This is not a wheat field, despite its superficial resemblance to an early morning landscape in the rolling hills near Swift Current, Saskatchewan. The tiny violet in the middle of the photograph suggests you're looking at something much smaller in scale. Indeed, this patch of turfy coprosma is perhaps one of the densest concentrations of flowers in UBC Botanical Garden - I'd estimate ten thousand in a square metre, maybe more.

Coprosma petriei is a coffee relative. It's a mat-forming shrub, native to New Zealand. Although Coprosma is typically associated with New Zealand, members of the genus also occur in the islands of Polynesia, Australia, the Juan Fernandez Islands of Chile and Hawaii (e.g., Coprosma ernodeoides).

This particular plant is female: you can see a close-up of the twin stigmas of the flowers in this photograph of Coprosma petriei (for close-ups of both male and female flowers of Coprosma, scroll down the page on Coprosma ernodeoides linked above).

You can see this plant in the Australasian section of the Alpine Garden. Like yesterday's photo of the day, this is another plant that leaves a memory when touched. I'm not certain how best to describe it, but brushing your hand lightly across the stigmas is worth a second of your time.

I'm very pleased with this photograph. Accurately capturing the blue-green colour on the upper surface of the leaves was the challenge, and I think I was successful.

Rhododendron campanulatum is a showstopper of a rhododendron, grown in cultivation primarily for its foliage. The blue-green colour on the upper surface of the new leaves is due in part to a thin layer of hairs. Brush off the hairs with your finger, and you discover a typical glossy green upper leaf surface underneath. The bottom of the leaves are a tactile treat - there, the velvety hairs grow so thick that rubbing your fingers along them is like touching a beaver felt hat. This isn't your everyday sort of sensation. As the leaves age, the hairs on the upper surface are lost, while the velvety hairs below turn colour from the white seen here to fawn then finally to cinnamon. The velvety hairs are collectively known as the indumentum.

Speaking of colours, check out Beautifully Blue. This is from a botany weblog which I discovered today: Art and the Bryophyte, run by Julie Ryder and Dr. Christine Cargill in association with the Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Update (Feb. 28, 2006 2:13 PM PST): Changed accession number on entry to reflect Brent's comments below.

Ideally, every plant in a botanical garden should be identified and named. Sometimes, for any of a number of reasons, the ideal is not reached.

This lupine is a good example. Wild collected in Patagonia in the early 1980s, it is labelled (and in our database) as Lupinus sp. aff. mutabilis. The original assessment of the plant was that it resembled Lupinus mutabilis, but the collector was not willing to affirm its identity one hundred percent.

For twenty-three years now, this plant has quite happily grown in the South American section of the Alpine Garden. In that time, none of the staff or researchers have been able to decipher its true identity due to a gap in our library. Generally we'd need either a comprehensive guide to either the plants of Chile and / or Argentina (a flora) in our library, or, alternatively, a scientific work that describes the Lupinus of the region or the world (a monograph). Without a step-by-step key to identify plants in the genus Lupinus of that region, any moniker we attach to the plant is scientifically known as a “guess” - and makes the plant even less valuable to researchers. In the case of using plants for research, it is better to be uncertain than to be wrong. So, for the time being, this plant remains a beautiful mystery.

Well, waking up at 5:30 AM yesterday morning was worth it, photographically-speaking. The early morning light was magnificent, and the garden is both quiet (except for all the birds) and filled with fragrance at 7 AM. It seems like it is the only way to take good botanical photographs during hot summer days and evenings, so I'll be switching my sleep patterns a bit.

The Himalayan blue poppies are just one of the many delights right now, although it seems to me there are fewer blooming this year than in previous years. The genus Meconopsis is found typically in the mountains of southeast Asia. There is a disjunct species in Wales and western England, Meconopsis cambrica. The people at the Meconopsis Group think it is doubtful that this disjunct species will remain a Meconopsis with a taxonomic re-examination. In the Asian Garden, you can find some plants flowering here and there at this time of year, although the largest patch of hybrid Meconopsis is yet to bloom near the fallen grand fir at the far end of the garden.

I promised that I would make a small request of local residents in today's photo of the day entry. Here it is: A Request for Help. In summary: the garden has been without adequate public transit service for three years. The plan for the next five years is to maybe have a shuttle bus that stops at the garden in the summer. It's frustrating and deflating, because (speaking unasked on behalf of the staff and volunteers), we have so much to share and so many people who want to share at the garden, and yet it is planned to have us continue to be difficult to access. We've ten thousand plants with stories to tell at the garden, and while the stories can be told through venues like the Photo of the Day, they still need to be experienced (P.S. The contest from a few days ago is still open).

Anyway, if you're a local (or a tourist who uses public transportion) and can spare a few minutes to add a few comments in support of restoring year-round public transportation to the garden after reading through that piece, I'd be much obliged.

Update (May 28, 2005 11:02 PM PST): Jordi from Spain wrote to me today to request a larger version of this file for desktop wallpaper. So here it is: Meconopsis betonicifolia, at two-thirds the size of the original photograph. The photo is not perfectly in focus, a fact which is revealed more strongly at larger image size - but that's just an excuse for me to try again. If you do want to use it as a desktop wallpaper, and have Photoshop, I recommend making it purposefully more blurry or alternately running a few passes of unsharp masking on it.

Also, I've substantially changed some of the text to add a few more links and more detail on some facts.

Photographed a few weekends ago in Merritt, BC.

Sorry, only the shortest of blurbs today - I wasn't able to post last night, and it is now very early AM, so I'm going to take advantage of being up so early and I'm out the door to go photograph!

I promised to make a request of local residents in today's post, but I won't be able to do it -- early morning light beckons -- I will make the request with tomorrow's post, though.

The last couple early evenings have been difficult for photography here in sunny Vancouver - bright sun and blue skies tend to produce photographs that are high in contrast. The end result is that the shadows in the photograph tend to be too dark (like in this photograph) and the brights and whites are oversaturated (which you can notice an example of in the plinth). Still, I've photographed much worse than this, and I find the photograph pleasing enough to inspire me to try again when the light is better, so there you go. Maybe if I improve upon it, I'll post a follow-up someday.

Anyway, this is the Physic Garden at UBC. It's one of the smaller gardens, built around the theme of medieval and Renaissance European medicinals. Along the European theme, it is also the most formal garden with its brick-lined paths, yew hedge, small beds, and physical structure centrepiece (in this case, the plinth and sundial).

Although there are a number of display labels and a few signs, this garden is a candidate for even more interpretation - the plants span the history of Western medicine prior to the 20th century, and you can only imagine how much was written about them (both correct and incorrect). For example, one of the tenets previously believed by practitioners of medicine was the “Doctrine of Signatures” - that the physical appearance of the plant was a hint as to its utility for healing people.

As a slight aside, if you're in the Vancouver area, it's an ideal time to visit the garden - the Asian Garden has highlights of Himalayan blue poppies here and there along with masses of 20 metre high climbing Clematis on its conifers (which I've been trying unsuccessfully to photograph!), the Alpine Garden easily has hundreds of different kinds of flowers in bloom and the Food Garden is just starting to get going with this year's plantings.

As incentive to visit the garden and to tie in with this particular photo of the day, I'm going to hold a small contest. The prize: I'll send you a “Seaweeds” poster from Celebrate Biodiversity. The contest: be the first person to send me an email with the answer to the following question: “What is the subtle joke on the sundial in the Physic Garden?” A hint: you'll need to be familiar with the University of British Columbia. A request: Please don't enter the contest if you already know the answer to the question.

As a final note, if you are a local resident who appreciates the garden and the Photo of the Day, I'd like to ask you to plan to set aside a few minutes of your day tomorrow - I'm going to make a special request with tomorrow's entry that should only take a few minutes of your time, but could potentially mean a lot to the garden.

Today marks another first for the Botany Photo of the Day - first photograph from someone not affiliated with UBC. This photograph was forwarded to Judy Newton, the garden's education coordinator, from a personal friend to see if Judy or someone else at the garden could identify the plant. With a little help from Holmgren's “Illustrated Companion to Gleason & Cronquist's Manual of the Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada”, we were able to positively identify it as Conopholis americana (usually, I post emailed ID requests to our Plant Identification Discussion Forum so everyone can learn but since it is being shared on Photo of the Day, that isn't necessary).

Conopholis americana is commonly known as American cancer-root, and is distributed throughout eastern North America. This photograph is from a few days ago, and was taken in Frozen Head State Campground near Wartburg, Tennessee by Sam Roberts. American cancer-root is a member of the plant family Orobanchaceae, and like most members of that family, it lacks chlorophyll and is wholly parasitic, in this case stealing nutrients from the roots of woody forest plants. Some orobanchaceous plants are only partly parasitic with a partial reliance on chlorophyll, like Castilleja, featured previously on Photo of the Day (and originally posted incorrectly under its previous family name, Scrophulariaceae).

Apparently, the ancestral plant of this family was either non-parasitic or partially parasitic, as it seems the strategy of being completely parasitic evolved on more than one occasion within the family (for references, see the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group entry on Orobanchaceae).

As I mentioned earlier, this is the first photograph on the Botany Photo of the Day by someone not affiliated with UBC. I think it'd be a good idea to continue with this and perhaps make it a once-a-week feature. It would help mix up the images a little more in terms of style and content, as well as de-emphasize the Pacific Northwest of North America. I'm thinking of setting up a couple systems - a Flickr tag as well as an area on the garden's discussion forums where people can submit photos for review. There'd have to be a few common-sense conditions, like “it has to be your photograph”, “you have to be comfortable with the Creative Commons license used” and “there's no guarantee your photo will ever be used”, but I don't think they'd be a barrier for most people. Would anyone be interested in contributing?

A few comments have been made recently about mixing up the photographs a bit to include more landscape and habit shots. I'm quite happy to do that, since it pushes me out of the comfort zone of taking photographs with my best lens (the macro). Instead, I'll be testing the limits of my cheapest lens and learning how to digitally correct for lens distortion.

In the meantime, I thought I'd dip into the garden's archives to share a cultivated landscape shot. This is a scanned lantern slide, photographed and hand-painted by John Davidson sometime in the first few decades of the 1900s. The subject of the slide is the alpine garden at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland.

Unfortunately, I'm not versed enough in identifying alpine plants by habit and shape to be able to determine whether Davidson's hand-tinting of colours is accurate. I suspect it might be, though, as my impression of him from exposure to his lantern slides and written archives is that of a very thorough person. If the colours are accurate, it meant he either coloured all of the plants in the scene from memory or he sketched the scene with annotations about colours for the slide tinting process. I don't think it was the latter, as I've not seen anything in the archives to suggest that was the case. It would be an interesting project for an enterprising person to see if RBGE has archived maps of its beds from the era and then cross-reference to this slide.

It's also an opportune time to mention that UBC Botanical Garden and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh have signed a reciprocal membership agreement. UBC's Garden Pass Members receive free admission to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and its specialist gardens at Benmore, Dawyck and Logan on production of a valid UBC Botanical Garden Membership Card (and RBGE members receive equivalent privileges at UBC).

Lastly, a note of thanks to Dr. Scott Russell of the University of Oklahoma who runs Scott's Botanical Links. Dr. Russell posts a botanical link of interest every weekday, and featured this site on May 19. In his comments, he mentions a page I've set up that aggregates botanical RSS feeds - you can see it here - it includes the Botany Photo of the Day, Scott's Botanical Links, and Botanical Electronic News. If you know of any other botanical RSS feeds, please drop me a note or leave a comment.

The first duplicate entry on Botany Photo of the Day, I previously wrote about Calypso bulbosa on May 2, 2005. Still, I couldn't resist sharing this photograph - it is the first time I've ever seen the plants congregated so closely together. It's also interesting to me because it shows the plants in various stages, from fully-emerged flowers to flowers which are senescing.

Photograph taken north of Princeton, BC on May 16.

Yellow glacier lily from Manning Provincial Park last weekend. It started to snow while I was taking this photograph, so I was taking pictures quickly and without my usual tripod. I wasn't too keen on being caught at the top of the mountain with an icy downhill road (and no one else likely to venture up the side of the mountain that afternoon / evening), so I didn't spend as much time there as I would have liked.

Photographed last year near Merritt, BC (with a different camera than usually used for the Botany Photo of the Day). My visit to the same site last weekend was a week too early, as only a few had started to bloom. I was hoping to get a photo en masse, because it was exciting to see the blue ribbons on the dun hillsides, but I suppose it will have to wait another year.

Updated Oct. 10, 2006 at 2:39PM local time: I had this incorrectly identified as Castilleja miniata. It is actually Castilleja hispida var. hispida, as corrected by Mark in the comments. Thanks Mark!

This red paintbrush was photographed near Merritt, BC, last weekend. The red parts of the plant are not actually petals, but modified leaves (bracts).

Apologies for the brief commentary for today (and the next few days), as I'm out of town.

(Quentin Cronk, Director of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research has kindly offered to guestblog today -- Daniel)

This photograph was taken at Jervis Inlet, British Columbia, on a very enjoyable Botany graduate field trip with UBC bryologists Shona Ellis and Wilf Schofield (co-author of the Takakiaceae for the Bryophyte Flora of North America project), organized by graduate students Nyssa Temmel and Chris Sears. The photograph was taken standing on a boulder in a wet gulley in the persistent drizzle of a typical March day, having arrived in a hired motor boat at the head of Jervis Inlet (the site is not accessible by road, nor would it be possible to hike in). The boat was gently beached so that we could jump off into the shallows.

The moss Takakia is interesting for many reasons, not least because when discovered it was thought to be a liverwort! Hooker collected specimens of another species in the Himalayas in the mid-19th century, which Mitten described as a liverwort, Lepidozia ceratophylla. Without seeing the sporophytes (capsule bearing structures full of spores), which are rare, this was quite a reasonable identification. Sporophytes were later discovered in Alaska. These were clearly moss-like and recent DNA data have confirmed its status as a moss. The British Columbian species, Takakia lepidozioides, also occurs in both Asia and Alaska, while the other species, T. ceratophylla, is confined to Asia and Alaska.

The reason sporophytes are so rare is that there are separate male and female plants which reproduce asexually, so large patches of a single sex develop, unable to produce the sporophytes (which result from fusion of male and female gametes). All the plants in British Columbia appear to be female, so sporophytes are not expected anytime soon. The male plants may have become extinct during one of B.C.'s ice ages. The presence of an ice sheet would confine Takakia to small refuge areas. It is possible that a male spore will blow in from Asia one day and start the sexual process once more in B.C. However, this may not happen for millions of years.

The plants are very small and the leaf segments are typically only one or two cells wide. This photograph covers roughly the area of a postage stamp.

Several interesting features can be seen. It is a very wet site on a dripping rocky cliff near a waterfall in the heart of B.C.'s coastal rainforest, and the wet conditions encourage a growth of "bluegreen algae" (cyanobacteria) that produce the prominent slime. Clearly visible in this photograph are the long green leafless "stolon shoots" which allow the plant to colonise bare areas. The leaves are bifid (deeply split into two segments) and this is obvious in a few places. Also visible are a few white "rhizomatous shoots" which give rise to the normal leafy shoots. Oil bodies are present in some of the cells and this results in the plant having a cinnamon smell when dry.

There are two species in the genus Letharia (the wolf lichens), and both can be found in western North America. This particular lichen was found growing at the trunk base of a Pinus ponderosa near Merritt, British Columbia.

Wolf lichens are so named because of their common use as poisons for wolves and foxes in Europe centuries ago. The lichen, with its toxic vulpinic acid, was mixed with ground glass and meat, apparently a deadly combination.

The lichen was also used as a source for making a yellow-coloured dye, which is not difficult to imagine.

Spreading phlox forms mats of flowers at mid- to high elevations. This photograph, taken at roughly 1500m (@ 4900 feet) above sea level, was the lowest I observed the plant, while driving up the switchbacks on the side of the mountain capped by Blackwell Peak in E.C. Manning Provincial Park. Phlox diffusa can have flowers in colours ranging from pink to lavender to white, and the full diversity of colour was seen at this roadside site.

As an aside, I'd like to thank Steven (aka “plep”) for mentioning the Photo of the Day in his Monday, May 16th list of links. Steven compiles and reviews high-quality cultural, historical, literary and scientific web sites every weekday on his site; I like to think of his site as “The Journal of the Human Endeavour”. Well worth a visit.

Like many Chinese genera of plants, Amsonia also occurs in eastern North America. Atypically, however, the centre for diversity for Amsonia is in eastern North America rather than Asia (compare with Magnolia or Acer Section Macrantha (the snakebark maples)). Of the twenty or so species of Amsonia, 16 occur in eastern North America, while only 4 are distributed in Asia. Amsonia elliptica is the only member of the genus that occurs in China.

The Flora of China summary for Amsonia elliptica reports that a “decoction of all parts is used to cure chills and to induce sweat.”

Only a quick note today and tomorrow, as I'm out in the field taking some photos of native wildflowers and landscapes.

The wheel tree is now in full flower, which will last several weeks. Trochodendron has an interesting way of preventing self-fertilization - check out what was written for the interpretative sign.

Last year, I had the luck of being able to attend the awarding of an honourary degree from UBC to Bishop Desmond Tutu, and I keenly remember him asserting, “I am, because you are.” (which is deceptively simple). To me, the people who live this philosophy are the real heroes - the individuals whose sense for the “other” is so keenly developed that they cannot help but act or speak out; they are the embodiment of the human potential for good. I'm generous with who I accord as personal heroes - it includes broad swaths of people, from palliative caregivers to artists who provoke me to think differently to scientists who (after looking at all of the facts) cannot help but advocate for the Earth and its organisms.

I had the privilege yesterday of meeting one of those scientists: Dr. Daniel Pauly (a profile of Dr. Pauly from Science). I noticed Dr. Pauly at the entrance to the garden, so (boldly for me) walked up and introduced myself. Needless to say, I was delighted when Dr. Pauly, his wife and guests from Germany accepted my offer of a personal tour.

Now, I'm certainly not the best person at the garden to give a tour - I can think of at least a half dozen other staff members who'd be better, along with the Friends of the Garden who are typically responsible for tours. Still, the plants in the garden make it easy, and the Asian Garden is in fine shape: the 30m high Clematis montana scrambling up the native cedars is a cascade of blooms, the Meconopsis betonicifolia (Himalayan blue poppy) punctuates the green foliage here and there, and this Delavay mock orange stands out with its combination of colours. As that linked page suggests, the contrast of the calyx and petals is best seen before the flowers are fully open, which is why I'm pleased with this photograph; it has the flower buds at a number of stages. I also took a photograph of the flower fully open, for your interest.

Speaking of scientists I regard as heroes, it's an ideal time to explain the rest of the tagline for the Photo of the Day, which I alluded to in the entry on Salvia discolor. As I interpret her comments, Sandy is okay with being imitated, so I've readded the word “Daily” to the tagline (I'm not creative enough to think of anything more suitable), but what is the inspiration for “In science, beauty. In beauty, science.”?

The thread of that idea can be traced back to a talk given at a 1982 meeting of the Canadian Botanical Association by the late Dr. J. Stan Rowe (disclosure: biography written by my uncle) entitled “Beauty and the Botanist”. I wasn't at that meeting, but fortunately, it was later made into an essay and is available online (and hosted on my uncle's site). A quote: “The perception of beauty in the world is the proof of our belonging, the bridge to a wider sympathy extended beyond our own kind.” I am because you are.

Our current understanding of the plant family Ericaceae (which includes rhododendrons, blueberries and heaths) suggests that plants from this genus, Enkianthus, are the “oldest”, if you are speaking in evolutionary terms. In other words, if you investigated all of the genera of plants within this family, used shared characteristics to determine how closely plants were related, and then calculated the relationships between the genera based on those characteristics, you would discover that Enkianthus has been around the longest.

All other woody members of Ericaceae have characteristics which Enkianthus lacks; one of these is “tetradinous” pollen. This simply means that the fully-developed pollen grains are fused as a unit of four, and this is the case for nearly all woody Ericaceae except for Enkianthus. By contrast, Enkianthus has “monadinous” pollen - each mature pollen grain is a single unit. It could be argued that the evolution of tetradinous pollen in this family was one of the changes that allowed the woody plants of the family Ericaceae to diversify (it could also be argued otherwise, as there are other characteristics that are different between Enkianthus and the others - see Kron, K. A., Judd, W. S., Stevens, P. F., Crayn, D. M., Anderberg, A. A., Gadek, P. A., Quinn, C. J., Luteyn, J. L. Phylogenetic Classification of Ericaceae: Molecular and Morphological Evidence. The Botanical Review 2002 68: 335-423). Perhaps if the development of fused pollen grains in woody Ericaceae hadn't happened millions of years ago, you wouldn't be consuming blueberry jam or cranberry juice today.

While in the Asian Garden yesterday documenting some of this year's plant inventory at the garden, I decided to try photographing this lovely little fern yet again. I've attempted it previously, but was never happy with the results.

I'm happy with this, although the photograph at this size still doesn't capture the flow and subtle beauty of this gem. So, for the first time for the Botany Photo of the Day series, I'm supplying the full-size version of a photograph, Adiantum venustum, for you to see. Be warned! The file is 3 megabytes in size - if you are on dial-up, go fetch a cup of coffee or tea. Unfortunately, the file opens to the weakest spot in the photograph (the upper left) - make sure you scroll down and to the right to be appreciating the same things I am with the plant.

Apologies for being light on the science side of things today - as I mentioned in a previous post, my time is elsewhere this week with the inventory. I do have the energy for a small story, though. I wanted to thank everyone who attended the Perennial Plant Sale on the weekend - the event was a huge success. I know that at least a few readers of Botany Photo of the Day attended, because I had an opportunity to speak with the Friend of the Garden who was volunteering in the “Tender Plants” section yesterday evening. She admitted to me that she hadn't visited the web site recently, and could not figure out why so many people were asking for Salvia discolor, which was featured as the Photo of the Day last Saturday. Once she figured out it was because of the web site, she was pretty impressed. So, thank you to those who live locally and who were inspired enough to seek out Salvia discolor based off that photo entry; if you did attend the sale hoping for a Salvia discolor but were disappointed, I hope the thousands of other plants available partly made up for it.

Only a quick note today - I'm helping with the garden's annual plant collections inventory this week, so time is scarce.

Even if you aren't familiar with the genus Passiflora, you are probably aware of the fruit of the cultivated Passiflora edulis: passionfruit. The plant in the photograph is a different species, and is commonly known as fragrant granadilla. It is also cultivated, but only as a fresh fruit (not for juice) - Source: Fruits from America: An Ethnobotanical Inventory - Passiflora alata. The Fruits for America site also includes a photograph of the mature fruit.

This particular plant was photographed in a non-public glasshouse at the garden. We unfortunately do not have a public display glasshouse (yet), which would be ideal for showcasing plants such as these.

P.S. Note the photographer's prop in the upper left: flagging tape to suspend the viny stem from a pipe so as to be able to photograph inside the flower...

Photographed in the Honeymoon Bay Ecological Reserve ten days ago, this trillium was one of many which dotted the area. Rarely growing in clumps, the plants were instead often growing as individual plants here and there - perhaps a result of the way their seeds are dispersed.

According to the authors of Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, seeds of the western trillium are dispersed by ants. Oil-rich appendages on the seeds are attractive as a food source, so the seeds are taken back to the colony and the appendages are eaten by the adult ants or fed to the larvae. The seeds are then tossed in the ant colony's rubbish pile, which may result in the seed being “planted” a considerable distance away from the parent.

There are (more or less) 43 species of Trillium recognized by scientists - 38 of these occur in North America.

Herein lies a tale.

The newly released book, “The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed” by Vancouver author John Vaillant features this plant photographed last Friday. Well, not exactly this plant, although it is genetically identical - this is a propagation from the original. How did the original compel “myth, madness and greed”?

From the book publisher's release:

When a kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited Alaskan island just north of the Canadian border, they re-ignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest that made international news. On a winter night in 1997, a logger-turned-activist named Grant Hadwin plunged into the frigid waters of the Yakoun River in the Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw behind him. When he was done, a unique spruce tree – 50 meters tall and covered with luminous golden needles – was teetering on its massive stump.

The tree, which baffled scientists, was sacred to the Haida on whose land it had stood for over 300 years. It was also beloved by local loggers who singled it out for protection in the midst of vast clear cuts. Since the 1970s, the mist-shrouded archipelago – one of the continent's most pristine and vibrant ecosystems – has been a battleground with government officials and logging companies squaring off against the Haida and environmental groups. The loss of the mythic golden spruce united loggers, natives and environmentalists in sorrow and outrage. But while heroic efforts were made to revive the tree, Grant Hadwin, the tree's confessed killer, disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

So where does this plant in UBC Botanical Garden fit into the story? In the 1970s, then-director Dr. Roy Taylor participated in an expedition to the Queen Charlotte Islands, where cuttings were taken of the golden spruce. Two of the cuttings that were grafted survived (although there is now only the one plant in the Native Garden). When the event occurred in 1997, Bruce Macdonald, the director of the garden after Dr. Taylor, offered one of the plants at UBC to the Haida nation, but unfortunately that plant died while waiting to be shipped. As it turns out, though, propagations had been made from the felled tree, and one of those now resides in a place of honour in Port Clements. I have read reports that the colour is not the same, although I don't recall where. Interestingly, I thought the golden spruce at UBC was looking the most golden that I've seen in the five years I've been here when I photographed it Friday.

There's plenty more online about the story. The original article from 2002 that was the springboard for John Vaillant's writing of the book is here at The New Yorker: The Golden Bough. Coenosium Nursery has an article about the golden spruce from a horticultural and horticultural history perspective. The Coenosium article suggests to me that the plant should not actually be named Picea sitchensis 'Aurea', because it is not the same plant as those originally propagated under that name, which I allude to on this thread in the garden's discussion forums.

The plant in the garden is only a small part of the story, however. If, like me, you are intrigued by the rest of the story - the maelstrom of personalities and policies that erupted into the murder of the golden spruce, the reaction of the communities and the mystery of Hadwin's fate - I hope you'll attend UBC's Talk of the Town with John Vaillant on Thursday, May 12 (7:30pm to 9pm) at the UBC Robson Square campus. The lecture is free, but pre-registration is requested (604-822-5675 or info.talkofthetown@ubc.ca) to ensure that the audience can be properly accomodated. I'll be giving them a call today, myself.

Update (May 12, 2005 11:48 PM PST): I attended the talk this evening, and I really enjoyed it. I liked the format of watching an interview between a host and guest - it was like being “live in studio”. John Vaillant is certainly not lacking for skill in either writing or speaking, so I suggested he give the garden a call if he's looking for other botanical writing ideas - there are thousands of stories to tell with plants.

I've also changed the name to reflect what will likely remain the cultivar name for the plant (I'd previously had it as Picea sitchensis 'Aurea', but that was a genetically-different plant introduced much earlier). This name (as is told in the book) reflects the name that the plant was sold under by Coenosium Nursery.

Update (June 5, 2005 12:09 AM PST): You can listen to the author of the book discuss this story on NPR - Killing the Golden Spruce.

I wish I could say raspberries were in season locally, but my appetite will have to wait another two months to be satisfied.

This photograph, from last July, is of the Tulameen raspberry. 'Tulameen' was bred by one of UBC's Friends of the Garden, Hugh Daubeny, while working as a research scientist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

We've previously featured 'Tulameen' on the garden's weblog, but it's definitely worth mentioning again. As David Karp exclaimed in his New York Times article while writing about new hybrids that do not sacrifice flavour for production values, “...Tulameen [is] a large, luscious variety introduced in 1989 from British Columbia. It is considered the standard of quality in Europe, with an ancestry that includes Willamette, an old Northwest processing variety, for high flavor, and Cumberland black raspberry, for firmness.” Indeed, while in both Bath and London in 2003, we bought Spanish-grown 'Tulameen' raspberries at Marks and Spencer.

Scientifically speaking, a raspberry is not a true berry, but rather an “aggregate of drupelets”. Each of the spherical units that make up the entire fruit was once a single pistil that has now matured into a drupelet; a drupe is a fruit with a fleshy exterior and a single hardened seed - think of pitted fruit like cherries or peaches - while a drupelet is simply a smaller drupe. Unlike cherries though, the drupelets of raspberries are assembled together into a single larger fruit - hence, an aggregate. A true berry, in botanical terms, is a simple fruit that is generally thin-skinned, fleshy, and contains multiple seeds - think grapes and blueberries.

If you live locally, you can often find a few plants at the Shop in the Garden (and some will also be available at the Perennial Plant Sale today). If you don't live locally, check online - quite a few nurseries stock the canes, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and the UK.

“Black” flowers - very desirable to many gardeners, even though (strictly speaking) they are not a true black. Rather, the black colour is due to a composite of dark coloured pigments in high concentrations. Despite a truly black flower being unattainable, plant breeders and hybridizers on occasion do their best to produce the darkest flower possible, and so flowers which are bred to be black are not impossible to find in the marketplace.

There are, however, a few plants that haven't been bred to be black, bur rather evolved that way. Salvia discolor (Andean silver-leaf sage) is one of those few. I was hoping to tell the story of why Andean silver-leaf sage has black flowers, but came up with very little while researching the evolutionary biology of its flower colour. Is the pigmentation irrelevant to its pollinators? If that's the case, why undergo the biological cost of concentrated pigmentation? Is the colour a strategy to accelerate floral development by increasing heat absorption (keeping in mind that it grows in high altitudes in the Andes) and thus biological activity? I'm speculating quite a bit; I don't have any expertise with floral pigmentation and development, but maybe someone with knowledge will comment and provide some answers (or at least more informed speculation!).

I should mention that if you live in the Vancouver area, you can pick up this plant at UBC Botanical Garden's Perennial Plant Sale on Sunday - first come, first serve though, and I suspect Salvia discolor will sell out quickly. One of the great things about the sale (for you) is that the public get first dibs - volunteers and garden staff have to wait an hour after the sale opens to purchase plants. Good for you, not so good for me - but I don't have a sunny spot at home to grow it anyway, as much as I like the plant.

A couple of other housekeeping notes: David Winter at Science and sensibility added the Botany Photo of the Day and the UBC Botanical Garden Weblog to his list of weblogs devoted to botany: Botany in the Blogosphere (after I had commented on his original list). David particularly liked the tagline “In science, beauty. In beauty, science. Daily.”.

Then, while using Technorati to see who is linking to the Photo of the Day, I noticed Sandy from Pollenatrix commented on the Calypso bulbosa photograph from a few days ago. That was great, but I then realized to my dismay that her tagline is “Botanical discipline, daily.”. I know that Pollenatrix has been around for a long time, and I'd certainly visited it a few times in the past. Sandy, will you forgive me? I must have liked the last bit of your tagline so much that I incorporated it into this one subconsciously - I promise it wasn't a conscious decision. I'll do a rethink on the one used for Botany Photo of the Day and alter it (or maybe someone has a suggestion to replace the word, “daily”?).

I'll explain the inspiration for the rest of the tagline in a future post.

(Douglas Justice, Curator of Collections at UBC, wanted to guestblog today - I've added a comment with some of my thoughts -- Daniel)

With the possible exception of Kadsura japonica (magnolia vine), Kadsura is poorly known in cultivation. Evergreen twining lianas (woody climbers), they are closely related to Schisandra, a genus of mostly deciduous vining species from Asia (one species in the SE USA). Both genera produce unisexual flowers, usually on different plants, with the females exhibiting separate carpels spirally arranged on a conical torus (floral axis). Once fertilized, each carpel expands to become a spherical berry and the torus expands, elongating into a spike in Schisandra or becoming globose as in Kadsura.

Kadsuras are strictly Asian and Kadsura interior is known only from SW Yunnan and NE Myanmar (Burma). This species differs from the related Kadsura heteroclita (Roxburgh) Craib by its softball-sized fruits covered with up to 70 glossy, red berries (K. heteroclita produces smaller walnut-sized fruits with fewer berries). We have only the one plant, derived from seed collected by Peter Wharton (curator of the David C. Lam Asian Garden) from a venerable 25m specimen growing at 2200m on Qiqi Mountain, Gongshan County, Yunnan. Although this species is monoecious (both male and female flowers are produced on the same plant), production of its extraordinary fruits is not assured as pollen may be released when stigmas are not receptive. Dichogamy (the maturation of male and female organs at different times, thus effectively preventing self-polination) is a common feature in monoecious plants. In protandrous plants (anther release prior to stigma receptiveness), sufficient pollen can be collected and stored until pollination can be effected; however, this species appears to be protogynous (our first flowers are clearly female).

The palm trees near the garden entrance are in full flower. This was a quick snapshot from yesterday, taken without all of my usual tools (tripod, plamps, reflectors), but it still turned out okay. I've photographed these Trachycarpus fortunei a few times in the past year, but I've yet to take a good habit shot - they're still too short.

As an aside, this entry begins the second month of Botany Photo of the Day (I planned to use a different (and I think superior) photograph today, but I need to verify a few things first - so maybe tomorrow). When we launched Botany Photo of the Day, it was with the understanding that we'd try it out for a month and gauge the response. It does take effort and discipline to have something fresh and appealing every day, and the question arises of whether this is the best use of limited resources (we're not NASA and their Astronomy Picture of the Day by any stretch of the imagination).

My assessment after a month's worth of entries is mixed. Conversation about the photographs comes readily enough from people I interact with through work, but only one person not affiliated with UBC has left a comment (although to be fair, a few weblogs have linked to us with comments), so that's slightly disheartening. On the other hand, at least a few dozen people subscribe to the RSS feed, so I'm pleased with that. Lastly, the number of unique web site visitors for April was easily 1.5 times our previous highest month - part of that can be explained because of spring and people using the discussion forums for gardening q+a, but it is also at least partly due to the Photo of the Day.

So, while I wouldn't consider this feature a raging success, I think it should continue on in this format for the time being and be given a chance to grow. It seems to have potential. I've yet to receive any negative feedback, but the concerns that were initially raised about it remain to be addressed.

Update (May 5, 2005 8:50 AM PST): One of the potential advantages of doing the Photo of the Day in the “weblog way” just emerged - go visit the updated entry for Babiana ringens to see what I mean.

This is “membranous dog-lichen” interwoven with a species of beaked moss (likely Kindbergia oregana, but I could be convinced it is Kindbergia praelonga). The “pelts”, as members of the genus Peltigera are commonly known, are perhaps my favourite lichens. How can one find fault with their texture, colour and form? And how can one not be intrigued by the lichens anyway, “organisms” that are actually a composite of a fungus and either green algae or blue-green algae (or, on occasion, all three!)?

If you look closely, you'll see a few orange-red structures along the edge of the thallus (the body of the lichen). These are the apothecia; these fruiting bodies from the fungal portion of the lichen will eventually release spores. However, spore release is thought to be a poor way for lichens to reproduce - when the spore reaches its new environment, the fungal component of the lichen begins to grow, but it must somehow find its related alga. It is thought that lichens better propagate themselves through breakage and distribution of a part of the thallus, which distributes all parts of the composite organism to the new environment.

Ethnobotanical note: In Lichens of North America (a must-have book for any lichenophiles), the authors state that the membranous dog-lichen was used by the Kwakiutl tribe of northwestern BC as a love charm. The authors go on to wonder, “it is not clear how (or if) it worked”. I've been trying out a few different methods with it for this purpose, but I haven't been successful yet. I'll keep you posted.

Honeymoon Bay Ecological Reserve, near Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, BC, was preserved for the dense concentration of Erythronium revolutum (pink fawn lily) that can be found blooming in late April. Knowing that this year's spring has been quite warm, I didn't hold out much hope for seeing many (or any) of the fawn lilies in bloom last weekend; as it turned out, I only found two plants blooming amongst thousands of seed capsules. I did however discover that the timing of the flowers roughly coincides with the blooming of the same species in the Native Garden, so I now have a timely indicator of when to visit the area in future years.

The trip had value beyond scouting for future trips; the trilliums and bleeding hearts were in full swing, and the vanilla-leaf (Achlys triphylla) was just starting to flower. The scenery was outstanding as well, so I was inspired to try out a few landscape shots, like this one.

Sutton Creek borders one side of the ecological reserve. I was intrigued by the moss-laden overhanging branches of Acer macrophyllum (big-leaf maples) that lined much of the creek, so this is my attempt at illustrating them.

One other thing to note is the “white-barked” trees on the other side of the creek. This is Alnus rubra (red alder), which actually has grey bark. Here though, the bark is near-completely covered with white crustose lichens, and I'll guess that one of the culprits is Graphis scripta (hieroglyphics lichen).

If you had been walking along one of the park trails near Ladysmith (BC) on Saturday, you might have found a bit of an odd sight: a man lying on his stomach on the trail.

I don't think anyone did see the sight, but I wouldn't have noticed if they had. I was lying on my stomach on the trail, busily taking a photograph of these fairy-slipper orchids.

Calypso bulbosa has a widespread distribution across the temperate northern hemisphere, but it is becoming increasingly uncommon near populated centres, due to trampling, flower-picking and naive attempts at transplanting.

These two flowers are a touch past their prime; more recently-emerged flowers in the locale were a deeper shade of purple, much like the colour seen on this Calypso bulbosa photographed last year in Banff. I didn't notice yellow in the throat of the flowers in the plants near Ladysmith, but that may have been carelessness of observation on my part.

Calypso was a nymph in Greek mythology; she delayed Odysseus from returning home for seven years.

As a last note, if you are looking for an orchid for your garden, may I suggest Bletilla striata? They're available in limited quantity at this year's Perennial Plant Sale.

Native to northern California and southwest Oregon, Iris innominata is (like many irises) highly variable in flower colour, ranging from mostly purple with a bit of yellow to yellow throughout to cream with splashes of yellow and purple venation like this one.

Apologies for the short note today, as I'm off on a field trip. Need more photographs!