Unreal plant named after party god

Dionysus was one of the fun-loving Greek gods. His portfolio included both wine making and drinking, The Romans converted him to Bacchus and we all know what he got up to.

The plant genus which I presume was named after this festive deity, Dionysia, is a a collection of compact 'cushion-bushes' native to central Asia, and particularly Iran and Afghanistan where they grow on limestone at altitudes above 1500 metres.

To see them growing in a more hospitable and secure environment I'd recommend the Alpine House at Kew Gardens.

According to Kew's Alpine and Rock Garden team blog, the cushion consists of tiny rosettes of leaves, each one producing a single flower. I must defer to the website because all you can see at the moment are flowers!

There are 50 or so species in this genus which is closely related to Primula. If you look at the tiny flowers you can see the similarity. Almost all species are in cultivation, as well as a few hybrids such as the one at the top of my blog, Dionysia curviflora x tapetodes.

Find out how to grow them, and some far prettier pictures than mine taken this afternoon with my Blackberry, on the Alpine and Rock Garden Team blog. As a visitor said as I snapped my picture, 'they look unreal'.

Pollen dust heralds sweet breakfast spread

Two whole hazelnuts in every 15 grams - that's what it says on the label of this jar. A shame the Brits living around here after the last Ice Age didn't have access to the American Theobroma cacao. Otherwise they could have created this oddly popular breakfast spread, invented in Italy in the late twentieth century.

A pretty pointless 'what if' I know but it helps me lead into the fact that pollen records show that hazel (Corylus) was the one of the first trees to return to Britain when temperatures increased after the last Ice Age. Very soon hazels dominated the forests of post-glacial Europe (until the oak displaced them around 6000 years ago according to pollen studied in French peat bogs).

The Common Hazel, Corylus avellana, is still a widespread tree in these parts. Around this time of year, lamb's tails, more techinically described as catkins of male flowers, dangle in the breeze, occasionally letting off a drift of pollen. If you look carefully you can see the pollen dust in this picture taken after Lynda kindly tapped the branch with a big stick.

The female flower is more subtle and all you really see is a tiny tuft of red, the receptive style waiting for a pollen grain to drift its way. You should be able to make them out in my next picture, just above the male catkin.

The hazel featured here is the Corkscrew Hazel cultivar, Corylus avellana 'Contorta'. It's very popular as a garden plant, both for its wacky contorted branching and these glimmering catkins. It's also called Harry Lauder's Walkingstick. I understand Harry was popular Scottish entertainer in the early 20th century.

Despite not discovering Nutella, according to some notes prepared by Kew, the ancient Brits did find the hazel a useful tree. In Celtic folklore it was known as the 'tree of knowledge', although the knowledge gained seems a bit suspect: keep a hazelnut in your pocket to avoid elfin tricks, cure toothache with a double hazelnut and fend off witches with the same malformed nut.

The Stone Agers also ate the nut, which makes sense at least after the last Ice Age given how common the trees were back then. Coppicing too has a long history, to produce small, straight poles for fencing. You can see some modern day coppicing at both Kew Gardens and Wakehurst Place, and various Hazel species and cultivars on display - the Contorted Hazel features in Wakehurst Place's Winter Garden.

Of course you can wander around the UK and find hazels in lots of woodlands and hedgerows. I'm sure there are some in the Yorkshire landscapes by David Hockney, currently on exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Maybe the purple tree? We went to see the exhibition today but of course didn't take this picture (photography is not allowed).

The palm of iron and blood

In the year the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck proposed the world's first old-age pension scheme - confounding his arguably deserved reputation as a conservative - compatriots Friedrich Hildebrand and Hermann Wendland named one of the world's most beautiful palms after him. It was 1881.

As far as I know, Bismarck did little for botany. I do recall from Year 11 History that he did a whole lot for Germany in the late nineteenth century. In fact I became quite obsessed with him at the time although I never understood why he was remained Chancellor and never became President or Prime Minister of Germany. I now understand that being Chancellor is as good as it gets in Germany.

Bismarckia nobilis, like more than 180 species of palm, grows naturally in Madagascar only. It grows unnaturally all over the tropical and subtropical world, and the glaucous-blue form will even tolerate the odd frost or two. If you visited or walked past any holiday resort in warmer climes you'll have seen them. Mostly they are young specimens and it seems that only in recent years, surprisingly, this species has taken off in horticulture.

There is only one species of Bismarckia and it's a noble one. The scientific name joins a small list I'm starting of imposing names. So far I have only two: Chrysophyllum imperialis, which I nickname the Imperial or Royal Tree, and now Bismarckia nobilis. I'm sure there are others....

My habit picture of the species at the top of this post, from a park in Puerto de Mogan on Gran Canaria, doesn't really do the species justice but these close ups are much prettier. It's one of the fan palms, so it's fronds look like this.

Some plants have downy pimples at the base of the leaves, like this. Others don't. 

And the female plants carry bunches of fruit like this.

So for me, this plant is striking to look at, impressively named, and an obscure connection to history lessons at Castlemaine High School.

Tuna and other succulent fruit

To avoid death you may eat a cactus but not a euphorbia. To avoid an irritating meal don't eat the prickly bits of either.

Mostly it's the fruit of cacti that people eat, after carefully removing any spines.The dragon fruit, from the climbing cactus Hylocereus, is perhaps the best known in Australia and England.

But look out for strawberry cactus fruit, prickly apple, Barbados gooseberry, chilito, garambulo, pitayo and tuna...

I encountered the succulent rather than piscean tuna most recently in Gran Canaria but I know it's big in Mexico. And not only tuna fruit, but the flattened blade of the prickly pear (Opuntia), the nopale.

To prepare your nopale, gather the young blades of the cactus and remove all traces of the minute but still irritating spines (glochids) and cook. Sauté with scrambled eggs, stew with other vegetables or chop up in a salad. For the more adventurous, pickle or juice them.

If you collect or purchase tuna, the fruit, pick the bright red (or yellow) ones and again remove all spines. If you've ever brushed up against an Opuntia you'll know that it's the tiny microscopic spines that are most irritating. You don't want these in your mouth. The seeds, however, are usually eaten with the tuna flesh or removed when making syrups, jams and liquor.

Now, if you've been concentrating on my blogs you'll know that cacti grow naturally in Americas and not in Africa. However you'll have gathered by my mention of Gran Canaria that cacti do grow (in cultivation or as weeds) in the 'Old World'.

What you want to avoid, generally, are the cacti-like plants growing naturally in the Old World. These are species of Euphorbia. I gather from Marina Welham's How Dangerous are Euphorbias? (and Others in the Family Euphorbiaceae) that autopsies from those who didn't avoid eating Euphorbias revealed that the poison euphorbon inflames and perforates the stomach and intestine wall.

Euphorbon has some practical uses, as a purgative, a treatment for skin lesions and cancers, and for painting the tips of poison arrows. You get the general idea. There are exceptions, as always. Euphorbia esculenta, for example, has a species name that means 'edible' and is apparently used for cattle feed in South Africa.

So what to do? You can't rely on the country of origin to separate cacti from euphorbs due to our habit of spreading species beyond their evolved range. You should certainly seek the help of a trained taxonomist - and pay them handsomely for their expertise. And once you are confident you have a cactus, and one that tastes nice, don't, whatever you do, eat the spines. That's just dumb.

Images: The Dragon Fruit is from breakfast in Vietnam a few years ago. The rest are from Gran Canaria and all but the last one feature cacti (except for a stray Euphorbia amongst the prickly pears in the landscape picture). The final image, is Euphorbia canariensis.

Learning to write

As an undergraduate I wrote flowery (in the literary rather than botanical sense), rambling prose, trying to instil what I thought was a little culture into science. After having an ecology essay torn apart by an uncompromising but incisive academic, I stripped back my exuberant style and tried to write dull and conventional. My honours supervisor, Gerry Kraft, tried his best but left me largely unmarked and unlearned, from a literary perspective. Finally Bill Woelkerling, as my PhD supervisor, wore me down and taught me to write dry as cold toast, but comprehensible, scientific text. As I know now, it was a stage I had to go through. It then took me another few years to shake off the scientific shackles, back under Gerry’s tutelage, and write in a more measured, mature and mischievous way. In a way, I was back to where I started, but this time able to write proper like.

Writing isn’t easy and while scientific writing isn’t the most difficult trade to learn it can be illusive for the enthusiastic and cocky young scientist. So would I have learnt more quickly if Getting Published in the Life Sciences by three north-eastern American academics was available, and would it have persuaded me to put down such formative texts as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Auto-da-Fé and the Life of Samuel Johnson? Perhaps not but through no fault of this book.

I like the way the authors - Richard Gladon, William Graves and Michael Kelly - start with a clear statement about what they can and can’t do. ‘Use of this book, the principles within it, and the exercises within it, cannot cure bad science’, and ‘A writer cannot compensate for... bad science with an extremely well written manuscript.’ Damn! The first few literary quotes also establish their influences and a healthy disregard for political correctness; I've not sought inspiration willingly from either Ray Kroc (Founder of McDonalds), and Ernest Hemingway.

There is plenty of practical advice, in chapters on ethics, choosing authors and journals, structuring your manuscript, presenting data, revising, submitting, peer-review and proofing, among other things. They outline the IMRAD structure – Introduction, Methods, Results And Discussion – while noting that some journals have moved away from this familiar sequence. Although generally thorough their attention to photographs and illustrations, so important to fundamental taxonomic research, is superficial. They make up this oversight with lots of practical advice about sentence and paragraph structures with guidance even on the ideal number of words in both: 15-20 (13 being too few and 40 too many) and an average of 150, respectively. This sentence is a little short and this paragraph a little long. While this may seem prescriptive, they are simply trying to help the novice writer get words on the page and their first few manuscripts into print. When you start cooking it helps to follow a recipe, at least the first few times.

Monographic taxonomists (of which I've been one) would do well to heed the power of the LPU, or Least Publishable Unit. This is the ‘minimum amount of information (data) sufficient for a manuscript to be accepted for publication in a reputable, refereed journal (Broad, 1981)’. Your conclusion, expands Broad, should be original, important and based on research ‘using accepted norms of the discipline’.  So far so good. In a list of reasons why you should be a good writer: ‘It is not necessary for you to be verbose to get your point(s) across to the reader’. They back up this claim by citing Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper where the double helix and genetic replication are described in a single page. OK, but let’s see Watson and Crick sort out one of my troublesome algal species in less than a half dozen journal pages. Gladon et al. do  admit that you must give what they call a ‘competent, informed reader’ enough information to repeat the study and to judge if you’ve done things properly. That might take more than a page me thinks.

The authors’ LPU is that you should start the writing of a scientific manuscript with a few strong take-home messages and a working title. This may take time but according to Gladon and his colleagues it is the key to a good scientific paper. The take-home messages must ‘hit the reader between the eyes’ rather than be lost somewhere in a meandering discussion – the latter always being my preferred approach (yes go and look for them!). The messages should be repeated strongly throughout the manuscript. ‘Reading a scientific article isn’t the same as reading a detective story. We want to know from the start that the butler did it’, Ratnoff (1981 [in K.S.Warren, Coping with the biomedical literature 95-101]) is quoted as saying. Perhaps, but some scientific papers could do with a little suspense, or at least a plot of some kind. They counter with this gem from Robert A Day: ‘Scientific writing is primarily an exercise in organisation. A scientific paper is not literature’.  That said, they do encourage writers to avoid being dry and boring. One way, they say, is to include contradictory data – that always adds a little spice and is, strictly, the right thing to do of course.

There are important things here, like how to write an abstract. One of my pet hates is an abstract that describes the structure of paper without any of the juicy discoveries or conclusions. It turns out this is the ‘indicative’ or ‘descriptive’ type of abstract. What I prefer, and strongly encourage, is the ‘informative’ kind. Help is at hand for writing titles, including one recommendation I know gentle readers of this newsletter will snort at: ‘unless there is an unequivocal reason to use the binomial of the species used in the research in the title, you should use the common name’. Still, I get mightily annoyed by authorities being included for names in titles unless there is an overwhelming nomenclatural reason for this.  The chapter on good word usage is fun and valuable.

I like the generous use of aphorisms. ‘Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science’ (Jules Poincare) and perhaps more usefully ‘The fool collects facts; the wise man (woman) selects them’ (John Wesley Powell). Anyone who quotes Dr Samuel Johnson is a friend of mine and the line they include is his classic of literary criticism: ‘Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.’ The authors are pretty good themselves: ‘For some people and institutions, the order of authors is critically important for promotion and tenure purposes. Sometimes it is important simply to satisfy egos.’ Quite so. And ‘If the results section represents the heart of your manuscript, then the discussion section may represent its soul’.

Despite using the word ‘ensure’ here and there, and allowing the jacket to carry a line containing ‘unique guide to...’ I like this book and learned a lot from reading it. I must send a copy to a couple of ex students of mine, just to encourage them to publish mind you. At the risk of contravening their section on plagiarism, I’ll finish with another pithy quote, attributed to Red Smith: ‘Writing is easy. You just stare at the typewriter until drops of blood appear on your forehead’. 

*     *     *

This book review of 'Getting Published in the Life Sciences' was written a few months ago and appeared first in the Australian Systematic Botanic Society Newsletter, No. 149 (December 2011), pp. 46-48. This week I've been  reading a great little book called 'Stylized' by Mark Garvey (2009), all about Stunk and White's little book 'The Elements of Style'. It reminds me of what's good about good writing. Still, I've resisted the urge to rewrite this particular essay. Only rarely does my writing not seem muddy on reading again. And seldom do I avoid needless words. I have the tantalising chore of good writing ahead of me.  


Image: The 1769 portrait of Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, taken from a postcard I bought at Dr Johnson's House, 17 Gough Square, London.

*Getting Published in the Life Sciences. By Richard J Gladon, William R. Graves and J. Michael Kelly. John Wiley & Sons Inc, Hoboken, New Jersey. 2011. ix + 356 pp. ISBN 978-1-118-01716-6. UK£20.50 (paperback)

No dogs but three dragons in the land of the spaghetti western

Forget the dogs now it's all about dragons. Most of them have been slain but like Jurassic Park they rise again, like this Gran Canaria Dragon (Tree). Thankfully these dragons grow easily from seed.

There are half a dozen different kinds of Dragon Tree, mostly in Africa and nearby islands but also one in Central America. There are more species of Dracaena, about 40 it seems, but (with Plato's Socrates in my head) all Dragon Trees are Dracaena but not all Dracaena are Dragon Trees.

Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden had one of the oldest (over 100 years) and beautifully symmetrical Dragon Trees in cultivation. I've posted pictures of it upright and now leaning - still old and beautiful but less symmetrical.

Jardín Botánico Viera y Clavijo in Gran Canaria, an island where Dragon Trees grow wild (just), has some lovely specimens but none quite matching the one in Sydney. Still for a 60-year old botanic garden they are well on their way.

What this botanic gardens has that Sydney does not (again I'm sounding like a Socratic logician) is two other dragon trees: Dracaena tamaranae (Gran Canaria Dragon Tree; illustrated at top of post), a species that only grows on this island (and which I apparently drove past, at some distance and out of view, yesterday) and Dracaena cinnabari (Arabian Dragon Tree) the most common source of the 'blood' (produced in response to fungi when the stem is damaged) used in medicine.  

We did see a Gran Canaria Dragon Tree outside the botanic garden but that was in this town square in Tejeda, high in the mountains of central Gran Canaria. So high, in fact, that we meet the southerly end of the the mar de nubes (sea of clouds). A few kilometres northward it was more nubes than nature, and it was time to descend to the coast again.

On the way to Tejeda, and before the mist rolled in, we were reminded why spaghetti westerns were shot on this island, something I mentioned in passing a year or so ago not knowing I would ever be here dragon hunting. Not a dragon in sight here, but perhaps behind one of the rocks, Clint Eastwood?

The Island of Dogs

The Guanche bred rather large and ferocious dogs on a cluster of islands one hundred kilometres west of Morocco, just under four hours flight from Gatwick.

Pliny the Elder records that the King of Mauritiania (including current day Morocco and part of Algiers) was impressed with a pair of these dogs sent to him in 60 AD, and would surely have been more impressed to know that we can fly almost anywhere in 2012 AD.

I have to say I was shocked myself to leave London covered in a few inches of snow and to arrive a few hours later in the rather stark homeland of the Guanche. Gran Canaria is named, it appears, in honour of these highly regarded dogs: 'canaria' is extracted from the Latin 'canis' for dog. It appears also that the tribe of Guanche on this island called themselves the 'canarii', so one wonders really which came first.

What we can say is that canaries, those well-known yellow birdlets, came later.Yes they are native to the islands and have most likely been here longer than the Guanche, but they were named canaries after the islands (the Canary Islands include 11 islands of which Gran Canaria is the second largest and second most populous in the archipelago.

Lynda and I are here on holiday but of course there are always some botanical morsels. So far it's all been succulents and other plants adapted the southern and eastern side of the island which bears the brunt of winds from the Sahara Desert. Remember, as I'm sure all my readers will, that there are no cacti native here or in Africa but plenty of euphorbs (Euphorbiaceae) looking like cacti (for a refresher, see this posting).

The most cacti-like one around the parts where we went today - from Puerto de Mogan to Ayacata andback via Arguineguin - is Euphorbia canariensis, only found in the dog islands.

We also found a nondescript, thyme-odoured plant which I assume to be Micromeria benthamii, another local.

No flowers on this one, or on most of the local lavender, Lavandula canariensis, but if you look hard enough you often find one flowering quite out of season.

But when most people think of the Canary Islands they think of three plants. The first is Phoenix canariensis, the Canary Island Palm.

The second, although perhaps only if you are a conifer nut (so to speak), is  Pinus canariensis, the Canary Island Pine.

The third? Dracaena draco. I gather there are only few left growing naturally, perhaps only one or two on Gran Canaria, but more on Tenerife (the largest and most populous island). There is also a local species of Dragon Tree found only on Gran Canaria, Dracaena tamaranae. We are unlikely to see the latter, which I gather grows not far from the route we travelled today but in an inaccessible area (at least to tourists like us). I'm sure we'll find some planted specimens of the more widespread Dragon Tree, but that's for another day, and another blog.

Instead let me finish with an iconic Canary Island planted species, now in flower: the almond, growing near to Ayacata.

The boy from Nhill encounters snow at Kew Gardens

I was told at a dinner on Friday night to 'get over it'. It being snow. At that time it hadn't actually snowed, but there was a 90% chance of it doing so on Saturday night. I explained that I do just that, after I'd enjoyed my first snow fall.

Well, I have, and I guess I will. Last night we had what seems to be about 2 inches of snow. A heavy dusting? In any case it has transformed Kew Gardens and London. There's not much to say from a botanical point of view other than some plants look to be coping better with a few inches of frozen water resting on them than others. The early daffodils, for example, look decidedly sad. The conifers, look majestic.

Here are some pictures of Kew Gardens taken this morning, ending with a view from one of our windows at about 11 pm last night. (A few are the same as I posted on Facebook and tweeted.) I know the excitement will wane, but until then, hope you enjoy as much as I did.

And from last night...

Floral (and fungal) forces of nature

Oodles of orchids, amazing (blue-dabbed) Anthurium and a cacophony of colour. The Tropical Extravaganza is back at Kew, with a vengeance.

This time it's all about the four Forces of Nature - fire, air, water and earth. Not to be confused with the four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile - an imbalance of which was once thought to be the cause of ill-health!

Instead our floral extravaganza is celebrating, as our website puts it, "all things bright, beautiful and, of course, tropical". In fact there is more to it than vibrant colours and 6,500 exotic blooms (2,700 of them orchids). The Tropical Extravaganza illustrates, playfully, how plants depend on and cope with these fundamental forces of nature.

And there's more - fungi! The earth element features giant fungal sculptures. Not as big as the real thing 400 million years ago but bigger than you'll see in Royal Mycologic Gardens today.

According to our website, one gram of soil can contain 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) of fungal thread. That's enough thread to stretch the full length of my usual morning walk from one end of Kew Gardens to the other and half way back again, to my office.

But rather than describe the fungal sculptures - or search for homely comparisons for the fire, air and water elements - let me show you a bit more of what it looks like. If these pictures don't attract you into the Princess of Wales Conservatory between 4 February and 4 March, the near zero temperatures outside may.

Images: all taken today while the final touches were being applied. The human next to the Stinkhorn (Phallus indusiatus) is my cousin Roo, visiting from Australia. And thanks Mr_Subjective for correcting my identification of the blue-painted arum!