Serve the Pollinators What They Want
Though the old saying “You can catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than a gallon of vinegar” is good advice, this plant knows an even better way to attract insects. The awful rotten-meat odor it produces attracts beetles and flesh flies from the family Sarcophagidae, who are the chief pollinators of the corpse flower.
During the blooming period, which lasts less than a week, the top of the spadix/phallus/French bread part of the plant warms up to enhance its odor, becoming the same temperature as the human body. Both male and female flowers grow inside the same inflorescence; the females are first to open, then, after one to two days, the males follow. This clever cycle prevents the plant from self-pollinating, instead allowing flies and bugs to facilitate cross-pollination. The leaves surrounding the flower can be up to 18 feet tall and 15 feet across. Though they fall off each year, new ones grow annually, despite the energy-consuming bloom, after which the plant becomes dormant for four months, until the cycle begins again. It takes the plant about seven to ten years before it has its first bloom. After the first time, it can bloom every second year.
Corpse Flower in Botanical Gardens
Many botanical gardens have corpse flowers, which in odorous bloom attract many visitors—because who doesn’t like a good stink? The first one to bloom away from its natural habitat was in the Royal Botanic Gardens in London in 1889. In the United States, a corpse flower shocked the noses of New Yorkers in 1937 when one bloomed at the New York Botanical Garden. According to Guinness World Records, the tallest corpse flower bloomed in 2010. It was displayed at Winnipesaukee Orchids in Gilford, New Hampshire, and measured 10 feet, 2¼ inches tall. Sadly, there is presently no way to gauge or record which specimen of this plant won for foulest smell in the plant kingdom.
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What Makes It Smell
It takes this plant all year to store up enough energy to make itself stink during its short blooming period. The smell seems to combine spoiled eggs, a dead animal, and sweaty, week-old dirty laundry. Corpse flowers produce a compound of sulfurous chemicals, cadaverine and putrescin, which break down carrion. The odor is strongest at night, an attempt to attract nocturnal insects laying their eggs in carcasses, such as flies and certain beetles. These insects relish the odor and fly to it, walking up and down the plant, thus serving as efficient pollinators. Though they do not lay their eggs on the plant, each year these insects are fooled by the corpse flower’s unique adaptation.
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CUCUMBER
Cucumis sarivus
Cylindrical Blessing
Cucumbers are the fourth most-cultivated vegetable in the world and one of the healthiest foods in existence. Cucumbers are best when they are organic, though today you’d be hard-pressed to find one that hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides, which penetrate its skin. The cucumber is native to India and was known to be cultivated for at least three thousand years in western Asia, whence it spread from India to China, Italy, and Greece. The Romans cultivated cucumbers with great success and introduced them to the whole of Europe. They were cultivated in France in the ninth century, England in the fourteenth century, and America in the sixteenth century.
The cucumber is an annual, herbaceous prickly vine of the gourd family Cucurbitaceae and of the genus Cucumis. The fruits are green and cylindrical, and can grow up to 24 inches long and about 4 inches in diameter. The cucumber likes to grow in fertile soil and requires ample water, as its root grows very shallowly and spreads only along the superficial layer of soil. The cucumber has two differential flowers, male and female, on the same plant, making it a monoecious plant. There are approximately an equal number of blossoms of both male and female flowers. Many varieties are now grown in greenhouses and require manual pollination, but if outdoors, the plants rely primarily on honeybees and some other insects from the bee family as their chief reproductive aids. Commercial cucumber growers border their fields with beehive boxes.
Green Cylinder of Health
The cucumber is an extraordinarily healthy food, rich in vitamins, minerals, and important ingredients. It has almost every B vitamin, although it consists of 95 percent water. The cucumber also contains vitamin C at 11 milligrams per 100 grams, and is a strong antioxidant. In addition, the green gourd is rich with iron, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, calcium, sodium, manganese, and iodine. Even cucumber skin is healthy, containing large amounts of vitamin C—eating only one cucumber provides about 10 percent of the recommended daily requirement. The skin is also useful in treating sunburns and skin irritations when rubbed directly on the wound or burn. It also contains lignans, such as secoisolariciresinol, pinoresinol, and lariciresinol, all known to help prevent breast, ovarian, prostate, and uterine cancers. Because the cucumber’s fruit is low in calories and high in water content, it is a great filling food for people wishing to lose weight. Doctors recommend it for patients with diabetes as well, since one of its hormones can help pancreas cells produce natural insulin. Cucumbers are also good for treating arthritis, low and high blood pressure, heart conditions, and digestive diseases, and can help lower cholesterol in all who include this impressive plant in their diet.
CYANIDE GRASS
Sorghum halepense
The Colonel’s Mistake
Johnsongrass, also called cyanide grass due to its unique chemical makeup, belongs to the family Poeceae. The common name stems from one Colonel William Johnson, who grew this plant on his Alabama plantation in 1840. Johnson had heard the grass was fast growing and could stop erosion and make hay, but he couldn’t have imagined how thoroughly it would eventually overrun the whole of the southern United States. It took us a while to learn that if grown in certain soils, or as soon as it is wilted by frost, the plant turns deadly, such that a mouthful of it can kill a full-grown cow in an hour. The plant is native to the Mediterranean area, coming to the United States by way of the Caribbean, where this rapid-growing “weed” was named in honor of the unsuspecting colonel who cultivated it.
Officially Sorghum halepense, this annual plant can grow from 3 to 9 feet in height, ultimately forming a wide shrub. Its stalk is smooth and vertical, and its branches contain narrow leaves. On the top of the stalk, a tassel forms that has a dark violet color. The grass prefers fertile and sandy soil and warm and dry climates, though it can adapt to almost any terrain and grows at great speed, often outcompeting other nearby plants. Cyanide grass reproduces via seeds and rhizomes, which are underground networks of stems and offshoots. As a result, Johnsongrass usually spreads faster than herbicides can prevent.
Cyanide grass blooms from July to September and ripens from September to November. It produces much pollen, which is primarily dispersed by the wind. Each plant can produce 8,000 to 25,000 seeds per year.
In some climates, the grass does make for an edible food for livestock, though there is no way to know just by looking if the deadly toxins are present. If the cow starts swelling at the stomach, you’ll know the batch of grass is bad. This deadly chemistry, the manufacturing of hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called prussic acid, is yet another effective defense mechanism. In the United States the plant is on a botanical version of the “Most Wanted List,” the “Federal and State Noxious Weeds” directory, which classifies the grass as an invasive species.
However, the plant is not entirely without redeeming qualities. One man’s weed is another man’s treasure. In many parts of the world, people use the plant’s grains in natural medicines to treat respiratory problems, kidney aliments, and urinary tract infections. In Nigeria, certain tribes use sorghum extracts to make poison arrows.
CYPRESS
Cupressacaeae
Solemn and Stoic
The cypress is a magnificent plant of the genus Cupresus and family Cupressacaeae, and has about 12 varieties. The tree gets its name from a tale in Greek mythology: A boy named Cyparissus was out hunting one day when he accidentally killed one of Apollo’s sacred stags. Though Apollo was o
utraged and about to seek revenge, the boy pleaded for forgiveness. In the end, Apollo reluctantly showed mercy, turning his dead stag into a tree and proclaiming it a monument to grief.
The Italian cypress (the tree is indigenous to the Mediterranean) grows tall and straight, like a green column. Ancient Romans called it the “mourning tree” and planted it in graveyards and placed its branches on the dead; even to this day when a pope dies, members of the Vatican rest cypress branches beside him. The tree does have a solemn essence, towering grandly and seeming almost sorrowful, if we permit ourselves a moment of anthropomorphic reflection.
Records indicate that the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks used cypress in shipbuilding, and many unearthed relics of sarcophagi and temple doors, in addition to religious statues, were found to be made of the wood. The Persians believed the tree was a sample of the flora that grew in heaven. The Bible indicates that Noah’s Ark was made from cypress wood, the same material Christians believe made up the cross on which Christ was crucified. Indeed, many attribute religious significance to the tree, particularly since many species of cypress have an incredibly long life span of thousands of years.
The cypress species is predominantly an evergreen perennial, and it can grow either like a bush or a tree. A few species are deciduous. But in general, cypress grows very fast (especially when young), almost 2 feet in a single year, and very tall, from 65 to 130 feet. It flourishes in all types of soil, in temperate and subtropical climates, and appears on every continent except Antarctica. Cypress grows at high altitudes in rocky soil, or even submerged in water, as does the bald cypress of the Everglades. In general, cypress bark is dark brown or red-brown, but as it ages the older bark frequently turns gray and looks as if it is peeling with scaly plaques. A cypress’s treetop can form various shapes, but almost all have narrow foliage and short branches. This foliage can take different colors as well, ranging from bluish to light green or dark green. Some leaves are thin needles or like smooth, long hair. Cypress bears male and female flowers. Pollen is dispersed by the wind, and cypress’s fruit is a cone that looks like a nut with scales. A fertilized cone takes 18 to 24 months after pollination to mature, going from green to brown.
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In 2006, an entire ancient forest of bald cypress was discovered buried off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico. The 50,000-year-old forest was so well preserved by silt and the oxygen-free environment that when one of the trees was cut, it still released the fresh resin smell found in a living cypress.
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Present Throughout History
A tree called the Zoroastrian Sarv, a Mediterranean cypress growing in Iran, is 4,000 years old. The Senator, a name given to a pond cypress in Longwood, Florida, is 3,500 years old, and the Alishan Sacred Tree, a Formosan cypress in Taiwan, is 3,000 years old.
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DAHLIA
Dahlia hortensis
Hybrids Galore
The dahlia is a native of Mexico and Central and South America, from which Swedish botanist Andrew Dahl carried a specimen back to Europe by ship in 1784. The man was quite a gatherer and cataloger, having been a student of Carl Linnaeus, the famous scientist who invented the scientific nomenclature of kingdoms, families, genera, and species we use today. After Dahl’s death, another scientist gave this tubular-rooted, perennial flower, which has since been cultivated into more than 1,000 varieties, Dahl’s name in honor of his “discovery” of the plant. Within years of its introduction to Europe, the flower became a favorite of European gardeners, though the Aztecs had grown it centuries before, appreciating it less for its beauty than for its effectiveness in treating convulsions. They also made the flowers’ stiff, straight stems, which become hollow soon after picking, into a straw for drinking all kinds of beverages. Aztecs even ate the roots, which make a sweet potato kind of dish still found in the regional cuisine.
Not only can the dahlia’s seeds produce next year’s flower patch, but its cluster of tubular roots, which resemble a bunched-up group of skinny potatoes, all have an “eye,” which, if kept moist during winter, will sprout a new plant in the spring. The flower’s ability to transform into so many variations or hybrids lies in its chromosomes. There were originally 36 wild species in its group, but there are thousands today. It has eight sets and contains what are called transposons, or “jumping genes.” A successful survival technique, this ability has been a way to attract any number of pollinators throughout the eons, despite environmental shifts and the dense foliage in which it has competed.
Is There a Black Dahlia?
Although the dahlia produces a colorful, concentric flower with many petals (again, depending on type of hybrid), it lacks scent. Therefore it had to adapt to bloom in a wide range of colors to attract pollinators. In other words, no matter how the surrounding flora changed, the plant always found a way to makes its brilliant burst of a flower stand out, like a billboard or advertisement for pollinators.
Although the flower comes in an array of colors, no actual “black dahlia” exists. “Black Dahlia” refers to a case about the murder of a young woman in Los Angeles in 1947—the longest unsolved crime in the city’s history, spawning numerous books and movies. Much like the plant, the story retains the ability to transform into seemingly endless variations.
DEATH CAP
Amanita phalloides
The Killer Beneath the Tree
Although not a plant and in their own fungi kingdom, mushrooms have been used throughout history as a food staple in many regions. Mushrooms from the wild are a tricky food to harvest. Some can be deadly, delicious, or both. If you aren’t 100 percent sure of your ability to properly identify mushrooms, don’t even think of collecting any you find in the wild. More people die from wild mushrooms than from bear attacks. The death cap is one such fatally toxic shroom, and a sly one, too, taking until long after a person has left the “scene of the crime” to knock them mysteriously dead.
People who eat death caps will feel fine for the first ten to fourteen hours, after which diarrhea, vomiting, and cramps take hold. Bizarrely, a reprieve of normalcy follows this distressing period, lasting a few days—just long enough to make one think his or her recovery is complete. This is not so—the mushroom’s sneaky toxins are now doing their deadliest work! After three or four days, the liver or kidneys will fail, and the person will die. Finito, ende, kaput—mortality by way of mushroom. The Amanita phalloides is the number one cause of mushroom poisonings worldwide.
Accurately identifying toxic mushrooms is difficult since most look similar to the classically edible variety. The death cap even has an almost visually identical match, the paddy straw mushroom (Volvariela volvacea), and so precisely identifying this villainous plant is a real trick. Actually, the death cap isn’t the only lethal member of the Amanita genus; others include Amanita bisporigera, Amanita virosa, Amanita verna, and Amanita ocreata. The collection goes by the name “destroying angels” (why angels? who knows), and all are equally toxic, differing only in their drier caps and white color.
Where They Grow
The death cap grows internationally, both in late summer and the fall when in temperate latitudes. In Europe and North America it appears from late August to late November; in South America and Australia from late February to May. Like most fungi, death caps favor the darker and loamier soil around tree roots. They have what’s called a mycorrhizal relationship with some trees, where a fungi wraps its mycelia—or thread-thin branching—around the tree’s roots, feeding it specific nutrients only the mushroom can absorb from the soil. This ultimately makes the tree strong and healthy. This clever adaptation ensures the mushroom and its subsequent generations will have a “rent-free” environment in which to flourish.
Death caps have a cap (or mushroom head) about 6 inches wide, and a stalk that can grow up to 5 inches. Depending on the environment, the cap can be whitish, yellowish, brownish, or greenish, and is sticky to the touch. The underside of the c
ap contains feathery gills, while at the base of the stalk there is a smaller, white cup. Amanita phalloides uses spores for reproduction that are similar to the seeds of herbs. The death cap has a specific intense smell that attracts different insects to its gills that are not affected by its poison. The spores stick to the insects, which then fly away and spread them, allowing the birth of new mushrooms—the life cycle of death.
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Chemical Warfare
Scientists have studied the death cap’s murderous biochemistry for decades. This species’ toxic mix evolved primarily to ward off “enemies” that might want to eat it. The main toxic element is the alpha-amanitin in combination with beta-amanitin. These are called anatoxins, and if they aren’t enough to kill you, the death cap will use its reserve weapons, named phallotoxins, to finish you off. Thirty grams, contained in half a cap of the mushroom, is a sufficient dosage to kill an adult, and drying, freezing, or cooking won’t even reduce the toxicity. In a cruel irony of nature, the death cap is alleged to be very tasty—according to an ill-fated mushroom lover just before he died.
The Big, Bad Book of Botany Page 9