Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
| from the February 13, 2011 Newsletter issued from
Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO GYMNOPODIUM Nowadays out in the woods you'll be walking along a hot, sunny, dusty-feeling trail, then all of a sudden you'll enter a pool of penetratingly sweet fragrance, like honey, but almost too much of it. If in searching for the scent's source you look up you may see what's shown above. Those are little flowers, smaller than a thumbnail, and if you're sensitized to how average blossoms on "normal" broadleaved bushes and trees look you'll notice something special about these flowers: They're three-lobed. A close look at a blossom is shown below:
On that flower you see nine stamens and six perianth segments, "perianth" being the term used when the calyx and corolla aren't clearly differentiated. Also the little green ovary in the flower's center has three style branches. You know that flowering plants traditionally have been separated into "dicots" and "monocots." Dicots, like daisies, oaks and buttercups, usually bear net-veined leaves and flowers with parts numbering four or five, or multiples thereof. Monocots, like grasses, lilies and orchids, usually have narrow and parallel-veined leaves and flowers with parts in threes or multiples thereof. Our fragrant bush has net-veined leaves like a dicot, but flowers with part numbers based on three, like a monocot. Well, Nature is full of exceptions to nearly everything, and this is one of them. Our plant is GYMNOPODIUM FLORIDANUM, a member of the dicotyledonous Buckwheat Family, the Polygonaceae. Sometimes that family includes species with flower parts based on the number three. Northern naturalists mostly know the Buckwheat Family as a home for herbaceous species, such as the smartweeds, knotweeds, docks and sorrels -- the main exception being woody Sea-Grape found along the seashore. Here in the tropics we have lots of woody Buckwheat Family members, and Gymnopodium floridanum is the most common one locally. The Maya, traditionally being great bee-keepers, know this plant very well, calling it Ts'iits'il Che, and appreciating the fact that not only do the abundant flowers smell like honey, they also produce large amounts of nectar. In fact, as I took the above picture the whole small tree buzzed with bee busyness. |
