Protean mimetes imitates life (Plant Portrait VI*)

Does this flower remind you of a rabbit's tail, a duck's feather or perhaps a droopy dandelion head? If you could see past the fluff you'd think it more like the flower of a grevillea or banksia. It's a relative of theirs called Mimetes.

Mimetes are people that imitate, represent or simply copy what someone else has done, or so say the linguists. Mimetikos is something capable of, and subject to, imitation. The word mimic comes from the same origin and there are books written about Mimesis*, 'art imitating reality'.

Keen gardeners and plant-lovers will be familiar with this botanical Mimetes, a genus of protea-like plants from South Africa.

It's unclear why, in 1807, Richard Salisbury named the genus 'mimetes'. It may be because all 14 species look very similar - that is, they imitate each other - or because the genus looks a bit like Leucospermum. Yet the name is almost ironic given how distinctive this genus is in flower from any other plant. No one writes of the flowers imitating some creature, such as a rabbit or duck, to encourage their pollination.

All the protea family genera have small flowers that generally pack a punch when massed together into a flowerhead - think banksia, waratah or protea itself. In this case the flowerhead is a little more subtle, although the red new growth makes up for this in great measure. There are only a handful of the small flowers below each leaf, and up to dozen or so of these them clumps on any single flowering stem.

All 14 species grown in the Western Cape region and only three are not threatened with extinction. The species photographed here, a few new plantings near the Oak Lawn in Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, is Mimetes cucullatus, the Common Mimetes or Common Pagoda. As you'd expect from its vernacular name, is one of the three.

The genus includes some survivors though. One species, the Silver Pagoda (Mimetes stokoei), was thought to have become extinct when the last plant was killed in 1969. After a fire 30 years later, though, seed stored in the soil germinated and the species sprang to life again two years later.

In fact all but the Common Mimetes release seed that will germinate after fire. Instead, the Common Mimetes has an large rootstock and resprouts after fire. Perhaps for this reason it is described on PlantZAfrica (my favourite South African plant website and source of much of the information here) as 'among the easiest members of the protea family to grow'. It flowers throughout sprinter, sprummer and summer, and often other times as well.

Life can be tough. When it is really tough, we either bunker down and wait for the good times (resprouting) or sacrifice ourselves for future generations (looking after our seeds). Tenuous perhaps, but the best I can do as a reflection on Mimetes imitating life.

*James Joyce, I understand, was one of the first to use a mimetic approach to his writing (he certainly imitates life well in Ulysses) and there is the wonderfully titled, and unread (by me) paper called 'The memesis of metempsychosis in Ulysses'. Metempsychosis being all about transmigration of souls and reincarnation, I not sure I'm up for reading it anyway. 

And just for the record, chapter or episode 3 of Joyce's Ulysses is sometimes called Proteus. The action takes place at Sandymount Strand, on the way back to Dublin from Sandy Cove, where the day starts in Ulysses and where I photographed the local swimming hole (the Forty Foot) on Bloomsday in 2010. Now that's tenuous!

Gum-filled teeth, golfballs and telegraph cables

Ten years ago, Stuart Brown of Fortune magazine was having his root canal filled with gutta percha. A few months ago Neville Walsh of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne was doing the same.

As is their wont, the dental guy working in Neville’s mouth struck up a conversation with him while his mouth was full of scaffolding and pointy metal implements. He mentioned that gutta percha was a plant product, and one with an interesting history.

He was right, on both fronts. Stuart Brown explains that gutta percha is the sap of a tree native to South-east Asia called Isonandra gutta (these days we call it Palaquium gutta). It was overharvested at first, leading to destruction of native populations and a collapse of the market. Later, and today, it is grown in plantations in Asia and South America.

According to Wikipedia (a handy if not always impeccable source), gutta percha means ‘percha sap’, after the Malayan common name for the species, Getah Perca. (To confuse things a little, a Northern Australian species that produces nice timber but no toothsome sap, Excoecaria parvifolia, is called the Guttapercha Tree.)

Palaquium is a genus in the Sapotaceae, a plant family providing various foods, medicines, soaps and poisons to us humans. You'll remember the miracle fruit of last year.

Like rubber, gutta percha is an isoprene, but with different chemical bonds making it not as elastic, a better insulator and rather plastic when heated. It started its commercial life as an insulating material for telegraph cables stretching across firstly the English Channel in 1851 and then later across the Atlantic. Unlike previous compounds used for this purpose it wasn’t favoured by marine plants and animals.

It also found its way into golf balls, replacing feathers stuffed inside leather. As well as furniture, jewelry, guns and (according to my impeccable source) the orifices of victims of criminal Wo Fat in the 70s television show Hawai Five-O. Nowadays gutta percha has been replaced by synthetic products (except in quaint nineteenth century reenactments by historically inclined golf enthusiasts, and possibly by some television crims).

Dentistry discovered gutta pecha in the later nineteenth century, firstly for filling cavities and then in 1887, according to Stuart Brown, for stuffing root canals where its plasticity and ability to extrude into distant parts of the canal was ideal. So far, a better product, ‘natural’ or synthetic has yet to be found and the gutta percha industry in 2003 was worth $30-40 million, with most of the US product coming from Brazil.

Yet, endodontists are not entirely happy with gutta percha and Stuart Brown reported on research then to replace it with synthetic product that would be easier to work with and didn’t leak quite as much. A paper published last year by Brazilian researchers confirmed that a polymer called Resolin performed better than gutta percha, although it did depend on the filling technique. Enjoy your gum-filled teeth before they go the way of the gutta percha golf ball.

Image: The plant illustration is from Encyclopedia of Life (published by Leo Shapiro, photographer Franz Eugen Köhler, from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen) - this genus doesn't seem to be represented in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne living collection. The gutta percah golf balls are from the Golf for all Ages! site, and the mouth is my own (the gutta percha is hidden towards the back).

Tongue-tingling fuchsia evokes runaway cowboys

Sad that about the only thing I could remember about Bolivia was that it's where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had their final shootout in the 1969 movie staring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. But that was yesterday.

Today I know there is a Fuchsia growing there, Fuchsia boliviana. It also grows in Peru and Argentina, as well as about 20 or so places around the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. Ours seem to be a cultivar, 'Alba', differing from the species in having a white rather than red flower tube.

Most of the 100 or so species of fuschia come from central and southern American forests, with just a few scattered across Pacific islands such as New Zealand. While digging around for information on this particular species I rediscovered in my own blog that Tamarillo calls Bolivia home, as well as the lesser known Achacha and Ocha. All of which you can eat.

As you can Fuchsia boliviana, or at least its purple fruits which I gather have been cultivated and sold in markets in South America since the time of the Incas. You can see the fruits swelling at the back of this clump of flowers in our Gardens.

Apparently the fruits taste like a kiwifruit or grape, but not as sweet. A book published in 1961 on the ethnobotany of Peru describes them as having a "sweetish taste" and being "mildly narcotic". Just add sugar perhaps: fuchsia fruits are used occasionally to make jam, although I haven't tried it (making or tasting).

The author, Margaret Towle, says the flowers were also popular with the Incas and may be the source of images that appear in their artwork and ceremonies. Which is not surprising. The flowers are elegant and arresting.

In Melbourne, Fuchsia boliviana is an attractive shrub growing up to a couple of metres tall, doing best with a bit of protection from full sun (in South America it grows at high altitudes, under the forest canopy).

It was back in November when I photographed these flowers, from the garden alongside the nursery between E and F Gate. Although it's said to flower almost all year our Melbourne summer knocked it around a bit and it doesn't look like it will flower again any time soon.

I was hoping I might be able to return about now to find if not more blooms then flowers converted into the purple fruits prized by the Incas. No such luck. Although I walk past one of the plants almost daily, I didn't notice any purple fruits.

I presume the fruits did ripen and were eaten by some lucky local wildlife. The young fruits were certainly swelling back in November. I doubt pollination was a problem. In its home territory various bees and birds pollinate the flowers and although the flower has a very long, narrow tube all the important bits are hanging out the end.

The best I can do is reproduce here a photo from Irene's Website (above). In comparing the Fuchsia boliviana fruit in look and taste to the overripe kiwifruit, 'Irene' says you get a similar tingling of the tongue. If I want that, I can chew the bark of Dinosperma erythrococcum, an Australian native called Tingletongue. But then that species doesn't have any of the romantic associations of a doomed Bolivian shootout.

Slime mold hardly dog vomit or scrambled egg

These pink blobs in Melbourne's Royal Botanic Garden are slime molds (or moulds). They are not fungi, or for that matter algae, plants or animals.

'Slime molds' is not what we call a natural group. That is, organisms called slime molds aren't the only descendants of a common ancestor. Natural groups are things like flowering plants, primates and Entwisleiales. Unnatural groups are things like algae, trees and cuddly animals - these are terms of (sometimes great) convenience.

The slime molds can be divided into various convenient, and some cases natural, subgroups. The plasmodial slime molds (or Myxogastria) are microscopic, often swimming (they can have flagella) cells that fuse together to form a great big cell with thousands of nuclei (each one the 'brain' of the single swimming cell). The big cell, the slimy moldy bit, is called the plasmodium. These you can keep calling slime molds.

The cellular slime molds (or Dityostelia) are microscopic non-swimming cells that only every now and then aggregate into a 'slug', called a pseudoplasmodium. Unlike its plasmodial colleagues, the individual slime-mold cells maintain their integrity and the slug is a little like a many-celled organism such as mushroom, rabbit or...slug. They are better treated as 'social amoebae' rather than slime molds.

There are other smaller groups, more or less related to these two. The slime nets (or Labyrinthulomycetes) are these days not to be mentioned in the same sentence (apart from here) as the slime molds. These mostly marine creatures consist of tubes along which cells glide along looking for food. The slime nets are related to, and possibly part of, the Heterokontophyta, which includes diatoms and kelp (algae) and phytophthora (water mold).

All of these organisms produce spores when things get tough. Sometimes the spores are clustered on the top of a stalk, other times in round puff-ball like structures like these (at the end of my forefinger).

This particular slime mold is called Lycogala epidendrum, a plasmodial type. It's growing in a pot of Swainsona in the nursery at Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens. The picture at the top of the post was taken by David Robbins, a few weeks before I saw and photographed them in early January.

A few weeks before David Robbins, and Val Stajsic (the Identification Botanist who lived up to and extended his job title by identifying it as Lycogala epidendrum), saw it these fruiting bodies called aethalia, the slime mold would have consisted only of tiny red cells. I think the fruiting body is the entirety of the plasmodium stage in this case.

Those slime molds that form big slimy masses of various kinds - dog vomit, red raspberry, scrambled egg, wolf's milk - can cover up to a square metre or so in some species. They not only spread but move, being able to track down food (bacteria, yeasts and algae) or repel themselves away from something nasty at a rate at least 10 times faster than a plant. Not quite your typical animal speed but fast for a slimy mass I'm sure you'll agree. Our slime mold just stayed where it was, in the pot.

Notes: Information sourced from among other places University of California Museum of Paleontology, The Eumycetozoan Project and an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA on the origin and evolution of slime molds by Sandra Baldauf and Ford Doolittle. This mention of Doolittle reminds me that a slime mold shouldn't really be part of TalkingPlants (or TalkingAnimals to be fair) but I'm willing to include anything that is rather sluggish and grows in a pot...

Singapore: a City, in a Garden, by the Bay

Like the Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, this is a garden designed to provoke. Singapore's Gardens by the Bay isn't your typical urban park. It's the flagship project for the Singapore National Parks department who set themselves the ambitious and tantalising vision of creating a City in a Garden.

The total area of the three public gardens at Marina Bay is 100 hectares – 2.5 times the size of Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens or to use a more universal (if Melbourne is the universe) measure, 50 times the area of the MCG playing field. So it’s big.

Singapore, it seems, was after a cross between Central Park in New York and Kew Gardens in London. What they got was something entirely different, and all the better for it. An interesting distinction is made between these Gardens (by the Bay) and the (Botanic) Gardens uptown. Both are run by the National Parks department, but the former is for horticultural recreation, the latter (largely) for education, research and conservation.

This is perhaps not a surprising distinction but one that is not made often. Most botanic gardens around the world, including the three I've worked in (Sydney, Kew, Melbourne) would argue that they combine science, conservation and recreation. Not only would they argue this but their Acts usually obligate it and their actions actively pursue this agenda.

The Singapore Infopedia page on Gardens by the Bay says the Botanic Gardens ‘were being overstretched by the demands of leisure, research and academic usage’. I take this to mean they were either at capacity in terms of visitor numbers (or perhaps facilities to service those visitors) or, to put it bluntly, they couldn’t be made pretty or interesting enough due to the constraints of being a scientific garden.

This new project has been driven by former head of the Botanic Gardens and Singapore National Parks, Dr Tan Wee Kiat. Dr Tan is a fascinating cross-over himself, being a scientist expert in orchids who then led the transformation of Singapore’s parks from pretty green wallpaper to part of the everyday life in this very green city.

Chief Operating Officer, Kenneth Er, visited me in Sydney in 2006 when I was Executive Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust. We discussed the Barangaroo project (I was on the Jury for the design competition), growing and displaying Australian plants in the Mediterranean glasshouse they had planned, and the planning and managing of parks and gardens generally.

In the end two UK companies won the international design competition for the Singapore project, Grant Associates to do the southern section and Gustafson Port to do some temporary work in the east; the central area was parked for later. Construction began in late 2007, with the opening of Bay South in 2012. Just over a year ago Linda Green posted an excellent assessment on GardenDrum, noting that 'the Australian garden is one of the healthiest that I have seen outside of Australia but it is early days yet'.

Now, nearly two years after the grand opening, I finally got there. With support from the Charles and Cornelia Goode Foundation I was able to travel to Singapore this week. On Saturday afternoon I made my first visit, waiting until dusk to see how it was transformed at night (it closes at 2 am). Then yesterday Kenneth Er met me for a guided tour of the outdoor gardens and two large glasshouses.

I was lucky to have a tour led by Kenneth. Next week he becomes Chief Executive of Singapore National Parks (his current boss Dr Tan's previous job), looking after both Singapore Botanic Garden and Gardens by the Bay, as well as lots of parks and roadsides throughout the city.

Gardens by the Bay is a massive project, and expectations always rise with cost. The bill for the 54 hectare Bay South was around one billion Singapore dollars (just under AU$900 million at current exchange rates). They predicted visitation of 2.7 million a year, with a pay back time of ten years. In their first two years of full operation they have already had 8 million visits (60% tourists, 40% local).

Bay South has a simple goal: to attract people who don't normally come to botanic gardens and to get them interested in plants. The more you talk to people like Kenneth, as well as newly arrived Deputy Director of Research, Dr Adrian Loo, and Dr Tan himself, the more you realise they have loftier goals. All of them want people to appreciate plants, to understand why they are important and to teach people care for the environment.

Equally, all of them feel this can come later, and should come gently. The important thing is to use colour and drama to attract people and make them marvel at the plant landscapes. The first objective is to create 'a garden filled with colour and vibrancy throughout the year'. A close second one, according to Kenneth, is to make the garden comfortable: e.g. there are lots of covered walkways to protect from sun and rain, and the whole garden is raised up a few metres to catch the breeze.

There are two huge conservatories, the Flower Dome for Mediterranean climate plants (such as those from Australia), and the Cloud Forest, with plants from high altitudes around the world. Apparently there are 226,000 plants in the two conservatories combined, about the same number as we have in Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

The  Cloud Forest is already a dramatic and enticing plant display. The way you weave up and down, and around and inside, the 'mountain', is brilliant. The plants are not exclusively cloud forest species and again the aim has been to provide colour and excitement. That said, there are some fascinating orchids and other plants (e.g. a beautiful collection of carnivorous plants with a venus fly trap in flower) dotted around and the plan is to introduce a garden of rare plants. These few pictures don't do the scale justice but you get the idea.

The Flower Dome is more subdued at the moment, and many of the large trees (boababs, olives) needs to settle in a little. There are regularly changing displays in the main foyer, at the moment a mix of temperate flowering shrubs and next up roses. The Australian plants are still in great health. It would be nice to supplement these with some of our more showy understorey species in time. Already Kenneth has been able to keep his kangaroo paws flowering almost continually for two years using adjustments to the night temperatures (they can zone the temperatures a little within the giant conservatory) and pH.

The most striking part of Bay South are the so-called Supertrees, 18 installations from 25 to 50 metres tall, inspired by the trees that emerge from rainforests. If you count the plants attached to these 'artificial trees' you'll get to about 163,000 I gather, with 200 different kinds of plants represented. These structures double as vents for the conservatories, carry solar panels for lighting them up at night, and another place to collect and harvest water. Some also include places for humans to eat!

The energy to cool the conservatories comes partially from an underground biomass boiler (you'll remember I was intrigued by one of these - above ground - in Cornwall) fed with horticultural and other organic waste. The boiler powers a steam turbine, sending cool water through pipes at ground level in the conservatories. Warm air is vented out the top and a liquid desiccant dehumidifies the air to make it more efficient to cool.

And there is more. Areas away from the public will be used as nature reserves. Already 91 bird species have been recorded, many of them forest dwelling birds not usually seen in the middle of city. There are butterfly attracting plantings and all the water features serve to store and filter irrigation water drawn from rainfall as well as the nearby Singapore River. 

In summary, spectacular, inspiring and impressive. Every visitor will at least have to admit that plants can be cool (and not just in the glasshouses). In time there will be more plant labels, more plant information and even more creative interpretation (there is quite a bit scattered about already). There are already 500,000 different kinds of plants (species and cultivars) and diversity is important: the first major plant collection was 210,000 bromeliads from America and the development includes a research facility (HortPark) to help them learn how to grow plants not native to Singapore.

The whole site looks amazing at night as well, the evening attracting almost as many people as the day. This is the best picture I could get, but to finish let's return to the daylight of yesterday. For a place like this, pictures are far better than words.

The final picture is of Kenneth Er and Adrian Loo in the Cloud Forest. My apologies to all the other staff I met who didn't make it into this picture. In particular the Director of Gardens Operations Ng Boon Gee, who took me for another tour after lunch, and for everyone who shared a delightful New Year banquet lunch hosted by Dr Tan.

Wormwood, revolutionary but not revelationary

The main thing you'll taste in the green liqueur absinthe is a licorice flavour, thanks to anise, not the mystical wormwood ingredient. But there is some wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, in it still. Vermouth also has a little wormwood, added originally to wine to disguise the less attractive qualities of cheap alcohol (according to my Drunken Botanist companion book, by Amy Stewart).

Although (again thanks to Amy Stewart) the active and potentially dangerous chemical thujone is present in old and new absinthe, and regulated in some countries, plants like Sage have even higher doses. The wild nights and hallucinations attributed to absinthe are more likely due to the wildly high alcohol content of the drink - about twice as strong as gin.

A few different species of Artemisia are used in alcoholic drinks, collectively called génépi after one of the other species used, Artemisia genipi. Artemisia absinthium is a European plant but one that has established itself nicely in places like Mexico.

That's the wild and crazy side of wormwood. There are about 400 hundred species of Artemisia but for many of us we know the genus by a handful of tough and persistent hedge species.

Most of the wormwoods I could track down in the Royal Botanic Gardens were Artemisia arborescens but we have plenty of other species and cultivars. Artemisia 'Powis Castle' (an excuse to top this post with a picture taken on my visit to the Welsh Powis Castle in 2012). I couldn't find but we have records of it from the Grey Garden (near the Temple of the Winds) and the Herb Garden - it's probably pruned back or covered by some other grey or herby species.

I read recently (Landscape Architecture Magazine, October 2013) about Artemisia annua, described by the author Constance Casey as 'perhaps the least-impressive-looking of the several hundred Artemisia species'. So it wasn't in the magazine for its landscape qualities!

It's profile links back to my November post about quinine and malaria. The chemical responsible for some of the bitter attributes of the Artemisia leaves, and part of its weaponry against nibbling bugs, is a sesquiterpenoid. Sesquiterpoenoids are interesting molecules: the most widely used antimalaria drug in use today, called coaterm, contains a sesquiterpene extracted from  Artemisia annua.

This powerful ingredient was discovered by Chinese scientists working under on the order of Mao Zedong. They screened 2000 traditional Chinese medicines, testing 380 extracts. But the clue was found in a book written during the Han Dynasty (over 1800 years ago) which recommended wormwood for treating 'intermittent fevers', a symptom of malaria.

Artemisinin was trialed on mice, then self-administered by the researcher, Tu Youyou. Apparently all survived and the drug was used in China in the 1970s, taking longer to reach the rest of the world due to China's isolation during the Cultural Revolution. So a good news story, luckily. Tu Youyou still lives and works in China today according to Casey.

There are sure to be other useful (to man and mouse) ingredients in the chemical cocktail within wormwoods. Meanwhile they provide a handy plant for drought-stressed gardens in Melbourne. So tough they sometimes stray beyond the walls. Artemisia arborescens, the Silver Wormwood, has become naturalised in New South Wales and South Austalia but although persisting around old gardens in Victoria it isn't yet (as far as I know) considered to be a worrisome weed. The Chinese Wormwood, Artemisia verlotiorum, however, is, particularly on roadsides around Melbourne.

A guilty passion for this flower

I don't know how many passion flowers there were on the Passionflower erupting from our back fence but on one evening last month I estimated 1500 buds with a dozen open that day. There are less buds and flowers now, particularly after our first summer heat waves. Each flower opens in the morning and closes, for good, sometime in the middle of the night (I haven't got up to check exactly when).

It's the invasive Passiflora caerulea (Blue Passionflower) from South America, probably the rootstock of a now departed Edible Passionflower or Passionfruit, Passiflora edulis (the Romans among you will notice the scientific and common names match pretty well this case). Beautiful flowers and edible, but not as desirable, fruits. The plant had already captured our back fence when we arrived in the house, and as tenants we haven't felt it within our remit to do more than restrict it's advance a little.

So with guilt, apathy and the law on our side, we have been enjoying those gorgeous flowers. It's been a chance to look at them more closely and to marvel, as always, at the mechanics of their innards.

I'm not going to explain how the bits and pieces of the flower are responsible for its generic common name, the Passionflower - Wikipedia does that well enough. Suffice it to say, as they say, Christians have found holy lances, whips, apostles, a crown of thorns, nails and wounds from the crucifixion cross and perhaps even the Holy Grail in a single flower.

Perhaps more informatively, the flower is a great way to understand how a flower works. In this case it's set up with big bold structures to suite larger bees, like bumblebees. Once you get past the frilly outside and target-like colouring, the next most obvious feature is the androgynophore.

For non-Roman readers, that translates as the male-female-column.That is, the combined structure formed by five boy bits (stamens) and three girl bits (styles). The thing you notice about the styles are the pairs of eye-like receptive areas (stigmas) on each of the purple stalks. The stamens have a greenish 'filament' with foot-like anthers pivoting on their ends.

The short purple fringe sticking inwards is involved in nectar production, while the outward spreading purple and white fringe is presumably all about attracting big bees to the flower in the first place. Bubblebees buzz and bump into more of the beckoning bits; our local honey bees barely brush against the dangling anthers, so no (bland) fruit for us.

 

The five petals and five sepals (the latter usually a layer of flower parts outside the petals, and often green) form an even ring of 10 pretty petal-like parts - although the sepals do have a tiny green hook on their back (which you can just see in this picture also showing a spring-like tendril dangling over the flower from the climbing stem).

Want to know more? St Louis' Missouri Botanical Garden reckon there are 520 species of Passiflora with plenty more still to be described, and you can catch up with their latest passionate research at Passiflora Research Network. For some cute pictures of the flower close-up see this Mic-UK site.

Botanical Ballarat, from big things bigger things grow

Bigger than Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens and almost as old, the 40-hectare Ballarat Botanical Gardens began life in 1858 in a police horse paddock. As with many of the State's regional botanic gardens it was established just a few years after the city itself.

There are three quite different zones with the more intensive botanical section long and narrow, pivoting on an magnificent avenue of Giant Redwoods.

The 28 redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) were planted in the 1860s and 1870s, in a mile long avenue. The trees are in decline, perhaps due to recent dry years, and replacements are already in place where a couple have failed. Yet it still have a grandeur that only this kind of mass planting of large trees can create.

There are two chunky Tasmanian Blue Gums, a legacy of Ferdinand Mueller's promotion of this species as a drought-tolerant street and park tree. I gather they too were most likely part of a late nineteenth century avenue.

Then there is this Druid's Oak, a Quercus robur planted by....druids...in 1870.

These are just a few of the 52 significant trees in Ballarat Botanical Gardens listed by the National Trust.

In addition to this fascinating and important tree collection there is a horticulturally (and species) rich border along Western Walk (inside the Gillies Street fence) and some pretty bedding displays. You'll also notice plenty of statutory. I saw some of the more classical pieces but not the famous row of 26 Prime Ministers (with J. Gillard and T. Abbott) to come. The Prime Ministerial avenue was definitely there, in the distance, but we walked on different paths.

I'm not sure if Ballarat can be described as a 'City of Statues', as its founders dreamed in the late nineteenth century, but there is plenty of art in the Botanical Gardens. The first 12 Italian marbles were bought by Thomas Stoddart, followed by a set of five by Australian sculptor Charles Frances Summers through a bequest from James Russell Thomson. And there are others. The Summers works are in a specially built Statuary House, all centred around his Flight from Pompeii.

But back to botany. While the relatively new glasshouse is striking and features strongly in most of the views, the Batten Fernery is quite special. Although its origins date back to 1884, what you see today is mostly from the 1950s. The timber slats don't last long, and much of the fernery is now closed for safety reasons but this large (more than a hectare?) structure is still an impressive sight and home to a large assemblage of tree ferns and other rainforest species. A striking new shady home for these plants has been designed to concept stage, and now awaits further funding.

I visited in late November, as a guest of the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. I have just recently become their Patron and this was my first visit for what must be 20 or 30 years, I enjoyed not only seeing yet another impressive regional botanic garden but (yet again) meeting such enthusiastic, knowledgeable and hospitable supporters. A master plan is in preparation and I have no doubt the Gardens will do well.

Captured by the beauty of an algal net

What's the most interesting and beautiful thing in this picture? The gorgeous water lily flowers, the Purple Strife in our floating islands or the Guilfoyle-designed garden landscape surrounding the Nymphaea Water Lily pond in Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. No, you have to look beyond the islands. And this is what you'll see...

To the untrained eye this algal mass looks like any other. To the trained eye, well pretty much the same. That is until you get up close. Close enough to pull some from the water, tease it apart in your hand and then, suddenly, all is revealed.

The all is a brittle green net. This is Water Net, Hydrodictyon reticulatum, a green alga. Most of the algae around in our lakes at Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens are either microscopic (e.g. the blue-green algae colouring the Ornamental Lake) or consist of unbranched or branched filaments. Like most trees, most algae don't once they've branched (I say most trees because we have a re-connection in one of our oaks, where a branch has grafted itself onto another branch).

Take a look at these pictures by Chris Carter, of Water Net in Thrapston Lake, Northamptonshire, in the UK. He is one the world's best phycophotographers (a word I've just made up) in the world.

The first picture shows a close-up of the net, with each side of the pentagon or hexagon a single algal cell. This is a mature Water Net. The next has a baby net overshadowed by just one interconnection of a parent net. The final image steps back a little so you can see what's going on. Look for the Milky Way like smear of green from top right to middle bottom - that's a baby net, released from inside just one of the cells of the parent net. Isn't (algal) life wonderful.

Water Net is weedy alga, common in irrigation ditches and small ponds like ours. It can be a major pest, clogging waterways and interfering with fisheries. But you have to admit that close-up and under water, it's quite attractive. There are five species of Hydrodictyon but the common, weedy, one is Hydrodictyon reticulatum. That's what we have in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

When I grabbed a handful from the lake yesterday the alga was a little discombobulated, probably due to old age. This next image was taken with a clunky digital phototube I have sitting next to my computer. I'm sure Chris Carter could turn even this into a work of art!

For more of Chris Carter's photographs buy, beg or borrow The Freshwater Algal Flora of the British Isles 2nd Edn (the three images above come from the CD at the back), or find them and everything else you wanted to know about algae in Algaebase. There is even a 3-D picture in both locations, which you view with those funny red and blue glasses. Enjoy...