Douglas Justice's October blog is up now: October 2018 in the Garden | UBC Botanical Garden. We're doing fruits this month; in the blog we have one edible, one weird, and one tiny and confusing. The blog starts with weird: Kirengeshoma palmata. Do you remember the Sputnik satellite? Well these fruits look just like that, but with only three antennae instead of four. My friend Judy is there to show how tall these plants are. The fourth photo I think shows stamens on flowers whose petals have withered. Someone could correct me on that. Next is the confusing (to me) Hydrangea febrifuga. The first photo, with the blazing blue fruits, was taken in April, 2016, when it was still called Dichroa febrifuga. So that's six months after the fruits would have been forming. The second photo is from yesterday. I chose a photo taken with flash because it was more in focus, but even without the flash, the colour was just a little more blue. These fruits look like they're finished, drying up. Or are they just forming, and it's only the calyces that we're seeing, with the fruits not developed or coloured up yet at all?
The edible fruits from the blog are kiwis. The Actinidia deliciosa in the Asian Garden look ripe, but they were very far from our reach. These plants were definitely "impressively vigorous". I'm including a photo of the interpretive sign explaining that vigorous is not the same as sturdy. I decided that the out-of-focus fruit photo would work to show quantity. Actinidia arguta, grape kiwi, is also impressively vigorous in the Asian Garden. I couldn't see the fruits at all when I zoomed in the camera, just pointed and hoped there would be fruits in the photo. I guess that would have worked wherever I aimed. In the Food Garden, this Actinidia arguta 'Ananasnaya' is of a size much more appropriate to fruit picking, but the kiwis don't look ripe yet.
Here are some more weird fruits. These fruits looked like horse chestnuts strewn on the ground, made me look around for the tree, until I found this Rosa roxburghii f. normalis, so these are spiny rose hips. We wondered about all the yellow in this tree, which we saw from a distance but were unable to get near - however we went to try to approach it, it disappeared. Fortunately, Halesia fruits are pretty distinctive even just with a zoom lens, and there is only one species in the Asian Garden, Halesia macgregorii. Halesia is not related to Agapanthus, but the fruits look similar. These plants are near the entrance to the Shop in the Garden. Judy thought they looked remarkably like Clivia, except for the fruit shape. Good guess - same family. It's too early for fruits on the Schefflera delavayi - the flowers are just in peak bloom, and they're creating quite a show.
