Ephemeral

Delicate, perfumed phlox;
A mist of columbine, clinging to earth;
Phoebe’s gravelly voice,
Titmouse — tender, sweet;
A dogwood cloud hover above
Vibrant, fresh leaves.

Fleeting
Falling flowers, already spent;
A garden, no longer my own.

A spring, a garden, will come again;
At home in the hope, the beauty.

Bittersweet
and fast-fading.

Always returning!

Mike has shared some of my poetry on his blog in the past; the poem above is another of mine. In fact, it’s the first I wrote as an adult. I went to a poetry session at an Outdoor Classroom Symposium at the NC Botanical Garden that was taught by a couple of teachers from South Carolina. The teachers gave us a few templates to get started, and sent us out along the garden paths to write. I found a spot amid a patch of beautiful columbine flowers. The first activity was simple – use your senses to observe the world around you, and pay attention to how that makes you feel. The poem above is the result of that short, sweet writing exercise. I have used the same simple steps many times since then in my own writing, and I’ve shared that activity with numerous teachers through my work. I’m incredibly grateful to those two teachers for reintroducing me to the world of poetry-writing!

But now, it’s time for our next flower parts adventure… this time we’ll take a close look at wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis). Wild columbine is one of my favorite spring wildflowers, and we have an abundance of it in our yard. The flowers hang on delicate stems and look like they’re floating above the ground. Each plant produces numerous blossoms over the course of  at least a month in our yard. In fact, a couple of years ago, one of the earliest blooms managed to get caught in a late winter snowstorm…

Because its so ubiquitous, it was an early target for my plant parts explorations – I didn’t feel too terrible taking a few blossoms off the plants when they were so numerous! Like the wood poppy, it is a simple flower, but because of the odd shape of some of its parts, it’s a little more challenging. As with the wood poppy and dogwood flowers, my first task was to find the sepals.

Given the overlapping nature of the flower’s structure, this was tricky. Which are the sepals, which are the petals? I took off one of each to see if I could tell…

It was still difficult to tell which was which, even after removing one of each part, though it seemed as though the smaller, leaf-shaped parts were attached higher up on the stem than the long, spurred ones, which would make them the sepals. I looked for some flower buds for confirmation, and indeed, the leaf-shaped part enclosed the bud before it opened. Mystery solved!

In these two images, you can see how the petals’ spurs extend and start turning red very early in the flower’s development. In the image on the right, you can even notice the developing stamens inside the flower bud; and in the right-hand image, the elongated stalks extending out of the flower bud are the undeveloped pistils (more on that in a moment). The spurred petals have a nectar reward in the bulb at the top where long-tongued pollinators like butterflies and hummingbirds can access it (while conveniently rubbing their bodies or heads on the stamens or pistils).

Since columbine blooms for so long in our yard, it was easy to trace the development of different parts of the flower by finding a sequence of ripening flowers.

In an early bloom, the stamens, with club-like yellow anthers on the end, slowly uncurl, with the interior stamens dropping first. Notice how, at this point, the stamens and pistils are about the same length. As the flower continues to develop, that changes.

The flower in the next two pictures is further along than the last one, and you can see how nearly all the stamens have fully uncurled. The pistils have also lengthened, and their tips have opened up as they’ve become receptive to pollen.

An interesting pattern among many flowers is that their parts often occur in multiples. The columbine is a great example of that. It has 5 sepals, 5 petals, and 5 pistils. And when I took the time to count the stamens on one flower, there were 40 of them (which is a multiple of 5!). Another example of this is with Easter lilies, a flower you might be familiar with, and perhaps appropriate to mention as we approach Easter weekend. Easter lilies (as well as other lilies) have 3 sepals, 3 petals, 6 stamen, and 1 three-pronged pistil. Maybe this is a new tool for teaching the multiplication tables for those of you who are now homeschooling your kids?

When the columbine flower is finished blooming, the sepals, petals, and stamens fall off, leaving only the 5 pistils behind. They slowly turn upright and the ovaries at the base begin to swell. Eventually, they will open up like 5-sectioned cups, full of dark-colored seeds that bounce out when you brush up against the plants. But for now, the seeds are still developing.

As with the wood poppy, I gently opened one of the one of the ovaries to see the seeds developing inside.

As with the other species, I was again fascinated by the way the columbine has adapted its structures to an entirely different arrangement. Flowers are so cool!

Whereas, the Dogwood is a radiantly beautiful flower which grows abundantly in all parts of the State; and

Whereas, there is a great demand from all parts of the State that this Legislature adopt an official flower; Now, therefore,

The General Assembly of North Carolina do enact:

That the Dogwood be, and it is hereby, adopted as the official flower of the State of North Carolina.

In the General Assembly read three times and ratified, this the 15th day of March, 1941.

~H.B. 609, 1941

Most people are familiar with the flowering dogwood tree. Not only does it grow fairly abundantly in the wild, but it’s also frequently used in landscaping because of its beautiful white springtime blooms. It’s our state flower here in North Carolina, and also in Virginia (where it is both the state flower and the state tree). It’s the state tree in Missouri and the state memorial tree in New Jersey as well. While Virginia, Missouri, and New Jersey all specify that they’re referring to the flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), North Carolina does not. But reading the declaration by the General Assembly, I’m going to go out on a limb (pun intended) and assume they meant the flowering dogwood, too.

Though I’m a proud transplanted North Carolinian, I must say that I think Missouri and New Jersey did a better job when they selected the tree rather than the flower for their state symbol. Because this is our state flower:

Yup, that’s it. Not only is it kind of unremarkable, but it’s only about 1/4″ long. Unless you’re a nature nerd, you might have been expecting to see a picture like this:

Because I am a nature nerd, I have heard many times that the white “petals” on a dogwood are not really petals; they are actually bracts. Back to everyone’s favorite Plant Identification Terminolog: An Illustrated Guide by Harris and Harris, a bract is “a reduced leaf or leaflike structure at the base of a flower or inflorescence.” Hmmm… those don’t look like leaves to me! But if you take a closer look at the center of the bloom, and refer back to my previous post about parts of a flower, you begin to see why.

The dogwood does not have a simple flower. Instead, it has a cluster of tiny flowers (florets) in the center of the inflorescence.

You can see in this image how some of the flowers are open, and others (notably the three right in front) are not yet open. Given my recent fascination with the parts of a flower, I couldn’t resist dissecting this flower to look more closely at it!

In the cross-section view, you can really begin to see the individual dogwood flowers. And on the flowers that I removed from the blossom, you can trace the development of the flowers as they open, and start noticing the flower parts.

The petals curve back as they open, revealing 4 stamens and a greenish pistil in the center. But as I mentioned in my earlier flower parts post, I really enjoy the challenge of finding the sepals…

Getting even closer, you can see the downy green lip surrounding the unopened petals; I assume these are the sepals. I was very excited to notice this detail! (Yes, I am a nerd.)

Here we are, back where we started: an open dogwood flower. Getting this close allows you to see the four pollen-producing stamen surrounding the pistil. It even looks like this flower has been pollinated as it appears there is some pollen on the stigma (though I’d say there’s a decent chance I accidentally pollinated it while manipulating the flowers).

So there you have it – North Carolina’s state flower!

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

~Georgia O’Keeffe

So far this spring, I’ve had to cancel workshops that I was planning for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences taking educators to the swamp along the Roanoke River and to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’ve always been a huge proponent of sharing real experiences in the natural world with others, in large part because I learned the value of that so well from Mike. But in this challenging time when I’m no longer able to do that, I’ve decided to finally try to embrace the power of sharing things in a virtual way, while still encouraging people to get outside and experience the world around them. To that end, my colleague Megan and I have begun creating a series of online workshops for educators where we share some information through a video and then give them a couple nature journaling activities to guide their exploration of the nature in their backyards or local parks. My most recent endeavor in this series was to teach the parts of a flower and send folks out to apply that knowledge by observing flowers in their yard and recording what they notice. Looking closely into the world of flowers is fascinating, and particularly timely with the arrival of spring. So I wanted to share some snippets of what I’ve discovered with the Roads End Naturalist crowd!

Let’s start with a quick primer on flower parts. I spent time during a recent online meeting sketching one of the wild geranium flowers in our yard (ah, the wonders of turning off your video during a zoom meeting!) and created a diagram of the parts of a simple flower.

The main parts of a flower are the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils. Let’s take a look at the arrangement of these parts in a simple flower that is abundant in our yard right now, the wood poppy, or Stylophorum diphyllum. This species is native to the eastern US, though technically not the Carolinas. However, it is native to the surrounding states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. I chose this flower as a starting point because it’s one of the larger flowers blooming in our yard right now, and it demonstrates most of the flower parts well.

Here’s the wood poppy flower. It’s about 1 1/2 inches in diameter and displays four vivid yellow petals. Petals are perhaps the most recognizable part of the flower. They are typically the most colorful part of the flower and often play a key role in attracting pollinators.

But what about the sepals? According to Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary by James and Melinda Harris (yes, we own a copy of this book… what does that say about us?), a sepal is “a segment of the calyx.” So what’s a calyx, you ask? “The outer perianth whorl.” And a perianth is “the calyx and corolla of a flower, collectively.” I still don’t know what a calyx is… but corolla? “The collective name for all the petals of a flower.” Ah… botanical jargon. (Picture the eye-roll emoji here.) It just might be worse that geologic jargon. (In case you don’t know, I am NOT a botanist – my degrees are in geology, and I like to joke that you have to like big words, as well as hitting things with hammers, to be a geologist). At least I know what petals are (“an individual segment or member of the corolla, usually colored or white”)! The easiest way I’ve found to explain it is that the sepals are arranged outside of the whorl of petals. Sometimes they are green, other times they look a lot more like the petals. And I’ve noticed that they often seem to enclose the flower bud before it opens, which can be a helpful clue in identifying them.

So where are the sepals on the wood poppy? Normally, they would be underneath the flower, and might even be visible from the top-down view (some sepals act more like petals when the flower is open). But the wood poppy flower presented a mystery because underneath the petals is just the stem – no sepals! So does this flower lack sepals? To solve the mystery, I went looking around the yard to find some unopened flowers.

In this picture of a flower bud, you can see two hairy, translucent sepals just beginning to open, exposing the yellow flower inside. I also looked around underneath the flowers and found a few sepals lying beneath the plant. So it turns out that for this species, the sepals fall off as the flower opens.

So now we get to the important parts of the flower, the stamens and the pistil. Because why do we really have flowers, anyway? Not just to look beautiful in a vase on my kitchen counter. Flowers exist to produce new plants. Without flowers, there would be no fruits and seeds. Many flowers, like this one, rely on pollinators and put a lot of work into attracting them through vivid colors, nectar rewards, and sometimes even trickery (check out the part of this earlier post about the grass pink orchid). Other flowers rely on the wind to disperse their pollen (anyone else’s screen porch covered in pine pollen right now?), and some can self-pollinate. But back to the wood poppy, and most simple flowers…

Stamens are the male part of the flower that produce pollen. They are comprised of a stem-like filament and a pollen-producing anther. As the flower ripens, the anthers tend to shrink and shrivel as they produce pollen. An education student at East Carolina University once described a stamen as looking like an eye shadow applicator, and ever since then I’ve used that analogy, especially for ripe stamen that have granules of pollen (eye shadow?) on them.

In the center of the flower is the female part, the pistil. At its top is the pollen-receptive stigma. In some species, like the big star-gazer lilies that are often in grocery store bouquets, the stigma opens and has a sticky coating as the flower ripens, making it more likely that pollen grains will stick to it. Below the stigma is the thin style, connecting the stigma to the ovary, which is the swollen part at the base. When a grain of pollen reaches the stigma, it grows a pollen tube all the way down the style to the ovary, where it fertilizes an ovule (which I like to call a pre-seed).

Eventually, the wood poppy drops its petals and stamens, and the ovary begins to swell. Inside, the fertilized ovules are developing into seeds.

This ovary had swollen from about 1/4 inch long to about 1 inch long, and the ovules likewise had enlarged, making them much easier to see. In the closer, backlit photo below, the developing seeds are even more obvious, and you can notice how each one has a furry-looking edge on one side.

Apparently, this species’ seeds are dispersed by ants and that furry bit is a fatty appendage called an elaiosome that ants like to eat. For more information on elaiosomes, check out a couple of Mike’s previous posts on seed dispersal by ants in bloodroot and trillium.

As I’ve refreshed my memory on flower parts, I’ve started looking at all the flowers in our yard with new eyes. Different species have developed fascinating takes on this basic structure. I’ll add more posts in the coming days highlighting some of the other flower species I’ve been examining. In the meantime, take advantage of this beautiful weather and head out into your yard with a magnifier and see if you can identify sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils on some of your flowers!

And if you’re an educator interested in the online workshops my team at the Museum has been creating, send me an email at melissa (dot) dowland (at) naturalsciences (dot) org.