Deconstructing the nasturtium

I've written in the past about my love/hate obsession with the nasturtium. Spring is about to happen here in the Arizona mountains and my thoughts are turning once more to pots filled with bright flowers. Including nasturtiums, which this evening brought to mind a series of pictures from last year, taken to show the different parts of the flower.

If you look closely at either of these blossoms, you'll find that the nasturtium has five petals (as a rule), but that three have "whiskers" at the lower end, while the other two sport stripes that lead down toward the center of the flower, where the real work is done.

It's pretty obvious, even to a rank amateur like myself, that the stripes are there to guide an insect toward the stamen either to pick up a load of pollen or to shake the anther, causing the pollen to alight on the stigma to start the seed-making process. But: what about the whiskers on the other three petals? Quite frankly, The Google didn't help me much with that question. I learned how to make caper substitutes from the seed pods as well as potato nasturtium soup. No talk about whiskers.

Perhaps their function is to brush off any pollen that sticks to a visitor, so that it falls back to the stigma. In any event, here are close-ups of both kinds of petals. Very possibly those stripes have a special color in ultra-violet light to catch the eye of the wandering insect -- that is often the case with flowers.

The plant doesn't count on stripes alone -- or bees and other bugs, for that matter. Each blossom also offers a heavy-duty nectary to entice hummingbirds or possibly hawk moths to help with the important job of pollination. It's strange but my mother, who introduced us kids to the honeysuckle nectary, never cottoned onto the syrup potential of a nasturtium. Maybe because the flowers are orange and she really, really didn't like that color! A pity. Oh, yes -- the nectary is that horn-shaped extension curving down from the bottom of the flower.