Let's face it. The colorful petals that so attract us to beautiful flowers are just that: good looks. Window dressing. Spin. Marketing. All designed to draw the eye of the pollinator, be it bird or insect, to the heart of the blossom where the next generation is in the making. This week I got caught up photographing the
central portions of flowers currently blooming in my garden pots. (Technical note: I used my older Sony for these pictures; macro shots with the Canon are neither as close nor as satisfactory.)
Many of our wild penstemons feature lines directing the eye into the business works, where pollen from the anthers is rubbed off and deposited on the stigma or female part leading to the ovary. In some blossoms, such lines are in the ultraviolet, visible to many critters other than humans.
Two more local penstemon. Above, Palmer's or wild pink snapdragon and, below, beardstongue. It's pretty hard to miss the beard on the latter. I had to upend the flower so that you can see inside it; normally, it hangs with the innards facing toward the ground. Beardstongue is a bright red; not surprisingly, it's a favorite with hummingbirds.
And here is the tame cousin of the wildpenstemon -- a garden snapdragon. BTW, I had to do that old kid's trick of pinching the sides of the flower so that it opened for the photograph.
In the real world, the intense purple of this petunia (above) hides the fact that it, too, features lines directing traffic toward the stamen and the stigma. Unfortunately, all I got for my efforts with the purple morning glory (below) was a wonderful central glow.
My mystery poppy which popped into existence this year from seedings past starts out with the anthers growing tightly around the center, but as they begin to release pollen (below), they spread out and their supporting filaments lengthen. That central arrangement where the seeds are made turns into a neat pod.
The California poppy doesn't produce such a tidy arrangement, though the central portion turns directly into a seed pod, just like its cousin above.
Speaking of cousins... our wild globe mallow is a hollyhock family member. There's a reason that the petals and the central works weren't both in focus above -- the stigma and anther stick out at right angles to the flower, as is evident from the view below.
The grains of pollen at the center of this portulaca show up quite nicely, but the stigma (the "star" to the upper left) sits above them in a different plane of focus. Below, the center of an ice plant flower.
Note that the anthers of this dianthus are attached ever so flexibly in order to scatter the pollen even in a slight breeze. The odds are that some of the pollen will land on the stigma in the center.
Right now, I don't have many
composites in bloom, tho my very own from-seed sunflower has just opened; it's too tall for me to photograph its big center. So we'll make do with the gallardia (above) and a coreopsis (below). Both plants feature ray and disk flowers in the center; each "petal" is actually a separate ray flower.
These are definitely not today's photographs -- or yesterday's -- though I would normally expect such lush mosses in late August. However, we've not had our usual summer moisture this month; these photographs date from a happier time. The mosses grow in the crevices of the granite or other rocks, where moisture collects; the accompanying blue-green lichen spread out on the rock surfaces.
This is indeed a local scene; the pictures above are all from the rock cut just off Gurley Street to the west of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
When I was a high school biology student, mosses and lichen occupied a position in the botanical scheme of things just below the ferns, which in turn were just below the flowering plants, as measured in terms of biological complexity. Things are not so simple these days. Per the Arizona State University lichen site, lichens are a partnership between a fungus and either a green algae or a blue-green bacteria.
Lichen are tough customers, too. A sample sent out and exposed to space for over two weeks turned dormant and did not metabolize, but once returned to Earth, resumed normal activity and its DNA appeared not to have been damaged, according to a report in New Scientist, which noted that lichens have a tough mineral coating that could shield them from UV rays. They are also made from individual organisms layered on top of one another, so outer layers may provide protection for underlying cells. The organisms have already been shown to be capable of withstand high levels of UV radiation on Earth.
I don't have much exposed granite in up my hill, but lichen is quite happy growing on oak tree trunks and those stout mountain mahogany stems (above, below). Our common blue-green lichen is just one of 1400 species found in the Arizona/SoCalif/Sonora region.
When conditions are right (meaning very moist), lichen form fruiting bodies -- those round holes above -- which launch spores to spread the organism afield.
This pine tree trunk over at the Gurley Street site is covered with a yellow lichen; I do not know if this is a different species or actually the blue-green form that has died.
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