Douglas Justice, in his August in the Garden 2023 - UBC Botanical Garden blog this month talks of "the resilience of many of our gardens will depend on a greater reliance on Mediterranean-climate-adapted plants" and how the "burgeoning Pacific Slope collections in particular, which include plants from the drier parts of BC south into California, represent the Mediterranean climate in the extreme". No photos this month - I was on my own, so I started in the Pacific Slope garden, nudged also by a Facebook posting by the garden about Amorpha californica, false indigo, showing the very striking tiny single-petal flowers. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=763763949089016&set=a.617678220364257. You should not need to log on to Facebook to see this posting. All I got to see were fruits, not nearly as showy. I did find some flowers on the way to this. Here is Grindelia aff. integrifolia. Penstemon heterophyllus Monardella sheltonii, coyote mint - the leaves do smell minty Mentzelia laevicaulis, blazing star, which I thought must never open its flowers any more than this, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe I was too early. Here is Clarkia purpurea. I ran into Linda Layne in the food garden, who was pleased to be caught putting out labels for her plants. She hadn't yet come across the label for the Cosmos sulphureus. But she did have the label for the millet - Echinochloa frumentacea, and a chart as well. The persimmon nearby is coming along - Diospyros kaki 'Izu'.
Thanks for letting me know that rushing to get there this week at 2pm is not going to accomplish anything in that regard, said the person who has her morning coffee at 2pm. I see now at Mentzelia laevicaulis (Giant Blazing Star) (gardenia.net) that they open at dusk, stay open overnight and close in the morning. I'm glad to see that I was sort of on the right track thinking I was not going to get to see open flowers.
The garden's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/UBCgarden just posted an item on this, with photos of the open flower. I can't link directly to the posting, so depending when you're reading this, you might have to scroll down on the FB page, or search for the plant name. Daniel Mosquin was among the group (leading the group?) that collected the seeds for this plant.
Among the group, though I was the one who was sent back to collect the seeds alone after much discussion as to whether the plants were worth growing in the respective gardens on that collecting trip. It's also on the Garden's instagram account, @ubcgarden
I was in the neighbourhood, so made a short visit today with a friend. The only plant I photographed for the first time today is Rhododendron adenogynum, which has some flowers that to me look like they're not really in season. I see at Rhododendron adenogynum - Trees and Shrubs Online that it's supposed to flower in April-May. Heptapleurum delavayi has been posted here lots of times, but not under this name - now Schefflera delavayi is listed as a synonym. Flowers on Kirengeshoma palmata and Inula hookeri are still hanging around. The Kirengeshoma have the great Sputnik-looking fruits now too. I think my camera often over-saturates the photos, but the Tropaeolum speciosum, flame nasturtium flowers and fruits looked far more vibrant in real life. This is the best showing of them I've seen up close, right at Upper Asian Way. Here are some fruits. Just after I mentioned that the Aria caloneura (used to be Sorbus caloneura) had fruits with no colour at all, Jeannette exclaimed "Oh look, golden fruits!". I'm always so excited by the green bark on the Acer maximowiczii. I'm a little confused by this. It's supposed to have been accessioned in 1990, but I'm sure I've been following it since it was a mere snip in 2020: https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc....extures-wendys-favourites.99069/#post-397342; in 2019, I found what I thought was the same tree that had been cut down: https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/threads/april-2019-some-leaves.95110/#post-370753. So if I understand correctly, this really is new growth from 2018 or so of a tree that came to the garden in 1990.
I just saw a photo on Facebook of what was called a serrate form shared by Dan Hinkley: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3563878803884703&set=a.1803129693292965. I guess as the leaflets age, they lose the lobes and the margins look more serrated.
Assuming the Sean Hogan Facebook photo is of material from the same DJHG 11146 seed collection here is the history Dan gives on his Wind cliff Plants web site: These seedlings represent our 2001 collections from Guizhou Province from populations we felt were distinctive in foliage posessing varying degrees of lobed laeflets on ginormous palmately compound leafves. For anyone interested here is the paper that moved a large number of Schefflera into Heptapleurum. Resurrection of the Genus Heptapleurum for the Asian Clade of Species Previously Included in Schefflera (Araliaceae) | Semantic Scholar
I guess it's not Open-access. I tried creating an account, but still didn't see the article, do get to read the Abstract. All the ones at UBCBG are Asian, so are now Heptapleurum. And it looks like the common houseplants have been renamed. The Pacific Island Schefflera have kept their names.
From the abstract: The polyphyly of the pantropical genus Schefflera J. R. Forst. & G. Forst. (Araliaceae) is now well established, and consequently the genus has had to be restricted to its type (S. digitata J. R. Forst. & G. Forst.) and seven closely related Pacific Island species More on polyphyly: For example, the biological characteristic of warm-bloodedness evolved separately in the ancestors of mammals and the ancestors of birds; "warm-blooded animals" is therefore a polyphyletic grouping.[3] Polyphyly - Wikipedia
That page is a pretty good attempt to get me to understand Polyphyly, which has already been explained to me several times. My take-away is that there is not a characteristic we would look for to know if a plant is Schefflera or Heptapleurum, as the basis for the distinction is the ancestry of the plant, which is a better prediction for the plant's behaviour.
Well, no actually: Several recent phylogenetic studies have shown that Schefflera is clearly polyphyletic (Lowry et al., S. Afr. J. Bot. 70: 382-392. 2004; Plunkett et al., Pl. Syst. Evol. 245: 1-39. 2004; Plunkett et al., Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 92: 202-224. 2005) and that the Asian species belong to a single, well-supported, morphologically coherent clade. The name Schefflera will ultimately have to be restricted to a small group of species from the SW Pacific while the Asian species will have to be transferred to one or more other genera. Schefflera in Flora of China @ efloras.org
I thought that's what has been done. The eFlora page is before that. And I thought your link to the Polyphyly page implied that the split was based on the ancestry, not on characteristics.
