Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Francisca Coelho is the Vivian and Edward Merrin Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions.
Victoria amazonica in its native habitat along the Amazon River.
In a post on Plant Talk, Scott described the fascinating life cycle of the Amazon water lily. But how did this iconic Amazonian species receive its scientific name, and how did this popular late-summer attraction come to be cultivated so far from its native habitat at major botanical gardens such as The New York Botanical Garden?
The Amazon water lily was discovered by Eduard Friedrich Poeppig in Peru and, because he thought it was related to an eastern Asian water lily belonging to the genus Euryale, he named it Euryale amazonica in 1836. The species was rediscovered by the German botanist Robert Hermann Schomburgk on a botanical expedition supported by Great Britain to what was then known as British Guiana. Schomburgk shipped his detailed notes, drawings, and collections to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where John Lindley described the species as Victoria regia in 1837 in honor of Queen Victoria.
Lawrence M. Kelly, Ph.D., is Director of Graduate Studies at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses on the evolution and classification of flowering plants.
Developing fruit (ovary) at the center of a Yucca flower
Despite the year-round availability of most produce, few things say summer like a juicy, vine-ripened tomato from the garden or a produce stand. You can slice them, dice them, and use them in stews, sauces, and salads. They’re one of the most versatile of vegetables. Or are they?
Is a tomato a vegetable, as most people think it is, or is it really a fruit? In general terms, fruits are usually sweet and vegetables are savory. Fruits are usually eaten as dessert, and vegetables as a main course. Fruits are often succulent and edible when raw. More technical dictionary definitions recognize a fruit as an edible reproductive body of a plant. In contrast, vegetables are usually defined much more broadly, for example as an edible part of a plant, or they are defined by example, such as in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, which cites cabbages, beans, and potatoes.
Carrots and their wild relatives, Queen Anne’s Lace, are a familiar part of our life, whether at the green-grocer or along summer-time roadsides. But the carrot family (Umbelliferae) is a huge group of nearly 4,000 species, including many familiar sources of food, spices, and medicines, such as parsnips, celery, parsley, fennel, dill, caraway, cilantro, coriander, and anise. Most are found in northern temperate areas of Eurasia and North America, but there is a smaller subgroup of the carrot family centered in the Andean region of South America, extending from the alpine páramos of Colombia and Venezuela to the cold, windswept grasslands of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile and Argentina.
Microscopic green alga Spirogyra, with its spirally arranged chloroplasts. Photograph from the Delwiche lab.
Plants produce 98 percent of atmospheric oxygen through photosynthesis. Everything we eat comes directly or indirectly from plants. One quarter of prescription drugs come directly from plants or are plant derivatives. Fossilized plants provide energy in the form of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
Given the importance of plants in every aspect of our lives, humans study plants to understand processes that are critical to our own survival and to the health of the planet. Beyond their obvious importance, plants have played key roles in a broad range of biological discoveries that have helped us understand some of the most fascinating mysteries of life.
Annie Virnig is a graduate student in the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden.
“The beauty of this species is its undoing,” wrote New York Botanical Garden botanist James Luteyn in 1983 regarding this flower, which is native to the Andean cloud forests of Colombia. Since then, his words have only become truer.
The founders of El Queremal in southwestern Colombia were inspired to name the town in honor of this beautiful and intoxicatingly fragrant flower that grows there, called quereme de la rosa by locals and known scientifically as Cavendishia adenophora.
Long before settlers reached El Queremal, the indigenous people of the area, the Anaconas, valued quereme de la rosa and believed it to be a charm for love and enchantment. The story goes that if a woman wears the quereme flower, its beautiful fragrance will inspire men to fall in love with her and women to be drawn to her in friendship. Likewise, if a man wears the flower in his lapel, women will flock to him. One story told in El Queremal involves a man who could not rid himself of the women who pursued him after he wore the quereme, so he ran away to live the rest of his days deep in the rainforest.
An inflorescence of pau brasil showing an apical view of a flower
Pau brasil (Caesalpinia echinata), a member of the legume plant family and the national tree of Brazil, has played an important role in the history of that country. Pau is the colloquial name for árvore (or tree), and the red sap it exudes when the trunk is cut has the color of a burning piece of charcoal (brasa in Portuguese). So pau brasil is translated into English as the Brazil tree. According to some historians, this common name was adopted from the plant as the name of the country, the largest and most biodiverse in South America.
Brazil (spelled Brasil in Portuguese) was discovered in 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, who landed near the present-day city of Santa Cruz de Cabralia in the state of Bahia. At that time, pau brasil was plentiful in the coastal forests of Brazil. The sap was economically important because it was used for dying cloth, but today the tree is best known as the source of highly prized timber used to create bows for string instruments such as violins and cellos.
A Symplocos flower, cut open to show the long style surrounded by stamens
The series of events by which flowering plants reproduce themselves is amazingly complicated and precise. One of the most critical processes occurs just after pollination, when pollen grains land on or are delivered by a bee or another pollinator to the surface of the stigma, one of the female reproductive organs within the flower.
The pollen grains begin to grow, or germinate. These germinating pollen grains produce tubes that grow through the tissue of the style and into the plant’s ovary. The sperm cells within the tubes will be delivered into the ovule—the plant equivalent of an unfertilized egg—so that fertilization and sexual reproduction can occur. That leads to seeds, the basis for the next generation of a plant species.
Fluorescence microscopy, one of the research techniques available to scientists at The New York Botanical Garden, allows us to see the path of the pollen tubes as they grow through the surface of the stigma and into the style, where the ovule awaits. In this species of Symplocos—a genus of of about 250 related plant species native to Asia, Australia, and the Americas—we can see the germinating pollen grains growing from the lobes below the top of the style.
A strangler fig embracing its host tree with an unfriendly hug
Normally, the term “tree hugger” brings to mind an environmental activist who takes action to protect trees from destruction by other humans. In contrast, the plant shown here is a tree hugger that may hasten the death of the tree it embraces. The plant “hugging” the tree is a fig, one of the nearly 700 species of the genus Ficus of the mulberry family (Moraeae).
Many species of Ficus are “keystone” species, meaning they play an especially large role in their ecosystems. Their fruits—figs—are eaten by a wide variety of animals, especially species of birds and bats. Bird figs are usually red (Fig. 2) because birds are attracted by red, and bat figs are usually green at maturity because bats often find their food by echolocation and aroma, not by color (Fig. 3).
Figs that embrace trees like this are called strangler figs, but this is a misnomer. They do not strangle the host plant. They do, however, harm their hosts by robbing them of light, water, and nutrients.
Trepanier Creek, British Columbia, a fast speed creek and one of my sampling sites
Algae, a large and diverse group of plants that live in water, are often overlooked, but they shouldn’t be. They play an important role in the food web and life on Earth: algae produce more oxygen than all the land plants combined. They can be found in freshwater, brackish, and marine environments, and they’re classified as red, green, or brown, which is the kind I am currently studying.
Rogério Gribel, Ph.D., is the Director of Scientific Research at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden in Brazil, and Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. They have studied all aspects of Brazil nut classification, ecology, evolution, and conservation for most of their careers.
Left: Rogério Gribel standing next to a gigantic Brazil nut tree. Right: a carpenter bee entering a Brazil nut tree flower in search of its nectar reward.
Here’s a video that shows how essential big, strong bees are for the production of the largest “nut” found in a can of mixed party nuts. It shows a carpenter bee (Xylocopa frontalis) pollinating the flowers of a Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa).
We say “nut” because Brazil nuts are seeds, not nuts, a kind of fruit structurally similar to an acorn. The Brazil nuts we eat at parties are produced in a woody fruit that looks like a cannonball, so, to be botanically correct, Brazil nuts should be called Brazil seeds. But we don’t expect that to happen anytime soon!
