Bird of Paradise flower, Strelitzia reginae,Strelitziaceae

I've waited a long time for this. I bought this Strelitzia reginae as a small plant several years ago and made the fundamental mistake of planting it in a large pot, so it's been producing leaves rather than flowers until now. Back in November a flower bud appeared but its growth slowed right down in our unheated conservatory, but April's warmth has brought it into flower

There's no doubt that the Strelitzia bloom is very bird-like. It's also pollinated by birds - sunbirds - in its native South Africa

 

Hummingbirds in the New World hover in front of flowers and so burn up a lot of energy as they refuel with nectar, but sunbirds have a far more relaxed strategy, using the blue stamen of the flower as a perch

The stamen is a complex structure, formed by two elongated, fused blue petals and tipped with the white pointed stigma. The third blue petal that you can see here at its base is much smaller and conceals the nectar.

 

When the bird lands on the stamen its weight pushes it downwards, splitting the fused petals longitudinally and exposing the white pollen, which sticks to the bird's feet

When it visits another flower it lands on its stamen and while it's shuffling around probing for nectar it transfers pollen to the pointed white stigmatic surface that you can see above

A new flower rises from the inflorescence spathe every day. This is day two and I'm expecting three more

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charlotte1767Cotes.jpg

This is a flower deemed fit for a queen and was named by Sir Joseph Banks in honour of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818), King George the Third's Queen-Consort, who was an avid botanist and great patron of Kew Gardens.

Puya chilensis, Bromeliaceae

A few years ago I was given some seed of Puya chilensis that germinated quickly and produced attractive small pot plants that had one particularly annoying trait. The arching whorls of leaves were fringed with vicious little recurved spines that were forever catching in my clothes or lacerating my skin, so one by one I gave them away to friends who had more space to grow them. On Tuesday, when I visited the National Botanic Garden of Wales I rather regretted that I hadn't been more patient, because their Puya chilensis had a magnificent three metre-tall flower spike. If I'd hung onto my plants for another decade, maybe............

.... or maybe not. I'd probably be permanently scarred by the Puya leaves by now, and you really need a glasshouse like that at the NBGW to flower this magnificent plant reliably. In the wild those recurved spines in the leaves have been known to impale birds and small mammals.

Puya chilensis comes from the coastal mountains of Chile and can be grown outside here in the mildest frost-free areas of Britain, such as the Tresco on the Scilly Isles. But what you really need is ......

........ a glasshouse like this - the magnificent structure designed by Sir Norman Foster for the NBGW.

This is the largest single-span glasshouse in the world, dedicated to displaying the flora of our planet's hotter, drier regions.

The stunning architecture of the building complements the natural architecture of the plants that it houses..........

........ while at the same time blending with its natural surroundings.

The glasshouse follows the contours of the land and reminds me of the carapace of a tortoise. A truely inspirational structure in an inspirational new botanic garden run by passionately committed, enthusiastic people.

Walnut, Juglans regia, Juglandaceae

When I was a kid my grandfather used to make little boats with half-walnut shells, fitting them with a matchstick mast and paper sail. Their association with childhood pleasures goes back a long way - apparently the Romans had a ritual at weddings whereby the bridegroom threw walnuts to children, symbolising the casting off of childhood preoccupations and the beginning of adult life.

One of the many botanically interesting aspects of walnuts is that they are not - botanically speaking - nuts. They are classified as drupes - fruits with a fleshy outer coating and a single hard seed inside, which groups them with peaches and plums whose outer coat is succulent. The tough outer coat of walnuts eventually splits to release the hard seed inside but it has its own special properties - it produces a deep brown dye. I discovered this for myself by accident when I was showing some visitors around Durham University Botanic Garden and picked up a fallen fruit and idly pulled it apart to show them the walnut seed inside - and it took three days for the brown stains to disappear from my fingers.

For about twenty years I had a walnut tree in my own small garden but it was foolish to plant such a fast-growing forest tree in such a small plot. It quickly outgrew the garden and I had to cut it down - and that revealed another interesting sensory aspect of the tree - its foliage and wood have a distinctive fragrance, that to me smells of apricots.

Walnut produces male and female reproductive structures separately on the same tree (monoecy) - the male flower being these fat catkins....

........... and the female being the ovary with a short style and twin stigmas that you can see between the leaf stalks at the top of the picture above. Solitary trees sometimes fail to produce nuts because there is a time differential between stigmas becoming receptive and the catkins shedding pollen (dichogamy).

Aside from its edible 'nuts', which were always an enduring feature of Christmas in our house when I was a child (no one could ever find the nut-crackers, which were not as elegant as the pair you can see here), walnut is famous for the beauty of its timber which is widely used for cabinet-making and for gun stocks. The tree originates from extreme south-east Europe and the Near-East (hence the alternative name Persian walnut) and can be killed in extreme winters. In 1709 there was a winter in Europe that killed thousands of walnut trees, which were felled and bought by Dutch merchants who foresaw an impending shortage and made a handsome profit by cornering the market for walnut timber in the years before new trees could be established.

There is an old saying that walnut trees are more fruitful if their branches are beaten. The likely origin of this is that walnuts used to be  harvested as soon as they began to ripen, while still attached to the tree, by knocking them down with long poles - otherwise birds and squirrels would get them first. This assault on the tree broke the tips of twigs and promoted the growth of fruiting spurs, producing a better crop of fruits in the following year.

Forsythia x intermedia, Oleaceae

Few shrubs are as easy to cultivate ("in almost any soil short of a bog": Graham Stuart Thomas) or provide such a reliable display of spring flowers as Forsythia, so it's hardly surprising that its blooms light up suburban gardens everywhere at this time of year. This fine specimen was flowering on the banks of the River Tyne at Wylam yesterday, with its mass of blooms contrasting with the still-leafless branches of the trees on the riverbank.

The modern Forsythia Forsythia x intermedia is a hybrid between F. suspensa and F. viridissima, first produced in the 1880s and since reproduced with various improvements on numerous occasions by intercrossing these two species, both originating from China. The parental species are not seen very often in cultivation these days. F. suspensa has long, trailing shoots that  William Robinson, in his English Flower Garden (1883), suggested looked best when they were either trailed over a sunny wall or secured to it (when "the long, slender branchlets dispose themselves in a very graceful manner"). It flowers all along its shoots, so to achieve the best display of blooms at least some of the long shoots should not be pruned. In contrast the hybrid, which inherits its shrubby stature from F. viridissima, flowers on side shoots, so some shortening of long shoots immediately after flowering keeps the plant reasonably compact and still guarantees a mass of golden blooms in the following spring; I've seen some very striking, quite formal flowering hedges created with this species.

 

An important factor in the popularity of Forsythia is that its flower buds are not damaged by hard frosts in March. Some research at Purdue University back in 1995 indicated that this was at least partly due to the fact that the flower tissues accumulate soluble sugars, that protect the cells from catastrophic effects of freezing.
It's quite often stated that Forsythia flowers contain the carbohydrate lactose, which is otherwise only found in milk secreted by the mammary glands of mammals. I'm not sure how this claim originated, but a study by biochemists at Tohoku University in Japan in 1991 failed to find any trace of lactose in the flowers.
Interestingly, in 1998 genetic engineers at the National Institute for Agrobiological Resources at Ibaraki in Japan managed to express mammalian milk proteins in tobacco plants, for potential pharmaceutical applications - a biochemical feat that half a billion years of plant evolution failed to achieve.

Buds

So here we are again, on the threshold of another gardening year - and surely there is nothing that epitomises the gardener's feelings of hope and expectation more than a flower bud at the point of opening.

It's worth leaning on your garden spade, taking a breather from digging and contemplating the mind-boggling processes that have taken place inside a flower bud in the months, days and weeks that have led up to this moment. Somewhere in the apex of the plant tissues a group of cells has become committed to becoming a flower rather than developing into leaves. They've undergone a precise series of divisions and choreographed cell expansions that has produced an embryonic flower, tightly packaged in a bud that only requires a little warmth and a surge of water coursing through its tissues to expand into its full glory.

It's been weeks in the making - months in the case of bulbous species like bluebell whose flower initials were formed in the bulb last year - and as soon as the flower has done its job and attracted a pollinator it will collapse and die. I can think of nothing in nature where the combination of structure and function have evolved to an extent that is so aesthetically satisfying - or so fleeting; the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the individual life of flower is measured in days.

Say It With Flowers

When did you last receive of bouquet of flowers from an admirer? Recently, I hope. But did you take a really close look at the kinds of flowers that came? Perhaps not. A century ago - back in Victorian and Edwardian times - the gift of flowers was loaded with hidden meaning. They had a language all of their own. At the tail end of the nineteen century and into the early twentieth century people really did ‘say it with flowers’, and the wrong choice of species could land you in serious trouble. No refined lady could afford to be without the latest edition of that indispensable manual of floral etiquette in polite society, The Language of Flowers. This copy belonged to my grandmother.

Each different species of flower conveyed a powerful message and arrival of the florist at the door would see the lady of the house flicking through the pages of the manual, decoding the bouquet. A camellia sent as a compliment symbolised 'perfect loveliness', while a pot of basil was a declaration of 'hatred'.

The layout of the book was simple and convenient. The first half contained a list of flowers with their meaning, the second half a list of sentiments and the flowers that expressed them. With successive editions the meanings were sometimes changed a little, which might have made these floral conversations a little tricky if you didn't remain au fait with the latest flowery language.

Botanically speaking, a burgeoning relationship might go something like this. Smitten by desire, a young suitor might send the girl of his dreams a single Coreopsis bloom, a declaration of 'love at first sight'. He’d be hoping for the return of a daisy, meaning ‘I share your sentiments’. Most often, I suspect, the lady would have been more circumspect. She might want to reassure herself first that her suitor was well-heeled, and despatch a kingcup (‘desire of riches’). Recognising he’d hooked a gold-digger, he might respond with a scarlet poppy ( promising ‘fantastic extravagance’), unless he was hard up, in which case vernal grass (‘poor but happy’) would be the reply. If that was the case then a mesembryanthemum (‘your looks freeze me’) would leave him in no doubt that further advances would be to no avail until he'd made his fortune.

It might all end there, but perhaps pride and outrage would trigger one final exchange of floral abuse. The swift despatch of pasque flowers (‘you have no charms’) from him, followed by Scotch thistle (‘retaliation’) and tansy (‘I declare war against you’) from her might open hostilities. If they really wanted to be abusive the spurned suitor might send the florist staggering up the garden path under the weight of a water melon (hinting at a tendency towards ‘bulkiness’ in the addressee).


Or perhaps his initial advances might be more successful. The opening exchange of coreopsis and daisies might escalate into something decidedly steamier. Pressing home his early success with orange blossom (‘your purity equals your loveliness’) might trigger a reply of a peony (‘bashfulness’) and marjoram (‘blushes’). Time for a bit more flattery with a damask rose (alluding to her ‘brilliant complexion’), in the hope that peach blossom (‘I am your captive’) might coming winging back through the post. If it did, he might risk despatching tuberose (hinting at ‘dangerous pleasures’), keeping his fingers crossed that the reply would be an African marigold (admonishing him for his ‘vulgar mind’) – a sort of Victorian “Ooooo! You are awful” – and not a dried white rose (indicating that ‘death is preferable to loss of innocence’).


If the African marigold arrived the swift despatch of a cuckoo pint (an unequivocal symbol of ‘ardour’) would leave her in no doubt as to what he had in mind, so she could safely despatch a white ditanny flower (hinting at ‘passion’), confirming her willingness to live dangerously .


But by then all those visits to the florist would have set the servants’ tongues wagging. A Cobaea bloom (warning of ‘gossip’) would set alarm bells clanging and would call for the despatch of mandrake (as an expression of ‘horror’) in return. A hellebore bloom (symbolising a whiff of ‘scandal’) would break the bad news that this wild botanical courtship had become talk of the town, so finally the suitor must be forced to do the decent thing and - pausing briefly to contemplate the folly of loose floral talk and the effect on his bank balance before he let his letter slide into the postbox – despatch a lime leaf ('marriage').


No wonder Victorian courtships were such drawn out affairs, if lovers had to scour gardens, florists and the countryside to find just the right flowers to convey their feelings. Where could you get a red columbine in January, if you wanted to tell your betrothed that you were ‘trembling with anxiety’? How inconvenient (and ecologically irresponsible) to have to scour the countryside for a frog orchid to convey your ‘disgust’ at their conduct. The Language of Flowers must surely be the most impractical form of communication ever devised......  but this genteel form of dialogue was infinitely more romantic than the modern text message - and often fragrant too. 

Maybe there is still someone out there who respects the old niceties of polite society. So keep a daisy to hand, just in case you receive an unexpected twig of spindle tree (‘your charms are engraved on my heart’) or a pineapple (‘you are perfect’). But if you do decide to respond, better get hold of a copy of The Language of Flowers first. There’s no telling where this botanical banter might lead.

The fly-leaf of my grandmother's copy bears this inscription: To Miss Nancy Fox, with every good wish from Mr. John Smith, 21st.August 1920 and it bears a cut-out picture of a pansy, which conveyed the message 'You Occupy my Thoughts'. At first sight that's a little odd, because she didn't marry a John Smith. So was this a rejected suitor? I suspect not. John Smith is not a very convincing name, is it? I suspect it was my grandad, Harry. At that time he had recently returned as a wounded soldier from the Great War. She was a young teenager, employed by a local nursery to hand-write invoices, on account of her love of flowers and beautiful script handwriting - the only school qualification she had. This might have been his first advance, in which he thought it proper to conceal his real identify, hoping that his gift would be the start of a floral courtship. We'll never know for sure, but she kept this little book until the day she died.

Honeysuckle or Woodbine, Lonicera periclymenum, Caprifoliaceae

“The beauty and fragrance of its flowers make it a welcome guest in our gardens, hedges and arbours”, wrote William Withering in 1776, in his Botanical arrangement of all the Vegetables Naturally growing in Great Britain. For my money none of the cultivated varieties quite match the scent of the wild species, emitting its scent on a warm, still summer night in a country lane. The wild plants seem to have paler, yellower flowers without so much of the purple pigment. Honeysuckle only flowers well if it's in a sunny position and to achieve that it climbs, sometimes to the top of trees, but it's at its best when it climbs through a hedge.

The scent is emitted just as disk falls, attracting moth pollinators, notably hawk-moths that hover with long probosces extended just in front of the flowers, which is why ...

... the stamens and stigma are so long - to make contact with the hovering pollinator.

After pollination the berries that form are a great attraction for blackbirds. By one of those happy accidents in gardening, they've perched on our otherwise dull leylandii hedge and voided the seeds in their droppings, so honeysuckle has clambered up through the conifers, which have become a wall of scent on summer evenings.

That in turn has brought this delightful little moth into the garden - the twenty plume moth Alucita hexadactyla, which breeds on the honeysuckle and is strongly attracted to light, setting on the lit wndows of the house after dark. Back in 1776 William Withering noted that several moths visited honeysuckle: “The insects that have been observed to feed on the honeysuckle include the Priver Hawk Moth Sphinx ligustri, the brown feathered moth, Phalaena didactyla, the small bee moth, Sphinx tipuliformis, and the many feathered moth Phalaena hexadactyla”. I think this is the latter, after a change of Latin name.

Some cultivars continue to produce flowers right through until the first frosts - as this one did - but there are also winter-flowering species that bring fragrance to the dullest months of the year.

This is Lonicera x purpusii that begins flowering outside our conservatory door in January. A few sprigs in a vase will scent a whole room.

Given the opportunity, honeysuckle will climb to the tops of small trees, curling around the trunk for support, which is why it acquired the alternative name of woodbine. John Gerard , writing in his Great herball or Generall Historie of Plantes in 1597, described how “Wood-binde or Hony-suckle climeth up aloft, having long slender woody branches........oftentimes winding it selfe so straight and hard about, that it leaveth its print upon those things so wrapped”.

This is what he meant. It puts me in mind of this statue.

For a closer look at the strangling tendencies of honeysuckle, take a look at this.