#angiosperms

Honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) drinking nectar from candlestick banksia (Banksia attenuata) flowers in Western Australia

Beautiful button orchid growing on a palm tree.

17/01/24 - Dischidia nummularia

Yuuka, after weeks of wandering, still seems to be lost in the border of Gensokyo. But she did find some interesting plants along the way. Two of the plants she found bore a fresh and savory scent, but the last one was more sweeter. They are all flowering plants that have awakened from dormancy, or Angiosperms. Are they edible? Are they poisonous? For now, let's assume that all plants shown are poisonous.

Let's talk about this first plant, Mystery A. Mystery A has a pretty thick and layered structure. One could assume that it could be a bulby root cooking vegetable like an onion, but we cannot tell this yet unless we dig it up.

These plants also have a budding structure at the top that will grow into a flower very soon! Mystery A is pretty easy to tell, but we cannot spoil it unless the flower blooms.

The next one is Mystery B. This plant can get overlooked at a first glance as being "grass," and I'll give a hint that it is most definitely something much more than grass. This one also has a pretty thick and layered structure similar to Mystery A at the bottom, which indicates that there is a bulby like structure as well. These two plants could be related in some way.

One clear note is that they also have a white stripe on its leaves. They are super tiny, and some of the leaves seem to be more tube-like. They seem to have an origin around a center. What could this plant be?

Last one is Mystery C. This one is much different than the rest. It is woody and tree-like and has a smooth branches a little bit similar to the plant Rosa multiflora that grew Rose Hips and the dormant plant with a ghastly color Rubus occidentalis that we have shown before.

They have very showy flowering buds on them, and they are a bit of a spoiler on what they are. 😅 But we have to wait for them to fully bloom and find out what they really are!

Happy International Women's Day, of course. 💜 Touhou Project is a series where a majority of the cast are women that play many very important roles in shaping its world. All of these plants will have their own posts in the future and we will show which one's which.

Winter is honestly one of the most challenging seasons to find blooming flowering plants (Angiosperms), and many of them that are winter blooming only bloom flowers really late in the season. As soon as the snow melted, all of these plants immediately grew and budded flowers within days. Some of these mysteries grew pretty late this year, they're supposed to grow like this in late-February, but it's been so cold lately. So for some of them they are technically winter flowers. 😶

Ghost Plant (Monotropa uniflora)

Family: Heath Family (Ericaceae)

IUCN Conservation Status: Unassessed

Over 80% of plants form mutualistic relationships with soil-dwelling fungi, linking their roots to the fungus' hyphae and providing photosynthetically produced sugars in exchange for hard-to-access nutrients that the fungus takes in from the soil. The Ghost Plant, which is found mainly in temperate shady forests across much of Asia and the Americas, also connects its roots with the hyphae of fungi (specifically members of the family Russulaceae,) but contributes nothing; it is a parasite, stealing nutrients not only from its host fungus but also from other plants (particularly birches) that its host is also connected to. Living entirely on stolen nutrients means that Ghost Plants have no need to carry out photosynthesis, and as such they lack the green pigment chlorophyll that almost all plants use to absorb sunlight, giving them their namesake eerie white appearance (although on occasion pale pink individuals are recorded) and allowing them to survive in dark, shady conditions that other plants are unable to colonise. Ghost Plants bloom rarely and unpredictably (as they do not photosynthesise they have no need for aboveground leaves or stems when not reproducing, but apparently develop stems and flowers rapidly during periods of wet weather following prolonged dry conditions,) baring a single bell-shaped white flower with a black-and-yellow interior that attracts various species of bees and flies. Following pollination the plant's tiny seeds are forced through gaps in its petals and carried away on the wind, remaining dormant in the soil they settle on until they detect a suitable host fungus growing nearby.

——————————————————————————