Water Lettuce is never eaten by Water Cows

Species name: Pistia stratiotes

Common name: water lettuce

Location: Ontario

The origins of water lettuce are unknown, but this plant was first discovered in Africa near Lake Victoria. It's presumed native to that location, but it could have been introduced there previously. It is now present in just about every waterway in tropical and subtropical area around the world, either through accidental human introduction, purposeful human introduction, or natural spread. It has become dangerously invasive in areas that don't have sub-zero temperatures during the winter, since it is not cold tolerant. Thankfully, this means that we have mostly escaped in Canada from having to worry about this long-term; with milder winters there is the serious threat of this absolutely taking off.

This is a very popular backyard pond aquatic plant, since it is better at competing for resources than algae that usually takes over a pond. Should a pond be properly balanced, the chance of algae being able to take over a pond is actually slim to nil. Over-feeding fish, having too many fish, too many plants, not enough water aeration, and a pond that is too shallow can all lead to a biological imbalance, which can in turn lead to an algal domination.

This plant has been especially successful at dominating waterways in Florida, where it has been contributing to the mosquito population boom. Mosquitos require standing water in order to lay their eggs, as their larvae are aquatic. Laying eggs under the surface of the bottom leaves of water lettuce provide the developing eggs with a sheltered environment, and provide the newly hatched larvae with a safe place to develop after hatching. The larvae actually create a siphon tube from where they live on the root of the plant up to the surface of the water so that they can get oxygen. A neat adaptation, but one that makes it incredibly difficult to control mosquito populations where water lettuce is abundant.

The Gazpacho of La Mancha

Species name: Silene vulgaris (synonym is S. cucubalus)

Common name: bladder campion

Location: Ontario

The bladder campion, a member of the pink family (or carnation family or Carophyllaceae), is native to Europe but was transported to North America sometime around the time of the great European explorers. It is often eaten in Europe (the leaves are apparently quite nutritious; I've never tried them myself) and in areas of eastern Asia. In Europe it seems to be declining in numbers (but still not quite reaching the status of "uncommon"), while in North America it's everywhere you look.

The "bladder" of the flower is made up of fused bracts that surround the developing flower, then grow outward with the flower itself. As the flower is pollinated and the petals are shed, the bladder acts as protection for the developing seed, but can also house and protect insect larvae which feed on the seeds. The same mechanism that has evolved to protect the seeds is being exploited by insects who prey on them.

The most famous dish made from campion leaves is called "gazpachos viudos," or widow gazpacho. It is a dish traditionally made by the poorest people in La Mancha in Spain, since it contains no meat. If you'd like to try to make it, apparently THIS recipe is quite good. You can run the page through Google Translate, then search the site for gazpacho cake (or you could bake tortillas in the oven and split them into pieces). Let me know in the comments how it goes if you try the recipe!

The vampire-hating chives

Species name: Allium tuberosum

Common name: garlic chives

Location: Ontario

There is a "free herb garden" on campus right beside the building that my office and lab are in, mixed in with some non-edible ornamental plants and some giant slabs of different kinds of rocks that were donated by various "rock companies" (most of them are affiliated somehow with the concrete business, but not all; some are granite supply companies). That is, the herb garden is free for the picking as long as you can identify plants; none of them are labelled. It means that if you really, really like sage and can identify it, you've got a perennial sage plant to pick from that's now about 3 feet tall and 3 feet across. Great for "backyard cooks"! The downside of this idea, however, is that many non-native herbs are invasive in North America. Garlic chives are one great example of this. They are native to the Mediterranean region (North Africa and Southern Europe), and are flavour-wise a hybrid between garlic and chives. The plant looks like a chive plant but with white flowers (chives have bright purple flowers), but the leaves taste much more pungent than the chive leaves; the flavour is much more like garlic. I personally have never cooked with them so I can't attest to whether the flavour remains after cooking, but I have tried a leaf raw and oh, my. I'm not about to repeat that purpose any time soon. It was great for clearing the nasal passages, and the room once I opened my mouth to speak! This species is used very commonly in Chinese, Korean and Indian cuisine, and in one traditional dish from Nepal called "dunduko sag."

Should you decide to use this plant as an ornamental and edible species, make sure you keep it under control. We do have quite a few native Allium species in Canada and the United States, and non-natives are much better competitors for resources (they have the same problem in Europe with the North American species, don't worry. It's not a one-way street!). Another danger with this plant is that it's a good example of why you must learn to identify plants properly if you want to be a forager. There are plenty of edible wild species of plants in North America that would make a great addition to any table, raw or cooked. Wild garlic, Allium canadense, which is very morphologically similar to this species, is not one of them. All parts of the plant are incredibly toxic and should never be eaten (cooked or raw; the toxins do not neutralize with heat)! The best way to tell these two species apart is to look at the flowers; in wild garlic the flowers are purple and have purple "bulbets" in the inflorescence between the small flower stalks, and in garlic chives the flowers are white with no bulbets. Wild foraging for food can be incredibly rewarding, but as my supervisor says "you can eat everything once!" Make sure you're confident of the identification of the species of plant (or fungus!) before consumption.

The most obedient plant of them all!

Species name: Physostegia virginiana

Common name: false dragonhead, obedient plant

Location: Ontario

This species is common and native to much of temperate North America, with the exception of the United States and Canada west of the Rocky Mountains. It is tolerant to most growth conditions it would normally find in its natural habitat (periods of drought and of intense rainfall, both hot and cold temperatures, intense and indirect sunlight, etc.), which is one of the reasons why it's becoming a popular ornamental plant in native plant gardens. The flowers don't have that great a scent (it's not undesirable, but it's certainly not overly desirable, either), but they do attract many different kinds of pollinators to the garden which is never a bad thing (well, unless you're allergic to bees...). As you might be able to tell from the second picture, this plant is in the mint family or the Lamiaceae.

The flowers on this plant are incredibly amusing to play with, and that's how the second common name, the obedient plant, arose. Each flower is on a stalk within the inflorescence that has the ability to swivel left and right. This ability probably evolved as a response to being exposed to prolonged periods of high winds (prairies can be very windy, and since there are very few plants taller than this one that can shield the plants from the wind, a mechanism to protect the inflorescences from wind damage would be a desirable characteristic to have), but now is useful purely for entertainment. If you push the flower to one side or the other, it will stay that way. "Arranging" inflorescences in neat patterns is fun if you're out for a walk and come across a big patch of obedient plants. It will make the next person that comes along wonder what the heck is going on. The other common name of this plant, the false dragonhead, comes from the fact that the flowers of this plant look very similar to touch-me-nots, which are in the touch-me-not family or the Balsaminaceae. The easiest way to tell them apart is to look at the stem: the mint family all have square stems, while the touch-me-not family has round stems (often hollow and filled with liquid).

The Fruit of Thanksgiving

Species name: Cucurbita pepo

Common name: pumpkin

Location: pictures 1 and 3 from Dave's Garden (dave), picture 2 from Dave's Garden (kennedyh), picture 4 from Dave's Garden (tman)

I was going to post this blog yesterday, but ran out of time and/or forgot.

Since yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada, I figured I should post a blog about a plant that is essentially analogous to Thanksgiving in both Canada and the United States (yes, I know your Thanksgiving Day is in November...you weirdos!). That plant, of course, would be the pumpkin. What's Thanksgiving (or Christmas, for that matter) without pumpkin pie?!

Pumpkins are actually a specific variety of the species Curcurbita pepo, one that has been artificially selected for an over-sized fruit and the orange colour (or white, depending on the cultivar). The species Curcurbita pepo is actually one of the most variable and one of the most popular fruit/vegetable species that we currently have in cultivation. We get zucchini, acorn squash, delicata squash, dodi marrow, gern squash, heart of gold squash, pattypan squash, pumpkins, spaghetti squash, sweet dumpling squash, crookneck squash, and summer squash all from that one species alone! It's amazing what human selection for various traits can do to a species. This species is native to North America, but likely native to a region in the north of what is now Mexico, or the southern parts of Texas, New Mexico and Nevada.

Pumpkins are a great example of integrative agriculture, and how agriculture has changed over the centuries. Traditional plantings of pumpkins (or any squash) were not monocultures like you would see today (entire fields of nothing but pumpkins). Native North American people used to grow squash in association with corn and beans, and those three crops are what we now refer to as "the three sisters." Corn depletes the soil very quickly of nitrogen because it requires so much to grow, but beans create biologically-available nitrogen through the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their root nodules. Beans are vines, and require props to grow so they wind themselves up the corn stalks to use them for support. Squash plants are very far spreading plants that cover the ground surface and don't require many nutrients (surprisingly enough), and due to their large leaf size they out-compete weeds for light resources. The three crops grown together create their very own bio-feedback ecosystem, and ideal harvests come from all three of these crops being grown together. Now with fertilizers and pesticides we no longer require the synergistic action of all three crops in one field, but you can see how this concept will become useful once we decide that dumping chemicals on our food is not the ideal way to grow plants.

Happy Columbus Day to my American readers, Happy Dia de la Raza to my readers in Latin America, Happy Discovery Day in the Bahamas, Happy Dia de la Hispanidad to my readers in Spain, Happy Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural to my readers in Argentina, and Happy Dia de las Americas to my one lone reader in Uruguay!

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!

The blueberry-like white aster

Species name: Symphyotrichum ericoides

Common name: white aster, heath aster

Location: Ontario

This species of aster is native to much of North America, from Canada all the way south to Mexico. It has been introduced as an ornamental plant around the world, and is sold as a popular garden plant. One of the common names, the heath aster, comes from the fact that the leaves are notably not aster-like; they are instead very thick and almost bristle-like, which is characteristic of the blueberry family (or Ericaceae). For Latin names, wherever you see the ending "-oides" at the end of a species epithet (the "second name" of a species), that means "looks like." Like most white flowers with yellow middles, with multiple ray florets and disc florets (i.e. anything that looks like a daisy), this plant used to be classified in the genus Aster until DNA analysis showed it was in a different genus.

The story of this plant being sold in nurseries for ornamental usage is a long and complicated one, and shows how important it is to be able to identify plants when you're landscaping a garden. This is by far the most common "small, daisy-like plant" sold in garden stores, carrying the name "white aster" or "heath aster." Unfortunately, very little of what is being sold is actually the correct species of plant. More commonly it's misidentified S. dumosum, S. lateriflorum, S. pilosum or S. racemosum. This isn't a real problem in Canada and the United States since all four of these other species are also native, but in Europe this could be a big problem since only two of these species, S. dumosum and S. pilosum, can become invasive. Always make sure you know what you're buying and try to identify the plant yourself if you can (if the plant is mature enough to identify!). This problem has apparently been occurring continuously since the mid-19th century!

Most Symphyotrichum species are hardy, and resistant to infections. The exception, however, is when the plants are planted in close proximity with other plant species, and planted where the soil can not dry out fully between waterings. The roots of this plant (and the stem at soil level) are very susceptible to fungal infections, but this problem is all but eliminated when the plant is on its own in a sunny area. Something to keep in mind if you're going to be landscaping a garden in the spring.

These be Kings of the coleus

Species name: Solenostemon scutellarioides (formerly Coleus blumei)

Common name: Coleus, King coleus, painted nettle

Location: Ontario

Contrary to popular belief, the genus name of this plant is not Coleus, and hasn't been since 1975. It's a rather long story for why the genus Coleus doesn't exist anymore, but to make it a short story it's because a really important botanist said "because I say so." When it comes to sequencing the DNA of all 6 species thought to once be part of the genus Coleus, it turns out that they actually fall into 3 distinct groups, two of which are new and the other is a well-established genus. All three of these groups are in the mint family. Because the previous genus name existed before the description of the first Coleus plant, the Coleus genus was dissolved. One of these three genera, Solenostemon, contains one of the most common garden plants in the world, the King coleus or the painted nettle. It is prized for its incredible degree of variation in colour in the leaves, with some varieties having as many as thirty different colours in one leaf. Most cultivars play on contrast, with very bright colours (or even white) being in combination with very dark colours (some almost appearing black). Why a plant would do this on its own is a mystery, but probably has to do with mimicry, herbivore detraction, or optimization of photosynthesis. We do know that most of the genes responsible for leaf colour in the coleus plant have mutations in them, which lead to the huge variety of colours you can see. Because these gene mutations were selected for by humans due to their visual appeal, the mutations are propagated in the population. This likely wouldn't have happened in nature, however, since changing a leaf's colour to anything other than green often leads to a decrease in photosynthetic ability, which in turn causes the plant to have an overall decrease in sugar production. This may not be a problem normally, but for a plant under any kind of stress (drought, heat, flooding, pest attack, etc.) this could be deadly.

For those of you who live in warm temperate climates (where the winter temperature rarely dips below 10 degrees), please exert extreme caution if you choose to plant a coleus outside (either in its native habitat or introduced areas). They do have the ability to be incredibly invasive despite being incredibly poor seed producers, so make sure you properly destroy of any cuttings you might take. Even a single leaf has the ability to root into a new plant just by having the petiole submerged in a puddle for a few days, and depending on the location as little as a few hours. Unless you like having coleus plants taking over your compost pile, do not compost the leaves or stem cuttings before shredding them! The native range of the coleus is enormous: tropical Africa, Asia and Australia, the East Indies, the Malay Archipelago (Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Brunei, and East Timor) and the Philippines.

A word of caution: this plant is toxic to most people when consumed. It was widely reported in the early 1800s that the Mazatec Indians near Oaxaca, Mexico, used this plant for its psychoactive and hallucinogenic properties and still do today. When consumed (either chewing leaves or brewing them in a tea), it can produce a feeling of euphoria and/or relaxation and some people have reported seeing hallucinations. These effects don't usually last long, but for a child this could not only be downright scary, but also could be dangerous to their health. There aren't any published adverse health effects, but better to be safe than sorry!

The first cure for diabetes

Species name: Dahlia x hybrida

Common name: Dahlia

Location: Ontario

Dahlias are very common ornamental plants in warm temperate (also tropical and sub-tropical) locations around the world. They are native to Mexico, Colombia, and everywhere in Central America between those two countries (we'll see if I can name them all by memory; let me know in the comments if I've missed any! El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica). They were first popularized in Mexico and further south by the Aztecs and Hidalgos that discovered them around 1525. Francisco Hernandez, a European explorer from Spain under the orders of Philip II (he was his physician; clearly physicians weren't so greatly appreciated in the 1500s!), went to Mexico in 1570 and reported back that he had seen these flowers and that they were magnificent. He also reported the use by the native peoples (discussed below), and returned to Spain in 1577 armed with dahlia seeds, leaves, and roots. None of these grew into new plants, and it wasn't until 1789 that they were successfully introduced to Europe Vicente Cervantes after rediscovering the plant in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Ornamental dahlias are a complex hybridization of what is thought to be numerous species. Existing today, there are approximately 30 different species in the genus (and over 20,000 registered cultivars!), but this number is often argued. There is even the suggestion that actually all of the morphological variation can be explained through genome doubling and not different species at all, and so they all belong in one single species named Dahlia variabilis. Once complex DNA studies are done with the members of the genus, we'll have a better picture of how exactly all this variation came to exist. Was it naturally through gene selection in the wild (natural selection) leading to speciation events? Or was it artificially in the lab and in botanical gardens (artificial selection) leading to many varieties and cultivars, but no new species?

Francisco Hernandez is actually an incredibly remarkable man for knowing very little about plants before starting as the personal physician for Philip II (who wasn't the king at the time, he later became King and was so impressed with his personal physician and "naturalist" that he kept him). He was one of the men responsible for taking such incredibly detailed notes about what is now referred to as the colonial-period decline of the population of Aztecs. The cause of this population is still under scrutiny, but Hernandez took incredibly detailed notes about the progression of the disease as well as autopsy results, as he was the main doctor responsible for conducting autopsies until his return to Spain in 1577. He and his son, the one assisting him on his expedition, are the only two men who left accurate reports about the disease. We know that it must have been something that Europeans had previously been exposed to, since no explorers that came in contact with the Aztecs got the disease (and some of them were what we could call "in close contact" with Aztecs if you catch my drift, so it wasn't exclusively a sexually transmitted disease). There are hypotheses about what this disease might have been (smallpox, typhus, plague, dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria, or a combination of two or more of the above; the most well-accepted theory is that smallpox came through first, then a combination of smallpox and typhus), but it managed to wipe out 80% of the population in only 60 years. In equivalent terms today, that would be a disease that could kill approximately 264 million Americans in only one generation. That's an incredible rate of population loss.

Hernandez is credited not only for his medical assistance, but also with his general plant knowledge and discovery. It is estimated that he discovered 600 new species of plants which he published in 24 volumes, one book about animals, one about the minerals of Mexico, and ten volumes of paintings and drawings of plants and animals he discovered on his expedition. He is credited with introducing some of the most important crop species we have in the world to Europe: chocolate, corn, pineapple to name a few, and some of the most important hallucinogenic plants known in human history: peyote and Datura (jimsonweed). He also introduced the drink mezcal (which he called Maguey, the Spanish word for "Agave"), made out of the plant Agave americana, to the Spanish (which you can read all about in one of my previous blog posts HERE).

The historical medicinal uses of the dahlia are numerous. The roots were used by the Aztecs to treat epilepsy, and the long hollow stems were used as water pipes and poison dart launching apparatuses. The most important medicinal application of the dahlia plant is to be the first plant from which inulin was extracted (which was extracted from the tubers; these look very similar to sweet potatoes). This inulin was marketed under the names Atlantic sugar or diabetic sugar, and was used as a type of sugar substitute. Because inulin cannot be broken down by the body into sugar, the symptoms of having too much sugar in your blood were effectively removed. This didn't solve the problem of how to get sugar into the body's cells where it is needed, so better treatments needed to be discovered (and insulin, the key to getting sugar into cells, was discovered in 1923). Inulin is still used as a measure of kidney function today, as the same amount of inulin should exit the body as went into the body (meaning it all has to be secreted by the kidneys; the rate at which it is secreted gives the measure of how effectively the kidneys filter the body's blood).

New England's asters aren't nearly as tasty as their clam chowder

Species name: Symphyotrichum novae-angliae (formerly in the genus Aster)

Common name: New England Aster

Location: Ontario

This species of aster (a common name as well as a Latin name!) is native to just about all areas of North America east of the Rocky Mountains, except in Canada's far north where it is too cold for it to grow. This species, while incredibly common in field sites, has becoming increasingly popular as a garden plant because of its late blooming time (sometimes still having brilliant purple flowers when the first major snowfall hits in November) and easy of care. You literally don't have to do anything to this plant to get it to flower vigorously every year. That's my kind of garden plant! Unfortunately, like any aster that prefers disturbed areas, with no basic pruning maintenance (and digging out new shoots that you don't want) this plant gets a bit out of control (as evidenced by the top photograph). You could also just plant a bunch of other native wildflowers beside each other in close proximity, and let them hold each other up!

Like many other "roadside weeds" in North America, this species was introduced to Europe more than three centuries ago as an ornamental plant. It seems to do much worse there than it does here, which is somewhat unusual for a garden plant. Usually when you introduce a weedy species from a natural habitat into a foreign one, it only gets worse. Thankfully, this plant missed that memo (or forgot to learn how to read somewhere along the way). The Australians haven't been so lucky, since this species tends to get away in gardens there.

Other than the ornamental value (there have been 70 different cultivars created to date, but only 50 of them are used in any great extent commercially), there is no known economic benefit of this plant. I'm sure somewhere along the line it was used as a medicinal plant many centuries ago, but that use has since been lost or forgotten. It is also not known to be edible.

Miscanthus for fuel?

Species name: Miscanthus sinensis

Common name: Chinese silver grass, Eulalia grass, Suzuki grass

Location: Ontario

As you can probably guess, this species of ornamental grass is native to Asia (China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan). It is a very popular ornamental grass species in North America, if not the most popular. There are about 15 different varieties that are widely grown with varying selected characteristics; this variety (along with a couple of others) has purple flower bracts. Another variety that I've previously blogged about is the infamous zebra grass, which you can read all about HERE.

I'm actually surprised at how many people believe that grasses don't have flowers, just because they don't have a structure that you would traditionally believe to be a flower. Any plant that produces a fruit must have a flower (but not every plant that produces a seed; pine trees, for example, produce seeds but no flowers. Instead the seeds are produced in a cone), and the fruit of a grass has a special name called a caryopsis. The caryopsis of any edible grass species is what we eat: the oatmeal you have for breakfast is the oat caryopsis, the grain that is ground to make flour for your morning toast is the wheat caryopsis, and the rice that you cook for your stir-fry is the rice caryopsis. As a general rule, any flower that's not overly flashy is probably pollinated by wind, since they make no effort to attract insects (through scent, colour, mimicry, etc.).

Miscanthus grasses are very successful reproducers in temperate ecosystems. They produce a huge number of seeds, and can spread through the soil via underground rhizomes. Recently, the suggestion has been made that perhaps they would make a good biofuel alternative compared to corn, since we eat corn and we don't eat Miscanthus. Instead, we could use corn for food (both for us and for livestock), and make fuel out of Miscanthus. A good idea in theory, but the problem is that we make bioethanol currently out of actual corn fruit (the corn caryopsis!) which is full of sugar and easily fermentable by yeast. We do not make bioethanol from corn husks or the green parts of the plant. This would involve turning plant cellulose into sugar, then the sugar into ethanol. Completely possible, but incredibly expensive and slow. The same would have to happen with Miscanthus; this makes the process currently economically a moot point. Any benefit we would get from growing Miscanthus instead of corn would be outweighed by the obscene price it would cost to build cellulose reactors. Until we can find an economically viable way to turn cellulose into sugar, producing bioethanol will always be a very expensive process. Expensive because corn is expensive to grow (unlike Miscanthus which grows like a weed with no chemical or labor inputs) but also because we're diverting perfectly edible food out of the food production chain.

The binder of wood: European honeysuckle

Species name: Lonicera periclymenum

Common name: European honeysuckle, woodbine

Location: Ontario

Right away the common name of this species should strike you as a non-native species, and you would be correct. I still haven't quite figured out why, but any species in the genus Lonicera, no matter where it's native to, seems to become a very popular garden plant in both North America and Europe. It's probably because of the intoxicating smell, especially towards nightfall (I'll be one of the first to admit that I absolutely love the smell of honeysuckles and lilacs). Unfortunately, almost every species of honeysuckle, including most species native to North America, are incredibly invasive except under very specific conditions. Most honeysuckles require their roots to be in the shade (they grow very shallowly under the surface of the ground), while their leaf tips in full sun. This makes them incredibly effective climbers, and spread out on top of plants to completely engulf them and use them as a support to grow. Honeysuckles that are more shrub-like instead of vine-like usually only contain leaves on the very outside of the shrub for this very reason (but it's very difficult to tell upon first glance since they have such dense growth). The most impressive invasive honeysuckle in North America is the trumpet honeysuckle which I'll profile in a blog post next month.

Because of the intense smell and the unusual shape of the flowers, it should suggest to you that honeysuckle flowers are pollinated by very specific pollinators. In fact, one of the reasons why the European honeysuckle is so successful as a plant species is because its native pollinator, a moth, has been an invasive moth species in North America longer than the plant has been here! Before the arrival of the European honeysuckle, the moth would feed on native honeysuckles and often out-compete native moths for nectar. It's amazing how one small change to an ecosystem can completely throw things out of balance. Now that the plant is here the moth is happy, and our native moths can go back to pollinating our native honeysuckles, for better or for worse! Watching a nocturnal moth unfurl its "tongue" (called a proboscis) to reach a nectary is fascinating. If you haven't yet observed the phenomenon (and don't mind getting eaten alive by mosquitos; wearing bug spray can deter some moth species), you should go find a honeysuckle and camp out beside it close to sunset during the summer months. If you'd rather just watch a youtube video, here is a good one (best viewing of the proboscis is around 0:30).