A Garden of Marvels

by Ruth Kassinger

  In 1785, Spallanzani traveled to Constantinople by ship and after nearly being shipwrecked, he spent a year exploring the fauna and geology of the region. According to Dolman, “In August, 1786, having dispatched the valuable museum collections by ship, Spallanzani set out with a single attendant on the unimaginably difficult return overland. Despite hazardous mountain passes, floods and torrents, brigands and cutthroats, detours were made to inspect mines and geological structures, and more specimens were collected.” Two years later, when he was nearly sixty, he traveled to southern Italy to gather information on a series of recent and highly destructive volcanic eruptions. While on Etna, the mountain erupted and toxic gases knocked him unconscious. (Shades of Pliny, who died of suffocation in A.D. 79 while observing an eruption of Vesuvius from a ship in the bay.) He ventured into the crater of Vulcano to investigate mineral structures, and emerged with burnt feet and his staff on fire. Despite the dangers, he was able to identify issuing gases and the mineral composition and temperatures of lava. Amazingly, he died peacefully in bed in 1799, shortly after his seventieth birthday.

  The best source for information on Kölreuter (whose name is also spelled Koelreuter and Kolreuter) is Ernst Mayr’s “Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s Contributions to Biology.”

  Black Petunias

  Petunia: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Physiological Genetics was indispensable to my understanding of the petunia. Also see “Flower Development in Petunia,” by van der Krol and Chua; and “Isolation Barriers . . . ,” by Dell’Olivo et al. For flower color, see “Biochemistry and Genetics of Flower Color,” by Griesbach and Janick.

  The Abominable Mystery

  For the best photographic image of amborella online, see http://www.phytoimages.siu.edu/imgs/paraman1/r/Amborellaceae_Amborella_trichopoda_23986.html. Pam Soltis, Doug Soltis, and their colleagues have written extensively about amborella and the evolution of angiosperms: see “The Amborella genome . . . ,” “Floral Developmental Morphology . . . ,” “The Making of the Flower,” and “The floral Genome: An evolutionary History,” among others.

  On the evolution of flowering plants and their unique anatomy, I turned to Floral Biology: Studies on Floral Evolution in Animal-Pollinated Plants and a number of more technical articles. A relatively simple explanation of the role of LEAFY and other genes can be found in “Age-Old Question on Evolution of Flowers Answered.” More detailed is “A Short History of MADS-Box Genes in Plants.” For the evolution of endosperm, see “The Evolutionary Origins of the Endosperm in Flowering Plants.” For the evolution of nectar, see “Nectar: Properties, Floral Aspects, and Speculations on Origin.” For the history of seeds, Ada Linkies and her colleagues have a clear exposition in “The Evolution of Seeds.” I also found “After a Dozen Years of Progress the Origin of Angiosperms Is Still a Great Mystery” enlightening. The Wikipedia entry “Evolutionary History of Plants” has an extensive list of helpful sources.

  Cheap Sex

  Stefan Vogel’s chapter on Sprengel in Floral Biology is essential.

  There are many books on Darwin, of course, but I primarily relied on Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, by Desmond and Moore; Darwin, His Daughter & Human Evolution, by Keynes; and especially the wonderful The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins at the Dawn of Plant Science, by Ayres. “Darwin’s Botany,” by Ornduff, was also helpful, as was Oliver Sacks’s “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers.”

  On orchids and mimicry, An Enthusiasm of Orchids by John Alcock is a delight. For the tidbit on the Ophrys sphegodes, see Schiestl in Oecologia.

  PART V: ONWARD, UPWARD, AND AFTERWARD

  Onward and Upward

  Darwin’s books The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants and The Power of Movement in Plants are very readable. For a more complete history of the discovery of auxin post-Darwin, see “The Odyssey of Auxin,” by Abel and Theologis.

  Afterward

  The European Space Agency estimates that there 1022 stars in the universe. Given that there are about 500,000 chloroplasts in a square millimeter of leaf (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/biology/chloroplast.html, among other sources) and using the estimate of 8,000 square feet of foliage on a sixty-foot oak tree, about 27 million trees hold as many chloroplasts as there are stars in the universe. Given that NASA estimates there are 400 billion trees (not to mention nonwoody plants and photosynthetic algae) on the planet (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96758439), the number of chloroplasts on Earth is awe-inspiring.

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