ash grows naturally from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, south to northern Florida. It extends west to eastern Texas and eastern Minnesota.)
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Unforeseen: Yahoo Falls
Plantsmen Allen Bush and Paul Cappiello, hunting for pink muhly grass, fall down a rabbit hole of botanical wonders in McCreary County, Kentucky.
Silene rotundifolia blooming near Yahoo Falls
McCreary County, Kentucky, November 2011
Photo: Allen Bush
By Allen Bush
I had no idea what was in store last spring, when Paul Cappiello began talking about an autumn day-trip to Eastern Kentucky. Paul is the Executive Director of Yew Dell Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky. The premise – or the excuse for a fun walk in the woods - seemed simple enough: try to find cold-hardy native stands of the pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris. They were there, somewhere in the Cumberland Mountains; we knew that. Julian Campbell had said so. And Julian knows where just about every native plant is, in every nook and cranny across the state. He had found pink muhly seedlings in Rowan County earlier in the year.