Thank you to Weekend Gardener of the UBC Botanical Garden Forums for contributing today's photographs to help conclude the "Biodiversity of China" series (original thread with additional photograph via the BPotD Submissions Forum. Much appreciated!

Often lumped with Dicentra (in this case, as Dicentra scandens), the genus Dactylicapnos has recently been reasserted as taxonomically valid. According to the Flora of China, Dactylicapnos is a group of scandent (vine-like) herbaceous annuals and perennials, containing twelve species from the western Himalayas to China. Dactylicapnos scandens is distributed widely throughout the region, occurring from northwest India to northern Thailand, and reaching southern China.

If you are fortunate enough to have access, you can read an excellent account of Dactylicapnos scandens in Curtis's Botanical Magazine (complete with illustrations). If not, you can investigate some briefer accounts of the species in gardens via The Hegarty Webber Partnership weblog: "The Charms of a Chain Bracelet" or Paghat. Visiting UBC Botanical Garden? You can see this species near the entrance to the Asian garden, growing along Upper Asian Way (just past the first major intersection of paths).

Lastly, you'll likely have noticed some design changes to BPotD. Much of the past week, including weeknights and Saturday, were spent on updating the inner workings of the site to a) take advantage of some of the possibilities of the software; and b) fix bugs and improve performance. I had more success with a) than with b), because even though I had to abandon attempts to upgrade the site a second time, I could still take advantage of some features that I hadn't incorporated from the last time an upgrade was done nearly two years ago.

So, new things include being able to promote BPotD via social networking services (at the bottom of each entry), tag clouds, a search engine specific to BPotD, a functional archives page with links to all previous entries, a right-hand sidebar on every BPotD page, more links to information about UBC Botanical Garden and being able to register as an authenticated commenter (this is in addition to continuing to be able to comment anonymously). The "On This Day" feature has been moved to the archives. I'm a bit concerned about making each page as wide as it is, but trends are showing rapid uptake of wider monitors. The alternative is to trim the width of the daily photographs, but as this would automatically affect all older entries, it might cause some strange-looking entries.

There are more changes on the horizon, as we will be redesigning the entire UBC Botanical Garden web site before the end of March -- and it is almost a certainty that some of the redesign will also be applied to BPotD.