Category — Science (weird & less weird)

As my geek complement to Daffodil Planter’s Daffodil Blogarama and the many other daffodil posts flashing yellow, pale pink, and white over the web, I’m offering a peek into the daffodil world of a hundred years ago.

Although maybe it’s not so geeky, since it’s mostly concentrated on sex. Daffodil sex, that is. Though a man of the cloth, the author of the “Daffodils” book in the British Present-Day Gardening series, Reverend Joseph Jacob,  has a passion for breeding. And, even more shockingly,  he thinks everyone should share it. “This fascinating pursuit, hobby, or business, to give it names which are appropriate to the different ends in view, is one which I advise every Daffodil cultivator to take up; whether it be for pleasure or with a view to business it is equally alluring and interesting.” (pg. 39) He talks of going from town to town in England, lecturing at daffodil societies, and how the members hung on his lips, asking questions about do-it-yourself breeding.

I wonder if the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will have any similar seminars? These days, we think of daffodil breeding as something only specialists can do, with special equipment and large fields and greenhouses. But, Jacobs says,  all we really need are labels and notebooks, plus little boxes for storing and carrying pollen (it’s viable for about two weeks, if you keep it dry and clean in a loosely covered box) and a camel’s hair brush, gently moistened in the mouth so the pollen will stick to it.

‘Minnow’, a miniature unavailable in Jacob’s time

That’s all the physical equipment that’s required. The rest of it lies in knowledge, and patience.

One of the bits of knowledge we need to try our hand at our own hybrids is knowing when the time is ripe for sex. “…the best time for cross-fertilisation is between 10 A.M and 4 P.M….that in cold and sunless weather the operations should be repeated more than once…that the pollen brushes must be kept very clean, and all the pollen of one variety carefully removed before the same brush is used for any other variety; that it is not found necessary in practice to cover the fertilised bloom in any way with glass or muslin; and that, the seed-bearer should be growing in a  good open position.” (pg. 44-45)

But the deeper knowledge that’s required, the one all those daffodil societies were swarming around Jacob hoping to get, is the knowledge of family background. Some daffodils are good pollinators, some are not.  Since most of the daffodils of a hundred years ago are lost or obscure, I’m going to save his complete lists for the very end of this post, in the hope that some of you have grown the ones I don’t know about, or will be able to point out sources for them.

From his list of “Potent Pollen-Parents” (I told you it was about sex), only  a few remain that are available today: all the poet varieties, W.P. Milner,  and King Alfred. (King Alfred, as I’ve explained before,   is an antique daffodil that’s actually hard to find. If you read the fine type, you will see that below most ‘King Alfred’ blurbs is “King Alfred type”, which basically means any yellow trumpet daffodil that looks more or less like King Alfred and is cheap in production. They may not have the same pollen potency as their predecessor.)

King Alfred is also on the list of “Good Seed-Bearers”, as are most of the poet varieties. Golden Spur, another good seeder, is available through Old House Gardens, as is Lily Langtry. (I’ve grown Golden Spur, a simple yellow trumpet that makes the modern ones look a bit as if they’re on steroids; I have yet to make the acquaintance of the divine Mrs. Langtry.)

Of the “Shy Seeders” I recognize only Maximus (also available at OHG) and Empress, a daffodil I have admired but never bought due to price (I save my most extravagant bulb purchases for tulips, it seems. I might as well admit my prejudice; I have favorite children in the garden).

Amateur breeders today may have a harder time finding this kind of information, as breeding has become something specialized and hard in our minds. It’s making me wonder if a little diligent research among breeders might be a good idea.

But research won’t give me the final attribute I need for breeding: patience. “The one great drawback that can be urged against [breeding] is the time that must necessarily elapse between the seed-sowing and the harvest. From four to six or seven years is a long time to wait for results, but, as the oft-repeated quotation from old Philip Miller (1733) says, ‘After the first five years are past, if there be seeds sown every year, there will be annually a succession of flowers to show themselves; so that there will be a continual expectation, which will take off the tediousness which, during the first five years, might be very troublesome to some persons…’ ” (pg. 39-40)

Is it any wonder that I love old garden books? Where in modern literature would we find someone urging us, urging anyone, to go out in the garden with a camel’s hair brush and start our own hybrids?  Even if it takes seven years. And why not follow these old urgings? Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but, as a look at the emerging spring around us will show, sex still goes on in the same old way.

‘Colleen Bawn’ - an antique now, but still in the future in Jacob’s day

Reverend Joseph Jacob’s Lists of Breeding Daffodils

(I don’t know what the ordering system for these lists is; clearly, not alphabetical. Maybe order of bloom time?)

List of Thirty Good Seed-Bearers:

Duke of Bedford

Lady Margaret Boscawen

Minnie Hume

King Alfred

Mrs. R. Sydenham

Madame de Graaff

Weardale Perfection

Firebrand

Judge Bird

W.B. Hartland

Oriflamme

Most of the Poet varieties

Emperor

Henry Irving

Golden Spur

Pallidus Praecox

P.R. Barr

Eyebright

Glory of Nordwijk

Bernardino

Acme

Golden Bell

Alert

Mrs. Walter Ware

Princess Mary

Mrs. Langtry

Albicans

Evangeline

Lord Muncaster

Decora

List of Shy Seeders

Empress

Horsfieldii

Glory of Leiden

Homespun

Maximus

Sir Watkin

Gloria Mundi

Flora Wilson

Crown Prince

Duchess of Westminster

Autocrat

Potent Pollen-Parents

King Alfred

Maximus

Eyebright

Emperor

Weardale Perfection

Circlet

Madame de Graaff

W.P. Milner

All the Poet varieties

Lulworth

Castile

Poetarum (for its colour)

Have you ever wondered how that morning glory vine knew how to find a support and twine around it? Or, for that matter, how roots know to grow down and stems know to grow up? And while we all know that plants follow light – how exactly do they do that?

For those of us who enjoy our geekery, it’s fun finding out more about these things. But even if you’re not a geek, knowing how your plants move adds a dimension to gardening, and might help you garden better, too. And just about everyone loves watching time-lapse photography movies, which are the core of this post. You can watch plants dance.

The forces that move plants really are beyond our ken. Well, the forces of nature are pretty much beyond our ken (especially our own natures). But humans do like to watch and name things. Science (one of the big areas for watching and naming, but not the only one) – science has a name for the ways plants move: tropisms.

There are different kinds of tropisms, but I think it would be much more fun for you to watch them than for me to tell you about them. This Indiana University site has several very short movies – each of them less than a minute. You can watch corn sprouts bend down, worshipping light in a ceremonial circle, or corn roots that know which way is down, even when they’re turned on their sides. Arabidopsis and tomato sprouts gracefully quirk into arabesques toward different kinds of light. Take five minutes at the Plants in Motion website; it’s better than a coffee break for a rush of energy.

Morning glory flowers lean into the sun: phototropism

My favorite movements are what this site calls nastic movements, movements plants make which aren’t necessarily in the direction of the stimulus (roots going down to ground, stems bending toward light). If  you go to this page of the site, you can watch a morning glory vine wave around, find a support, and twine around it.

Of course since it’s human beings making the categories here, there’s some argument about whether this is a nastic movement – those are the movements that don’t go toward (or away from) the stimulus. Some people call this dance of the morning glories thigmatropism – which means that when the reaching plant hits a solid object, it starts twining (or in the case of plants with suction cups, like ivy, sticking).

If you like intimations of horror without the gore, there’s an episode of a venus fly trap closing (a nursery manager once taught me how to stimulate the center, not the edges, of their traps. And using a bigger instrument (such as your finger) will get you better results than the little metal tool in this movie).

To me, the most spectacular of these nastic movements are the young and old arabidopsis (what is arabidopsis?) plants. They wave, they bend, they whirl: what’s the force moving them? Their own plant cells, elongating more on one side than another. When you watch the 10-second movie, they look as if they are blowing in a high wind. But the wind is all inside them. Inside their secret lives.

No longer a Figwort

Like many families today, the Figworts have split up.  Even now, they are moving on to new families, acquiring new names.

It’s sad, but modern life is full of such scenes. What drove them apart? Taxonomy.

What does this mean to me? you may be wondering. Who gives a fig?

Well, if you’re a gardener, you’re probably living with a Figwort right now. Got any foxgloves? Snapdragons? Toadflax? Or if you don’t have those, you may have nemesia, penstemon, angelonia, or any of about 190 other genera from the family (in its heyday).

If you like to walk in the larger garden nature combines with humans to make, you’ll find more (former) Figworts: mimulus, Indian paintbrush, collinsia. Wetter areas than mine may harbor the wild Figworts foxglove (D. purpurea) and toadflax (Linaria vulgaris).

What does it mean to a gardener or just plain plant-fancier to know a plant family? In my own case, I’ve used the old, extended Figwort family as a sign of plants that are likely to do well, or at least OK, in semi-shade. Since semi-shade is mostly what I’ve got, this is important news.

Figworts, I’ve discovered – at least the clan of ancient days – seem to be a little less tasty to deer than other flowering plants. You notice I didn’t say Figworts are deer-proof (that would be asking for it). No plant is deer-proof. Figworts (or Scrophulariaceae in the old-school sense) might qualify as fairly deer-resistant, though.

I can still use these old designations for practical purposes, but here, as so often, the dread Lumpers and Splitters have come into the garden, wreaking as much havoc as deer. DNA sequencing shows that the Figworts must be in five separate groups, some of them entirely new groups made for the occasion, like children of a second marriage assigned a name they’ve never known. Even these five groups leave the mimulus on the outskirts : mimulus is still unclassified. And to make the splitup even more fraught, Lumpers and Splitters have been tussling over the genus Mimulus for years. Some say that the shrubby ones should be called Diplacus, and the herby ones Mimulus. (For more about this epic struggle, check out this post.)

When botanists create new orders (so to speak), gardeners (conservatives of the botanical world) often stubbornly hold on to the old ones. The gardeners have a point: there were reasons why these plants were bound together under one roof. They have similarities that help us to identify them, know some of their properties, and have a good idea where they like to grow.

The botanists have a point, too. If these plants are different down to their DNA, it makes sense to me that there would be distinctions in their personalities and properties – how could there not be?

And what might that mean to gardeners?

You probably think I’m going to talk about your stress. Nope. I’m going to talk about plant stress. But you can extrapolate if you want: humans need a bit of stress, too, or we wouldn’t stand upright.

What seems to be important, in humans and in plants, is the right kind of stress. I’ve talked about bad kinds of stress, like what happens to plants that get watered, then  suffer from drought.

How do we create good plant stress?

Squeeze your grapes. Wine grapes, that is. But you’ve got to do it right. Mark and Rie Ishii Matthews, at the University of California, did a study on wine grapes that were stinted on water, making smaller, dryer grapes. These grapes made wine which was more aromatic and flavorful, and had a better appearance. The wine was worth more, too, which made the growers happy.

Whack off your vines.  Most vines put on a much better display if they’re severely pinched out or pruned early in life. Grapes would be only one example; most perennial flowering vines also benefit from being whacked. Instead of putting their energy into one long trailer, suddenly they have several branches, all potential rivers of flowers and fruit. Don’t forget that many tomatoes are vines, too. And some non-vine plants – such as chrysanthemums – also do well under this treatment.

Beat and shoot your trees. In the southeast U.S., farmers flail their pecan trees to make a better yield. This echos an old English custom, wassailing. On about the 17th of January (Twelfth Night on the old calendar, one of those post-winter-solstice holidays) farmers gather in the apple orchard with shotguns and other noisemakers. They pour libations of cider on the roots, and put cider-soaked pieces of toast in the branches. Sometimes a child is put in the branches of the chosen tree and fed some of the cider toast. Then guns are discharged through the branches, tin cans and trays are beaten, and a song is sung to the apple tree, encouraging it to bear.

There are records of similar rituals for other fruit-bearing trees, but for most of history, apple trees were the main source of alcohol, making them vitally important, and their rituals seem to have been more recorded. Some of the wassailing traditions include beating the trees, just like the southeastern pecan farmers.

Robert Stone’s 1989  book,  The Secret Life of Your Cells, got me thinking about this. Stone says that, in the grapes experiment, the researchers intended good when they turned off the water, and the plants sensed that. Having known scientific researchers, I think they were just as likely to be thinking about what they were having for lunch or if they could fit a trip to the gas station in before they got home, but OK. Let’s ride with this theory.

Certainly the farmers who beat their apple trees are looking to encourage, and not harm. Yet how many stories have we heard of plants who were threatened with death if they didn’t shape up – and they shaped up? How many of us have experienced plants thriving where they have no business to? A miniature citrus that thrives in a shady spot, but dies when moved to a sunny one; Ruth Stout’s gardenia, which flourished where it wasn’t supposed to.

Are these plants stressed, and liking it? Or are they just perverse? Is it the same thing?

Peter Henderson’s 1874 gardening book, Practical Floriculture, is an idea-provoking read that leaves me wondering where he got his manic amounts of energy. One of the things he seemed to enjoy most was experimenting with new technologies, and pooh-poohing old superstions.

One piece of dogma he refutes is the notion of using only soft water or rain water for plants, very popular then, and still recommended now. This is problematic for those of us whose water is full of minerals, and whose rain is only available for part of the year.  The other dictum about watering that Henderson refutes, is that most plants prefer warm water (bulbs don’t; they’re late-winter/early-spring creatures, adapted to cold).

Fortunately for a lot of us, Henderson dispels both these myths. He describes a greenhouse in Jersey City where he grew plants with cold, hard well water, and a greenhouse in Bergen (also in New Jersey) where he gave plants rainwater captured from the roof and stored in cisterns. “…yet we have never been able to see that our plants have been any better grown or healthier in one place than another.”

I will say from my own observation that rainwater (from the sky, as nature provides it) does seem to me to make plants grow more lushly and greenly. It could be because of nitrogen in the water, or it could just be that the time of year it rains here is the time when things are cool and moist and much more likely to be lush.

Whether municipal water poses more of a problem would be harder to say. In 1874, they didn’t use chlorine in their water supply, and there were plusses and minuses to that. Chlorine is used because it’s toxic to every form of organic life. Since people recommend that you let water sit and evaporate chlorine before filling a fish tank, it’s probably not all that great for plants either (or us), but then neither are typhoid fever and all the other great things you get from water gone bad.

As for the temperature of the water, Henderson explains, a simple thermometer test combined with observation takes care of that. He measured his greenhouse soil at 80 degrees; theory had it that the water was supposed to be the same temperature. Henderson begs to differ. “If we pour a pint of water at 40 degrees [about 4.4 degrees C] into the soil, the temperature will not be 40 degrees, but above the mean between 40 and 80 degrees [about 27 degrees C], or about 60 degrees [around 15.5 degrees C]. Now if the soil remained for any length of time at 60 degrees, it might be claimed to be injurious, but it does not.” In ten minutes, the soil temperature is back to normal, or almost.

“It is the duration of extremes of temperature that does the mischief; place a plant of Coleus in a temperature of 33 degrees (just above freezing in Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, and it will be almost certain to die, while it would remain as many minutes without injury. Let a dash of sun raise the temperature of your hot-bed to 100 degrees [ 38C], or over, for 10 minutes, and it will not seriously injure the contents, but an hour of this temperature might destroy the whole.”

He likens this to drinking ice water; the temperature is radically different from our body’s,  but most stomachs are up to the task of bringing the water up to body temperature pretty quickly, so even though having our insides at ice-temperatures is dangerous, it would take a heck of a lot of ice water for that to happen.

So for those who worry about such esoterica: worry no longer. And for those who are worried by people who worry about such esoterica: you’ve now got the perfect answer. Science and history have proven it: we can retire from excessive water snobbery, and all that heating and storing of water that I’m sure somebody did. Me, I’m just glad that science and history are providing a rationalization for sloth.