A boat for every month of Her Reign, and more

Move along, move along, no plants to be seen here I'm afraid. Last time a British Queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, 15 hectares of land was transferred from the Lord Stewart's Department to Kew Gardens. The Queen was Victoria, the land a relatively wild area that was ceded on the condition that it remain in its natural state.

Today I don't expect Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew will make any property gains but on the nearby Thames there was plenty of action. To be fair it all happened far downstream, from Battersea Bridge to Tower Bridge.

This was where 1,000 boats paraded in front of many thousand (i.e. one million according to media reports) of the Queen's subjects. Your Queen (for those of you in the United Kingdom of Britain and Australia) stood, watched and waved for 90 minutes as they passed by.

Lynda and I took the 391 bus to Bagley Lane and fought our way to the back of an impenetrable layer of loyal subjects at Imperial Wharf. I held my camera aloft to take a few pictures of the boats assembling above Battersea Bridge before we walked downstream to watch Brits celebrating here, there and everywhere.

 

Kew did contribute ideas and plants to a display of Dominion plants on one of the Royal barges but no record of it in my chance encounters I'm afraid. After all that it was home to try and catch the action on Television (from where my close up of royalty was taken). We arrived in time to see the end of the fleet reach Tower Bridge in more of that English weather, and some fireworks from the top of the bridge - clearly a nod to Sydney Harbour on New Year's Eve.

Back in Battersea the parties continue I imagine.

 

Turning forests into ships into poems - Homer the Greek in Chios

I've returned from my visit to Ionia, or at least the island of Chios, home of Homer and Mastic and once part of  that Ancient Greek empire on the Aegean Sea.

I learned many things, including why the island has few trees. You will read about the pine forests (Pinus brutia) being susceptible to fire. That's half the story. The first half starts over 3000 years ago.

During the Trojan wars, the subject of Homer's Iliad, 934 ships set sail from Ionia and other Greek states. These ships were made mostly of fir (Abies) and poplar (Populus). The masts and oars were made of fir and the hull of the ship from poplar.

Now for the maths. Each boat had 50 oars, 25 on each side, and each oar was made from a single fir tree. Plus the mast, that's 51 fir trees required to make each boat, a total of 47,634 fir trees for the whole fleet. Lots of these boats were destroyed of course. Worse was to come when in the fifth century BC they built larger ships with 170 oars each. Very soon the great forests of Ionia were destroyed.

The third half (whoops) is all about agriculture. The southern part of the island has been cultivated for olives and mastic for the least 2500 years. The Mastichochora, as it's called, often includes rows of mastic and olives with semi-natural vegetation - but not trees - in between.

I've already posted on the illusive mastic but here is the real thing, with cuts in the stem where resin has been extracted.

The poetry of Homer has more to tell us about the plants of Chios and a new botanic garden on the island, the Aegean Botanic Garden, has a special Homerian garden to celebrate Homer's botanical words. While I was visiting the garden, for its inauguration, Magnus Liden from the Uppsala Botanical Garden in Sweden read Homer in his very own Homerian Greek translation!

And if you want more on the Trojan War by people that actually know something about it, see Melvyn Bragg's latest In Our Time BBC Radio 4 podcast. For some odd reason I wrote this before I got around to listening to it so I hope it doesn't contradict the (very) few facts I've included above!


Notes: I'm grateful to Stella Kokkini from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for providing at the European Botanic Gardens Congress (EuroGard) the data on ships and trees consumed in their construction, and for Magnus standing still long enough for me to take the picture above. The image of the reconstructed Greek ship is from a website called The Greek Age of Bronze. 

I’ve eaten it, drunk it and driven past it, but I’m yet to see a Mastic

The tears of lentisk, as locals call the gum extracted from Pistacia lentiscus (the Mastic), find their way into all sorts of edible products on the island of Chios, part of Greece but only eight miles from the coast of Turkey. I’ve eaten mastic ice-cream, sucked mastic lollies, munched on mastic biscuits and downed a shot of mastic liqueur.

In between digesting mastic I am attending the sixth meeting of Eurogard – not, as I’m fond of saying, an insect repellent but a three-yearly meeting of the botanic gardens of Europe. Today we left the darkened lecture theatres in the Homerian Centre to see some native plants on the north of the island. 

The island boasts 1260 different kinds of vascular plant, although only one endemic, Fritillaria pelinaea. Many species are restricted to the local region or western Mediterranean of course. All very pretty and perhaps some subjects for future posts.

Today, though, it’s all about Mastic, native throughout the Mediterranean (through to Canary Islands in the west and Iraq and Iran in the east) but closely associated with island of Chios for many centuries and now enshrined in a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI). So there; apparently the trees of Chios are the only ones to shed the tears of lentisk when the bark is cut.

A little after Homer’s time, the Ottomans occupied Chios in the 16th century, to either free the island from Italian control or to harvest the Mastic, depending on your perspective. Lately tourists have arrived to either enjoy Mastic or soak up the Mediterranean weather and life style, depending on your perspective.

Mastic grows and is harvested mostly in the southern part of the island and thusfar I’ve only been to the middle and north. However I’m sure we drove past a plant on the roadside between the airport and town.

The aroma travels with you, particularly when you’ve eaten something containing the product. It tastes like the sap smells when you cut something like the Pepper Tree (Schinus molle), which just happens to be in the same family – Anacardiaceae. 

Whether that’s a good thing or not is a matter of taste. Let’s just say I bought some quince and almond delight instead of this Mastic flavoured variety. And as Tim Upson said, you sometimes think these regionally flavoured delicacies taste wonderful in situ but they lose all their positive attributes when eaten back home.

Images: The food products are from the ‘Citrus’ store at Argentikon, a restored 15 century estate with a wonderful citrus garden/orchard, the liqueur is from a food tasting event in the city square of Chios (sampled by Suzanne Sharrock and Matthew Jebb)  and the illustration was hanging on the wall of the city library (founded by the owner of a previous owner of Argentikon, I think).


Postscript (as comment): I have now seen, photographed and touched Mastic. Last night we drove through fields of olives and mastic on the way to Elata, in the middle-south of Chios, for the conference dinner. The meal was free of Mastic but the countryside full of it. Is good.

What do you call that white thing? Kill-your-mother-quick?

On Tuesday night I asked a tour-train of directors from botanic gardens around the world what they called the white-flowering umbelliferous plant you see in these pictures. Queen Anne's Lace was the consensus. This came from the Australian and North American representatives.

Earlier in the week I'd used a pictorial key to the common flowers of Britain I found in my office, and decided this white thing was Cow Parsley.

Today I checked with a local, Greg Redwood (Kew's Head of Great Glasshouses and Training) who confirmed the Cow Parsley diagnosis, although he did say there might be a bit of wild carrot amongst it.

Turns out Cow Parsley and Queen Anne's Lace are both commonly used names for Anthriscus sylvestris and this is what I'm more or less convinced it is. Other names are Wild Chervil, Wild Beaked-parsley, Keck, Poor-man's Oatmeal, Rabbit Meat, Adder's Meat and even Mother-die and Kill-your-mother-quick.

Because of these latter names, or perhaps because of what is was perceived to do, the flowers of Anthriscus sylvestris are not brought inside the house by some. It tends to drop its petals so perhaps that is the real source of the weird name - a clever device for mother's to encourage their families to not bring it inside!

Even the rather quaint name Queen Anne's Lace may refer to the death of Queen Anne's children rather than the pretty lace effect of the flowers.

Cow Parsley likes shady places so you see it under many of the trees in Kew Gardens were we let the wildflowers do what they want in spring (i.e. we don't decapitate them with mowers). I've seen a reference to it as Dead-man's Flesh because it frequents cemeteries, presumably in the shade of tomb stones.

As you'd guess by the mention of the words oatmeal and meat in some of the common names, you can eat Cow Parsley. Like pretty much everything in its plant family (Apiaceae) it tastes a bit like carrot. Although I gather not as pleasant as that vegetable.

I was partly inspired to feature this plant by a comment made by my colleague Dave Simpson (Assistant Keeper of Systematics in Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives, and one of the 'rotating' Keepers of the Herbarium at the moment) who said he was amused by some of the rather plain plants I include in this blog. He wasn't being derogatory and understood that for me, just about everything I see in London I see with fresh eyes. Mother-die is perhaps a plain plant, but en masse it's beautiful and the common names are irresistible.

Kew Gardens @ British Museum via North America

In April last year, one of my first postings after arriving in London was all about Kew's Australian Garden landscape in front of the British Museum. Yesterday I tubed into London to see the North American Landscape, Kew's fifth excursion to the forecourt of the British Museum.

Steve Ruddy, Head of Kew's Garden Development Unit, and his team have posted a couple of blogs as they built the garden and I've plundered their pages for information. They describe this year's landscape as taking 'visitors from the Florida swamps, through the Missouri prairie to the New England forest'.

I can't argue with that having never been to any of those places except perhaps a little of the Missouri prairie when I visited St Louis twice, the only place other than Ann Arbor (Michigan) that I've visited in North America.

I'm a big fan of insectivorous plants like these, nearly 1000 North American Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia).

From the Florida swamps, the Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) are just coming into leaf. There are even cypress knees, the little volcanic structures that seem to be more for stability than trying to get oxygen into the water-logged roots. (I'm assuming they are made from concrete here in London....). Also in the mini tree canopy are Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera) from Canada, maples, tulip trees and ash. Many of these will look their best later in the season and the garden is going to stay in place later than usual to show off their colours in autumn.

There are more than 4,000 plants in the garden, close to 3,000 of them from the prairie, sown and grown in the glasshouses at Kew Gardens. There are things like Rudbeckia, Coreopsis, Cosmos and Echinacea.

There is plenty more on this garden on the British Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew websites. One thing I was looking out for yesterday was a link to the exhibitions inside the British Museum. Last year there was a collection of art prints from Australia. In the same room this time I found nothing really North American but some wonderful Picasso sketches. So I include this one of a frog as a bit of link to the Florida swamps. This picture was done for at 1942 book including 31 animal sketches by Picasso.

Last dynastic rose on way to Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an, China

Rosa xanthina was described by John Lindley in his 1820 monograph of the genus Rosa. Lindley didn't see a living specimen but based his description on a drawing in the library of Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a founder of the Linnean Society (of which I am now a member!), a Fellow of the Royal Society (of which I'm not) and supporter of Kew Gardens (which I am).

Lambert had an extensive botanical library and herbarium, praised by Sir Joseph Hooker as 'one of the most extensive and valuable ever formed by a private individual'. He had gathered private herbaria from many countries, including China, but it was a collection of drawings of Chinese plants that caught Lindley's attention in 1820.

Lambert also collected living plants and donated a collection of cacti to Kew in 1841. But his rose drawing was the start of the rather slow introduction of this pretty and robust, shrub rose into cultivation. Single and double flowers occur in nature, and now in gardens. This one from Xi'an is single, which I prefer.

Rosa xanthina grows naturally on scrubby slopes in North China (and Korea) but is widely planted throughout the country. The specimens I photographed were near the 8,000 buried Terracotta Warriors, an attempt by the first Qin Emperor to take control of his afterlife in the same way he had conquered, and unified, China in real life.

In the town of Xi'an you can see traces of the Qin (200 BC), the Ming (who rebuilt the city wall 600 years ago) and if I really stretch it, the Manchu (in this rose). I suspect the name comes from the region once called Manchuria, where the rose grows, rather than the last Dynasty (officially the Qing, that lasted from 1644 to 1912) but I'm allowed some poetic licence in my own blog. This tenuous link between the tree dynasties also allows me to finish with this striking picture taken on top of the 17 metre thick city wall around Xi'an.

A nauseous Camassia mass at Kew Gardens

Walking along the Thames Tow Path this morning, the first time since returning from a week in China and two in Australia, I saw why everyone gets so excited about Camassia cusickii*. This is a picture from my phone (looking across white umbelliferous flowers on the Thames side of the ha ha).

This North American bulb is rare in the wild but became easily naturalised in Kew Gardens when planted for this purpose in 2003. Now you can see from the Riverside Walk within the Gardens, or from the Tow Path outside, a lovely sea of blue every May. Before I left, things were just starting:

There are five species of Camassia, all of which form large and conspicuous colonies according to an early review of their taxonomy by Frank Gould. Some species are widespread but contrary to quite a few reports, Camassia cusickii* is restricted to a small region near the Oregon-Idaho State border. In fact Gould in 1942 says it is restricted to the Snake River region in north-eastern Oregon, and not collected from there in recent times (sensu 1942). The only living bulbs seen by Gould came from California, where they were grown without any knowledge of where they came from.

The more recent treatment of Cassia in the on-line Flora of North America suggests a slightly wider distribution, extending into Idaho. Even so, there are only two adjacent dots on the map, so it may be still restricted to what's called Snake River country.

It grows there on hillsides, between 1000 and 2000 metres above sea level, unlike the other species of Camassia which favour wet meadows. Interestingly it's growing in what could be called a wet, or slightly damp, meadow here at Kew Gardens.

The bulbs of common Camassia are eaten by Native Americans, where they are called quamash or camas. The bulbs are roasted for couple of days to sweeten them, producing something a little like a sweet chestnut in flavour. In case you get a hankering for one of Kew's bulbs, I should let you know that Frank Gould describes the bulbs of Camassia cusickii* as 'nauseous, pungent and inedible'.

If you want to see (but not eat!) one of the edible-bulbed species, look out for Camassia leichtlinii in the Rock Garden at Kew, or the Bog Garden at Wakehurst Place.

The flowers of our nauseous-bulbed species are often said to be pale blue and I did read that the cultivar 'Zwanenburg' has darker blue flowers with a pale stripe on each petal. So as this close up shows, I expect we have Camassia cusickii* 'Zwanenburg'. Presumably still with pungent and inedible bulbs...

*Postscript: I was intrigued but not greatly surprised to read a sign erected inside Kew Gardens celebrating the camassia blooms and calling the species Camassia leichtlinii. The rareness of Camassia cusickii in nature and horticulture worried me a little, despite it being listed on our website as the source of this mass planting (see the end of this webpage, under The Species at Kew) and mentioned (albeit with surprise also) in Tony Cope's book on The Wild Flora of Kew Gardens. I note that a more recent page on our website goes further still and lists the species as Camassia leichtlinii subspecies suksdorfii. For more information on this species and subspecies, well take a look at that original page that set me on the wrong track... And when you've done that, go to Wakehurst Place and take a look at Camassia leichtlinii 'Lady Eva Price' (as I did this morning), named after the family who owned the property prior to the National Trust/Royal Botanic Gardens, also featured on that page.

No need to mow this cryptogamic lawn in Melbourne

This is fun, as long as it’s in someone else’s botanic garden... It’s an Azolla filiculoides lawn atop the Ornamental Lake in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens.

Not many lawns are made of ferns but then not many ferns look like this. 

And it’s not often you have to put up signs telling visitors something is not really a lawn, just so they don’t fall into it.

Quite right too. Although to me it looks more like a pub carpet. I’m sure I remember one like this in Naughton’s, the pub nearest to the Botany School at The University of Melbourne (but sadly, I think, no more).

There is a lovely irony in the bottom part of this sign. The lake is full of nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate, entering as run-off from gardens and lawns, or from the rear end of ducks and other wildlife. The Royal Botanic Gardens have built lots of fancy constructions in the lakes to remove nutrients and, as the sign says, the azolla might just help as well.

The azolla plants require various chemicals to create new little azollas, and given the size of the carpet plenty of this has been going on. But each azolla also carries around a little bonus organism called Anabaena (perhaps these days classified as Trichormus or Nostoc), a blue-green algae (or cyanobacterium) that fixes atmospheric nitrogen into nitrate. So azolla probably produces as much of this nutrient as it consumes. Phosphorus is usually what limits growth and I’m sure there is plenty of this in the Ornamental Lake thanks to the ducks. The azolla could well make a dent on that nutrient.

The sign finishes by saying that by removing nutrients and shading the water the azolla lawn/carpet can help reduce the growth of ‘nuisance blue-green algae blooms’. Quite true but the word ‘nuisance’ is critical. This is not only a lawn of floating fern, but a cryptic lawn of blue-green algae – together, a lumpy, reddish-green, nitrate-producing factory.

I do wonder what the nineteenth century Director William Guilfoyle would have thought of all this? Not the algal connection but the lawn growing on his lake. His beautiful landscape design of 1873 was built around sweeping views through to water, not to a carpet of azolla and algae.

Still the azolla is only temporary and will surely fade away in winter. In the meantime, Guilfoyle’s memory is kept alive elsewhere in the botanic garden by a charming redevelopment of a once hidden water reservoir to what is called Guilfoyle’s Volcano. The landscape is based on Guilfoyle’s original designs for this area, inspired by him seeing a volcano in the New Hebrides.

I couldn’t see any obvious blue-green algae in the volcano reservoir but there were a couple of cycads in the plantings and as we all know, they have blue-green algae in their roots. 

Images: taken during a short visit to Melbourne last week.

La nature est trop verte et mal éclairée

"Nature is too green and badly lit." So said François Boucher, the eighteenth-century Rococo painter. I just wish I'd found that quote before publishing my last blog post on electric trees.

Instead I'll leave this quote with a picture of a contemplative someone from the Tang Dynasty in China for you to meditate over while I take two weeks off from work and blogging. You may notice the similarities between this gentleman and my posturing in the blog picture opposite.

Should I extend my facial hair while on holiday? Alternatively is my Chinese friend predicting the discovery of an orchid with a foot-long nectar spur, predicting the discovery of a moth with a foot-long proboscis? So much for you to ponder while I'm away.

These occasionally colourful trees capture no carbon

Now that I can blog (tweet and facebook) again legitimately, I'll file one more quick post before I leave Chinese territory. So from the Hong Kong airport, some electric trees photographed in Xi'an.

During the day these specimens look like a deciduous trees with particularly unattractive autumn foliage. Except that it's spring and these brown things are not leaves.

The whole tree is wired up for a very pretty night-time show.

Don't see those natural wood and leaf things doing this do you? Sure the electric versions aren't doing much carbon sequestration but there are plenty of real trees in Xi'an. In fact in this sense it's becoming a particularly green city (the street trees in following picture are Chinese Scholar Trees, mentioned in last post); shame about the air and water pollution.

But this post is about celebrating these colourful trees and my trip to Xi'an. Everything is on a colossal scale in the new parts of Xi'an, learning it has to be said from the old parts of town which include many miles of city wall over 17 metres thick, and from ancient emperors who did things like bury 8,000 ceramic warriors... At the end of the Great Tang All Day Mall, lined with electric trees, you get this.

Xi’an’s botanic garden: all about fishin’, marryin’ and tulips

Shaanxi Botanical Garden in Xi'an, China, doesn’t have the richest collection of interesting plants or the most beautifully manicured horticultural landscape. But in a city of 8 million closely-packed people it is place to treasure, particularly when the tulips are out.

Walking through the entrance, after paying you 20 Yen (£2), everything and everyone slows down. There are people strolling, sitting and fishing.

I saw six couples in various places having their wedding photographs taken.

All the signage is in Chinese so not a lot for a foreigner to learn, except that tulips are beautiful. Even here in China, adjacent to the natural source of most cultivated Tulipa in southern Kazakhstan, they pay homage to the country most frequently associated with this plant today. Still, although species of Tulipa do grow wild in China Xi’an is probably only a little closer to Kazakhstan than The Netherlands – China is a big country!

The Ottomans first cultivated tulips, about 1000 years ago, and they were introduced into Europe soon after, in the 11^th century.  I gather tulip cultivars came to China via Europe. Where they have clearly been embraced.

The rest of the botanic garden is not so colourful , although still a pleasant place for wandering and contemplating. There are various ponds but at this time of year few aquatic plants doing their thing. Mostly it’s trees and low shrubs.

The Oriential Plane (Platanus orientalis) is another species from further west (Balkans to Iran) although perhaps once extending almost into China. It features in the street plantings around Xi’an, as well as in this botanic garden.

The other very popular street tree is the misnamed Styphnolobium japonica, which I’ve blogged about before. Despite the species name this tree is definitely native to China and called locally the Chinese Scholar Tree or even the Xi’an Tree. This avenue of Styphnolobium japonica is beside the 600 year-old city wall around central Xi’an – a 17 metre thick discouragement to invading forces of the time.

Also local, and in the botanic garden, is Oriental Paperbush (Edgeworthia chrysantha), which I also blogged about recently. I include a picture here just to show Timothy Walker, Director of Oxford University’s botanic garden, how the Chinese make it look a little more showy (Timothy was sceptical about my portraying it as an exceptional horticultural specimen)…