Sunday, May 20, 2018

Corpse Flower, indeed

Despite our existence in the "flyover states," there were many fantastic activities in Manhattan Kansas this weekend.  The Bill Snyder Half-Marathon, for instance, tied up a number of city streets and traffic policepeople for most of Saturday morning.  For those hip individuals in the know, however, the real attraction was the imminent blooming of a Titan Arum, Amorphophallus titanum, right here in the Little Apple.

I was alerted to the potential bloom from Tuesday's K-State Newsletter, and I made a trip over to the greenhouses soon after that, so I would know where the darned thing was when I needed to get to it.  The picture at the upper right is from that Tuesday visit.  Believe it or not, the white line running into the bloom was the work of a chemistry graduate student who was taking a baseline sample of the air in preparation for the stench.

Live Camera Feed 5/18/2018
Soon afterword, the digital wizards at K-State placed a live camera feed on the plant so that extreme nerds onlookers could monitor when the actual bloom occurred, including a clock in the venue so you could see that it was live.  Being the nerd that he is, ProfessorRoush bookmarked the camera feed and began checking it several times daily.



Image property University of Wisconsin
The Titan Arum, native to Sumatra, is the largest inflorescence (made up of many flowers) in the world, the record for the "shapeless phallus" being 10 feet or so tall.  This lime-stone-loving rainforest plant stinks like a rotting corpse (hence the common name) to attract the carrion beetles and flesh flies that pollinate it during its one-day bloom period.  Every botanical garden that has one makes hay (sic) when it blooms, because of the crowd drawn to the stench and the fact that a plant takes 7-10 years of growth before it can support a bloom.  Most recently, the Chicago Botanical Garden's Arum provided some delayed gratification after several teasing incidents and finally bloomed in April, 2018.

True to the prediction of the local expert, Dr. Chad Miller, our Titan Arum began to bloom Friday evening, slowly opening to reveal its blood red center.  Can't you just feel the excitement?  The Titan Arum grows from a corm that typically weighs over 100 pounds and can weigh over 300 pounds, the largest corm in the world.  When it blooms, the temperature within the flower rises to 98ºF, to better volatize the odor around the area.

Titan Arum in full bloom, K-State, 5/19/18
On Saturday morning, Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I ran pell-mell over to see it in person.  The stench at that time was not nearly so bad as advertised, but I'm told it was at its strongest around midnight the previous evening.  According to the chemistry gurus, the odor is caused by dimethyl disulfide (Limburger cheese), dimethyl trisulfide, methyl thiolacetate, isovaleric acid (think sweaty feet) and  trimethylamine (rotten fish).   A regular one-day chemistry factory, this inflorescence.









During our visit, I noticed this glass jar containing blue desiccant in the bottom and, upon inquiry of Dr. Miller, learned that he planned to pollinate the flower within the next hour.  The pollen in the jar was from the recent bloom at the Chicago Botanical Gardens ("fresh pollen") and he was giving it more time to dry since it was a little moist and clumped.  The male flowers in the base of the inflorescence open up about a day after the female, a natural barrier to self-pollination as the female flower has begun to fade at that point and has presumably already been pollinated.  I didn't voyeuristically stay for the grand pollination, but I'm sure it was a satisfying moment for everyone involved.

ProfessorRoush is happy, however, a Nerd in Paradise as-it-were, to have finally seen a Titan Arum bloom, a horticultural bucket-list checkoff item at its finest.  I had always wanted to experience the stench first hand, ever since I read about it years ago from Henry Mitchell, writing in One Man's Garden, who, having seen one in 1937, said "Sometimes you don't need to paint a picture, but should just stand there amazed at one plant..." and termed the Titan Arum a "miraculous thing to behold, and it didn't paint any picture, it just sat there by itself."  Clearly, a thing worthy of missing the Bill Snyder Half-Marathon just down the street.




Friday, May 18, 2018

Bee-careful Out There

Such oblivious creatures, we Homo sapiens, we naked apes of tools and dreams.  We trod through millennia, intent on food, shelter, and water, occasionally motivated to art or to walk on the Sea of Tranquility, yet unknowing of the intricacies of the surrounding world, incapable of recognizing life on different scales than our own.  Civilized human-kind conveniently forgets the constant struggle of life at large.

ProfessorRoush has spent the past few days capturing flower photos, digitally preserving the blooms of 2018, as happy to welcome summer as an otter discovering a brisk stream.  I was seemingly, in fact, entranced this week by honey bees, happy to see them out and about, thrilled to know they haven't all disappeared into extinction.   A noon walk to the K-State Gardens on Thursday brought me green tranquility and the simplicity of the bee above, ensconced on a single bloom of Rosa eglanteria.  Later, I was drawn into the massive bounty of a full-grown and trellised 'William Baffin' and enticed further into the blooming mass (at left)  to capture another industrious worker strutting around its food source.



At home that night, however, I was starkly reminded of the dark side of bee life.  I had just noticed this motionless and soundless bee on 'Polareis' and began to look closer when it suddenly moved beneath the flower, all without wiggling a wing or leg.  Perplexed, I changed my perspective and exposed the true tableau, the bee expired and in the grasp of a victorious crab spider.   It is tempting at such times, to judge the spider as evil, but more correct to recognize merely life as it is, sometimes brutish and quick, unaffected by how we wish it to be.  I suppose the spider has its own reason to exist, just as the bee.  It's just that I like to root for the bee.




This is the real life of my garden.  I think only of flowers and prunings, mulch and plant combinations. To the bee, each flower could be nectar or death, each flight from the hive success or oblivion.  For the spider, each day may bring feast or hunger, no guarantees beneath the sunniest skies.  I've forgotten again the drama beneath, the life of a garden in constant flux, predator after prey, ultimately death for all.

Now reminded, I still am rooting for the bees.


Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Never Go Away!

'Buckeye Belle'
....at least not when spring has arrived, a spring for which you've waited impatiently over the past 2.5 eons and change.  Trilobites have gone extinct since I first anticipated spring this year.  Then I was gone a mere 5 days and the plant friends that I missed are almost too numerous to count.  No, I at least didn't miss the luscious garnet-to-die-for Paeonia lactiflora ‘Buckeye Belle’ pictured at the upper left, but it was a very close thing.





'Prairie Moon'
Recall please, that I only left on the morning of May 9th, but on that morning, fickle peony 'Prairie Moon' was yet to bloom at all.  Five large buds were on the low-growing plant, just thinking about opening.  Yet, when I returned on May 13th, four out of the five flowers had opened in the 90ºF days and finished, with only one decrepit, ant-invaded, spider-guarded, ragged bloom to mark its passing.  I've waited three years for this immature plant to finally bloom with some mature size, and it was gone before I enjoyed it.













'Scarlett O'Hara'
And then there is 'Scarlett O'Hara', one of my most showy and favorite peonies.  No blooms when I left, but I returned to a fully-bloomed plant with all but three blooms faded from gaudy red-salmon into blush pink or white.  This peony normally takes a couple of weeks to open fully and fade.  What happened?  Spring was delayed by fickle fate and then time and the garden rushed headlong into summer, that's what happened. 





'Buckeye Belle' 05/13/2018
'Buckeye Belle' herself was a close one.  On the 13th, when I came home, she had three large blooms open, with several enormous buds in reserve.  Yesterday evening, the 14th, they had all opened, a soul-quickening sight to behold.  Today, these petals are falling, peak over, fading into another season.

'Buckeye Belle' 05/14/2018


















A gardener should never go away during growing season.  In temperate climates the first two weeks of January might be safe, in a really cold year.  Might be safe.  But otherwise, forget it.  The other 50 weeks of the year there are things to be done, plants to check on, and beauty to behold.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Garden of Eden; Complete w/ Snake

What a difference five days can make in a garden!  Mrs. ProfessorRoush and I left for a trip last Wednesday (May 9th), and returned tonight (May 13th).  Before I left, Tuesday night, I took a photo of this Paeonia suffruticosa (Yellow Tree Peony), which had just opened its first bloom of the season that day.  The remnants of that first bloom are visible at about 2:00; tonight the petals of that bloom are already faded and gone, and now every other bloom on the peony is open.   Temperatures went from the 60-70ºF range last week to several days of 90ºF+ this week during our absence.  Wait all season for a brief glimpse of peony heaven, and almost miss it during a five-day trip!





For an added bonus, look closer at the bloom at the 7:00 position in the photo above.  See my little friendly neighborhood garter snake wondering who was disturbing the garden aura?  How about a closeup (at left)?  I had only seen my first snake of the season last Monday as I was cutting down a grass clump and a green snake went racing away too fast for a picture (in its defense, I was racing away in the opposite direction).  Now, already, I've run across my second snake of a still-early season.  Going to be a slithery year, I think.

The entire garden seems to have exploded over these 5 past days, and I think I'll catch up on my blogging and introduce you to the current bloomers at about two day intervals this week.  Tonight, however, I'll leave you with this tantalizing photo of 'Harison's Yellow'.  Before I left, only 5 days ago, not a single bloom was open.  Now, all of them are.  And to think I almost missed it!


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