Another thank you to Andreas of Bogotá (aka Quimbaya@Flickr) for sharing images of plants from Colombia (original). This photograph is part of a set that Andreas has assembled on Cerro de Usaquén. Much appreciated!

I had a difficult time discovering any information about this genus of plants until I broadened my search a little bit and learned that the genus Espeletiopsis (and 7 other related genera) were all once lumped under the genus name Espeletia. That led to discovering this site by Dr. Jason Rauscher, The Espeletia Page. Dr. Rauscher has written a brilliant introduction to this fascinating group of plants. Some tidbits: most of these plants grow in tropical montane regions with the growth form of a giant rosette. The height of plants in these genera range from small rosettes measuring only 5 cm high to the tallest plants in the local landscape at over 5 m. Photographs of some of these giant relatives of today's Espeletiopsis corymbosa can also be found on Dr. Rauscher's site in this gallery of images.

Eric in SF@Flickr has kindly shared today's photograph with us (original image posted ~ a year ago on the BPotD Flickr Group Pool). Thank you once again, Eric.

California buckeye is endemic to the state. Its poisonous properties were recognized and utilized by the First Nations of the region, who ground the seeds into flour and then used the flour as a fish poison (ref: Jepson Manual and expanded in the Wikipedia entry on Aesculus californica).

Henry W. Coe State Park shares a series of photographs of California buckeye on its web site, if you're keen to see the plant from other perspectives and in detail.

On a different note, if you live in the Seattle area, you might like to attend my lecture on “Beauty and the Botanist” at 1pm tomorrow at the Centre for Urban Horticulture (3501 NE 41st St.), hosted by the Northwest Perennial Alliance. Cost is $5 if you're not an NPA member.

Botany / art resource link: Discovered via Pruned weblog, Wood Anatomy of Central European Species shows the beauty of wood at the cellular level. Take a look at Larix decidua as a fine example of what's available in the list of species.

Another African plant today, this time courtesy of sky_view@Flickr from California (original | BPotD Flickr Group Pool). Do have a look at sky_view's other stellar images of flowers! Thank you for sharing.

“Lachenalia liliflora is one of the most beautiful and most endangered bulbs on the planet.” states Adam Harrower of Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in this thorough article on the species. Along with biological details about the plant, Harrower relates a sad story of the destruction of one of the three known remaining wild populations; it involves a bulldozer and a new housing development. Though his story mentions that half of the plants had survived, more recent accounts I've read suggest that all of the plants have since been wiped out. The Wine Estate De Grendel and the Tygerberg Nature Reserve near Capetown now host the two remaining populations.

This species has also been the subject of artist illustrations. I'm fairly certain one of the first appeared in Icones Plantarum Rarorium (published between 1781 and 1793), available online thanks to the Missouri Botanical Garden's Rare Books initiative here. Jean Emmons, a member of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Florilegium Society, likely has one of the most recent illustrations: Lachenalia liliflora (2006).

Thank you to Brent aka foliosus@Flickr from Portland, Oregon for sharing today's photograph with us (original) via the BPotD Flickr Group Pool. Check out Brent's web site for an appealing mixture of plants and web design.

A close-up shot of Zantedeschia aethiopica, or arum lily, was previously featured on BPotD. It's accompanied by a good set of links about the plant, so I won't pursue that again today.

However, a little bit of botanical history might be intriguing. Zantedeschia is named after the physician Giovanni Zantedeschi, by the physician and botanist Kurt Sprengel. This pattern of medicine and botany intertwined is longstanding, which makes sense considering the original medicines were directly derived from plants (and, of course, animals).

As another example, the University of Uppsala in 1692 had a professorial chair in “medicine and botany”. This chair was eventually occupied by Linnaeus, after a swap with Rosén for the chair in “practical medicine” (this meant Linnaeus was now in charge of the botanical garden, chemistry and botany while Rosén headed the university academic hospital, human anatomy, human physiology, etc.).

Finally, here's a search on Google for both “physician and botanist” and “botanist and physician”.

Gardening resource link: Kingsbrae Garden in New Brunswick has started up the Kingsbrae Garden Weblog, so you can follow along on how their garden progresses. Discovered via bloomingwriter (jodi DeLong), who posted a comment to yesterday's photos (her take on Kingsbrae is here).

Today's photographs are courtesy of David Smith of Delaware, who shared them via the UBC Botanical Garden Forums. It would have been more appropriate to show these a few weeks ago when David submitted them, but BPotD was running the abstract series at the time. Despite the seasonal relevance of this plant fading for another year, they're also interesting botanically, so here they are. Thanks, David!

Mistletoes, such as this oak mistletoe, are obligate hemiparasites – obligate, because they are obliged to do something, in this case meaning they are dependent on a host plant to complete their life cycle. If they could sometimes live and reproduce independently of a host plant, while at other times live the intriguing life of a parasite, they'd be described as facultative.

David's photographs show quite clearly why these are also termed hemiparasites. Strict parasitism, or holoparasitism, occurs when a parasite is entirely dependent on its host for all of its nutrients, minerals and water. Hemiparasites, on the other hand, do not entirely depend on the host. In this case, Phoradendron leucarpum is capable of its own photosynthesis (sugar production) through chlorophyllous leaves, while still parasitizing the host plant for minerals and water. Compare this strategy with Monotropa uniflora, if you're interested in an assignment.

Will Cook of Duke University shares a different interesting tidbit about Phoradendron leucarpum – a dispersal strategy that involves sticky pulp inside the fruit and birds.

A thank you to Hampshire, England's “Souren” for sharing this photograph via the UBC Botanical Garden Forums. These photographs were taken in September of 2006, in the Kharkiv University Botanical Garden (Ukraine). Much appreciated!

The alkaloid colchicine was first derived from plants in the genus Colchicum, hence the name. In addition to the medicinal uses outlined in the link, colchicine is extremely important in plant breeding research. If applied properly, a colchicine treatment can lead to a doubling of chromosomes in (half of the) gametes, resulting in offspring that are polyploid, or plants that have more than two similar sets of chromosomes.

Polyploidy is important for plant breeding in two respects. First of all, polyploids tend to be more robust than the diploid progenitors. As noted in the Wikipedia entry on polyploidy, many important crops were (unintentionally) bred to be polyploid: apple, banana, durum, maize, cotton, potato, tobacco, strawberry, sugar cane, etc. Compare wild strawberries to domesticated varieties, and you'll understand what's meant by more robust! Colchicine, by helping to induce polyploidy, can help create new ornamental or food varieties of plants. A second use of colchicine in plant breeding work is to overcome hybrid sterility, as is done with triticale.

From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel

A photo from mid-October.

From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel

This bramble is the source of much recent photographic frustration for me. It beckons outside my second-floor office window with its tangled icy-blue mass of canes, asking to be photographed in pretty much the exact frame that I see through the window from my office chair – a window that only opens thirty degrees outwards, thereby requiring me to either 1) move furniture and lean out the window while undergoing unnatural contortions (which I suspect the safety folks might have something to say about); 2) take the photograph through the window glass (and accept some glare and reduced image quality); or 3) let it taunt me. I wonder if I can get away with propping a ladder against the side of the building...

This shot was from a much closer distance, with a new lens.

From December 16, 2006 to January 14, 2007, Botany Photo of the Day is going to be featuring photo abstracts posted with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your taste, please consider revisiting the site in mid-January. – Daniel

In infrared. Previously featured on BPotD here: Trachycarpus fortunei.

Scarlet gilia is a native of western North America with a distribution range stretching from British Columbia south to Mexico. According to the Plants for a Future database, the crushed leaves smell like skunk. I wouldn't know, as I was intent on both photographing the plant and being vigilant of my surroundings. Looking back to when I took this image, it was likely the most endangered I felt in 2006 while taking photographs.

Realistically, I was most in danger of being injured when I was walking on unstable rocks and boulders in the rock slide area where I took this photo of Acer circinatum. However, this image of Ipomopsis aggregata was taken while standing in a small ditch between a highway and rocky slope (there was a barrier between the ditch and highway) with semis roaring behind me – a bit unnerving, and certainly distracting. When I returned to the car after the session, I was informed I was bleeding from my legs. Between concentrating on the photographs and keeping an eye out for the relative impossibility of a semi jumping the barrier, I hadn't noticed that the rocks on the slope I was kneeling against had punctured skin.

As noted in the Jepson Manual, the genus Ipomopsis can be found throughout most of southern North America, but at least one species resides in southern South America. I've yet to find a reference explaining the broad, disjunct distribution of the genus.

If you're searching for more images of this species, there's the always-reliable Burke Museum of Natural History: Ipomopsis aggregata.

On the topic of the next few weeks, I'd like to first note that I will be around, so please don't hesitate to comment on or discuss any BPotD entries. In anticipation of not writing much in the next month of BPotD, I'll add this now: thank you to all of you for your support of BPotD and the kind words you send along behind the scenes. It is very much appreciated.

The last reader-contributed photograph (original image) of 2006 is supplied by Eric in SF@Flickr. After tomorrow's entry, I'm taking a “writing vacation” from BPotD until January 15, 2007. For the next four weeks, I'll be posting some of my abstract botanical / landscape photographs from 2006 with little or no scientific commentary. If abstracts aren't to your liking, I hope you'll revisit the site in the middle of January when BPotD returns to its more traditional format.

In addition to relaying my thanks to Eric for today's photograph (thank you, Eric!), I'd also like to thank everyone who has submitted photographs for BPotD since its inception. For those who have submitted, you may have noted I can't use every photograph (whether it be for size, or repetition, or lack of imagination on my part to write something about the subject), but I do want to state that I appreciate your generosity and thoughtfulness. Thank you to all of you.

Wilson's barberry is named after the wife of the famous plant explorer, E.H. Wilson (thanks Greg and Peter – see comments below re: my mistake). If you're researching the plant online, it is important that you also search for a misspelling of the scientific name, Berberis wilsonii, a common error which had creeped into the Wikipedia article on Berberis (though I've now corrected it).

Eric also has a photograph of the flowers on Flickr. You may note the strong resemblance to the flowers of Mahonia – Douglas's comment on the Mahonia entry explains some of the differences between the two genera.

If you're interested in reading more about the area of China where Berberis wilsoniae can be found (and some of E.H. Wilson's adventures), Discover magazine published “The Mother of Gardens” in August 2005.

Lastly, I submitted the recent photograph of the varied thrush and Chinese mountain ash to the I and the Bird Blog Carnival, “a carnival celebrating the interaction of human and avian, an ongoing exploration of the endless fascination with birdlife all around the world”. It's made an appearance in the text of I and the Bird 38 on the Ben Cruachan Blog. If you're interested in birds at all, I and the Bird is certainly worth following.

Many thanks to Lotus J. aka ngawangchodron@Flickr for sharing today's photograph with us (via BPotD Flickr Group Pool | original image) – appreciated, as always.

How many species of Crataegus (or hawthorns) exist? The answer is, “It depends on what you mean by species.” Depending on the taxonomic interpretation, there may be a couple hundred species or there may be over a thousand. Charles Sargent, first director of the Arnold Arboretum, described 732 new species. Dr. Tim Dickinson of the University of Toronto cites W.H. Camp as pronouncing the determination of number of species as “The Crataegus Problem”.

Dr. Dickinson provides excellent resources about hawthorns on his lab and teaching site. A broad description of hawthorns is available on this page: Crataegus. A paper specifically about the black-fruited hawthorns (of which Crataegus douglasii is one) can be found here: North American Black-Fruited Hawthorns.

Landscape architecture / art / design resource link: Pruned, recently listed as one of the Best Blogs of 2006 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading. Hours and hours of readings and wanderings available here.

One of four US National Parks (+ 1 US Nat'l Monument) named after plants, the roughly 800 000 acres (324 000 ha) of Joshua Tree National Park is solely located in southern California. Despite its size, that's less than 1 acre for each annual visitor – 1.25 million. Many of the visitors are photographers, and the body of photographs for this place reminds me of a question asked by Guy Tal in his essay: “Does the World Need Another Aspen Image?” (applied to the Joshua trees, of course).

Excellent descriptions of Yucca brevifolia can be found in the Flora of North America and Wikipedia.

I spent most of the past eight hours preparing BPotD entries for my upcoming vacation from BPotD, so I've selected an image of a previously featured plant today. To learn more about the greater yellow lady's slipper, visit the BPotD entry from October 2005: Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens.

You receive a special treat today from Andreas of Bogotá (aka Quimbaya@Flickr | original image 1 | original image 2 |BPotD Flickr Group Pool). I know I'm not likely to ever see this in the wild, so I'm thankful for your sharing, Andreas! (As an aside, Andreas, Steve Swinscoe is trying to contact you re: Ceroxylon quindiuense).

There is very little online information about this rare species. For example, other than a few small photographs in the Flora Illustrada del Páramo de Chingaza (here), what you see today is the extent of what's available online for images.

I did find one species-specific tidbit of information from – believe it or not – the California Department of Fish and Game; it appears California DFG hosted an international conference on bears. This PDF on bear habitat assessment posters displayed at the conference makes mention (page 11) of research about the spectacled bear and its role as a dispersal agent for seeds in its habitat, including the seeds of Puya santosii. I imagine Puya santosii is not the only bromeliad to benefit – plants in the family Bromeliaceae are an important component in the diet of this second-most endangered bear species in the world.

Photography resource link: for inspiration, Daily Walks, the photography of Californian Diane Varner. After spending some time viewing the photographs, you might be curious to read about Diane and her postprocessing technique.