Nonbinary flowers blooming when they shouldn't


This is the Small-leaved FuchsiaFuchsia microphylla, at Alfred Nicholas Gardens in the Dandenongs. Compared to other species of Fuchsia (which I incorrectly, but along with most Australians, pronounce to rhyme, sort of, with 'future'), named after sixteen century German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs (whose surname he and I would pronounce to rhyme with 'books'), it has not only small leaves, but small flowers and fruits.

The Small-leaved Fuchsia is a relatively common shrub in pine-oak forests of Mexico, extending through to Costa Rica and Panama, where sometimes the local variant is recognised as a species or subspecies (hemsleyana).


Plants are mostly functionally male or female. Initially it was thought that plants had either bisexual flowers or female flowers but it turns out that most of the bisexual flowers (90%) are functionally male. That means you generally need two plants to get this fruit.


In the specimen photographed here at least some flowers are clearly functionally female, in that they have set fruit. I gather there is no obvious difference between apparently bisexual flowers that produce fruit and those that don't.

I only saw this one specimen growing near the pond at the top of Alfred Nicholas Gardens in Sherbrooke, in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne. There may others I missed in my hurried walk through this part of the garden in April, but if not the flowers seem to be self-pollinating. 


In any case I don't know if there are any suitable pollinators in the Dandenongs. In the Americas, the tiny flowers are pollinated by bumblebees and hummingbirds, although a local flowerpiercer bird (Diglossawill sometimes 'rob' the flowers of nectar.


I also seems that in their natural habitat, the plants flower in spring which makes the profusion of flowers in mid-autumn a little odd. The fruits are presumably the consequence of last spring's flowering. Or maybe last autumn's?

What this odd flowering time does mean, though, is that I can finish with a couple of pictures of the emerging autumn colour in the Alfred Nicholas Gardens. The ginkgos in these two pictures are just starting to butter up. Ah, remember autumn!




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