Sisal here, sisal there, everywhere a sisal sisal...

Species name: Agave sisilana

Common name: agave, sisal

Location: teaching lab at Western

So once again we have a plant in a pot (the next few blogs will all be plants in pots) from my favourite course ever. This plant is from the same lab exercise as the previous one, flax (which you can read all about HERE). The point of this lab was to introduce students to five major fibres and where the come from, as well as providing them with visual representations of what the plants actually look like since most are pretty foreign concepts to the average undergrad student. The five plants we feature are hemp (not as a plant, but we have a huge display about hemp cultivation and harvesting, as well as products commonly made, and some uncommonly made, from hemp), flax/linen, banana/musa, sisal/agave, and cotton. We also feature products made from each of these plants so the students actually get to touch the fibres to see what they feel like, and why one might be used for one thing over another (for example, it would be extremely unlikely for you to want to wear a pair of jeans made out of sisal, but some made out of hemp would be lovely).

Sisal, also commonly called "agave" after it's Latin name, is native to the Yucatan area in Mexico where it is still commonly cultivated (and found in the wild) today. There are many, many other countries that cultivate this plant for its fibres, not the least of which being my favourite country to visit in the whole wide world: Cuba. The story of how they started farming sisal is actually a funny one! Back in the "good old days" (the 1600s and 1700s, not the 1980s), world exploration was quite the hot topic everywhere in the world. Cuban people, whether it be immigrants to Cuba who have now called it home for decades or native Cubans who have lived there for centuries, were big into exploration after Christopher Columbus piqued their interest (he made landfall in Trinidad in Cuba, where he was attracted by all of the same plants he found in the Dominican Republic). They set sail for the west, hoping to come across something exciting and they did: Mexico. What they observed there was fascinating to them; people turning plants into beverages, and then singing and dancing after consuming those beverages. I don't know about you, but it sounds like a fun time to me! Cubans agreed, and offered to buy some of these plants off of their hands; Mexico refused. So what's a Cuban to do when you want to make the "happy drink" but they won't give you the plant to make it? Why you steal it, that's what you do. Minor detail: the plant in question was the plant called Agave tequilana, or perhaps even Agave americana, not Agave sisilana. Since pretty much all green spiky plants look the same after an over-indulgence of tequila, you can probably understand how they got the two mixed up. Once they brought the plants back to Cuba, grew them, and tried fermenting them into alcohol they were likely sorely disappointed since the resulting beverage would taste nothing like Mexican tequila (it's much more bitter, and would be a much darker brown). They quickly rectified their mistake by becoming one of the world's most important producers of sisal fibres around the world, used to make marine ropes and twine. At least it wasn't all for nothing!

Sisal has recently come back into fashion as an alternative plant to grow in an area, especially in tropical countries, when you're letting a field plot go to rehabilitate the soil as it out-competes weeds and animals avoid eating it because of its physical defenses. It will just happily grow, producing long strands of fibres in the leaves without any kind of human intervention. Even harvesting the plant for fibre is non-destructive; you simply cut the leaves from the stem and leave the stem to grow more leaves. Most commercial sisal varieties are sterile, meaning they will never produce the flower stalk that is so characteristic of other members of the genus Agave (which you can read all about HERE or a closely related plant in a different genus HERE). Should those flowers have been produced, the flower stalk could also be used as a source of fibre. Like with the tequila agave, once the flower stalk is produced and the flowers are pollinated, the entire plant dies so there is incentive for sterile varieties to be grown to prolong the life of the plant.

Aside from rope, there are many uses for sisal and even more are being discovered now that varieties of sisal can be produced in the lab that make longer, softer fibres. Sisal is now commonly used to make paper, dartboards, scouring cloths and sponges, filters, carpets, and even some texturized wall coverings (paints and wallpapers). Sounds like a great plant! The one major downside in using this plant as a fibre source is the amount of waste: only about 4% of the total mass of the plant are useable fibres. The rest is all waste that is composted (rarely) or burned (more likely). The odd time the burning of sisal waste will turn into a dirty fuel, but more often than not it's just set on fire in the field and the ashes are spread around after the pile has been burned off. There are now efforts into looking at how microbial decay by bacteria can be used to turn sisal wastes into biogas, or methane.

While not officially a state "tree" (not actually a tree, despite the ability to produce a stem that looks quite woody, as it is a monocot), it appears on the coat of arms of the state of Yucatan in Mexico, and Barquisimeto in Venezuela.

Do pineapples grow on trees?

Species name: Pandanus utilis

Common name: common screwpine

Location: Dominican Republic

Screwpines are a group of about 650 species of tropical trees native to different regions around the world, but mostly in Southeast Asia and tropical Africa. This particular species is native to Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles, and it is still incredibly common in those three locations because of its practicality. Many species in the genus are now endangered because of habitat loss. One big attractive feature about these plants are their aerial roots; they act almost like hands holding in soil and do a great job of preventing erosion. They, like mangroves, can also grow submerged in water so do well in areas that get a lot of rain and periodic flooding.

This genus of plants get their common name because of their arrangement of leaves around the stem; they are spirally arranged and this is so exaggerated in some species that they look as if they have been artificially made. The fruit, very reminiscent of pineapples, are edible once cooked (I haven't read anywhere that they're toxic, but they are incredibly starchy and cooking would break down some of that starch to make it palatable, like with potatoes).

The most important use of this plant is as an ornamental leaf species used in the construction of baskets and roofs. The leaves have a very thick coating of wax, making them almost completely waterproof. The wax can also be scraped off of the leaves and used as moulding wax, or the leaves could be heated to start to melt the wax. This is exploited during the basket making process to fuse the weaved strands together, making the joints completely waterproof. Also useful in thatching on roofs because of their waterproof nature.

The Royal Palm

If you were looking forward to a blog today about shamrocks, sorry to disappoint you! If I do plants associated with important dates all in the first year of my blog, I'll have nothing left to blog about in future years! So you'll have to be satisfied with a different green object for today :)

Species name: Roystonea sp.

Common name: Royal palm

Location: Dominican Republic

The royal palm is one of the most instantly recognizable, and arguably one of the most beautiful, palms around the world. It is native to Central and South America, as well has having a "hyper-diversity" of species in the Caribbean Islands. In countries where it is native, there is usually only one species native to each country with the exception of Jamaica which has two native species of Roystonea, and Cuba which has five native species. The tree is recognized by its green leaf sheathes which encircle the tree at the top and its concrete-like stem (much more pronounced as the tree matures and loses the leaf sheath scars). As the leaves mature, they are easily sheared off by the wind. They are also easily cut off from the tree and used as roofing material for thatched roof houses or huts. There are approximately 20 species in the genus, and other than extreme examples like R. violacea with its purple stem, they are almost impossible to distinguish unless you pay close attention to flower morphology.

The royal palm has many uses throughout the Caribbean and Central/South America, not the least of which is as a coffee substitute. The seeds to not contain the caffeine that is naturally present in coffee beans, but it does have a very similar flavour when roasted. It makes me wonder why it is not used more often as decaf coffee! The men that pick the ripened fruit of the royal palm have special training starting from when they are very young (and much more fearless than the average adult male) to teach them how to properly climb the trees. By the time they are in early adulthood, they are able to climb a 20 meter tall royal palm very quickly with bare feet and only a rope for assistance. A machete is used to cut the stalk that all of the fruit is attached to (very similar to a bunch of grapes), and the fruit bundle is carefully lowered to the ground with the assistance of a second rope. The wood-like material of the stem of the royal palm is used as a building material, and the "heart" of the palm (when the plant has only started producing its first few leaves, the plant is cut at the soil surface and carefully peeled apart to reveal the young, tender area responsible for the upward growth and the production of new leaves. This is called the palm "heart") is used as a source of food. The hearts of palm we buy in North America in cans in the grocery store is highly unlikely to be from the royal palm; it is more likely to be from the coconut palm or the jucara (also called the palmito, Euterpe edulis). The tree also serves a huge cultural significance in Cuba; it is their national tree. It is said that for every citizen of Cuba there are at least three royal palm trees!

The royal palm is also very important as an ornamental species in the Caribbean, and not just because of its beauty. The tree also has a hidden secret that you wouldn't know until it was pointed out to you: it is a natural lightning rod. The new leaves are produced from the middle of the bundle of leaves and sticks straight up towards the sky until it starts unfurling. This single palm frond can make the tree significantly taller than a lot of hotel buildings, and almost twice the height of the average beach hut. When you walk around hotel grounds in tropical countries, look for trees that are very tall but have no leaves on top. Those have almost certainly been struck by lightning and lost all of its leaves, but leaving the very tough stem still standing.

Flamboyant Flamingo Flowers

Species name: Anthurium sp.

Common name: Flamingo flower

Location: UWO Greenhouse

The common name "flamingo flower" actually refers to an entire genus of plant species; Anthurium is estimated to contain 1000 or more species with almost all of the diversity of this genus existing in the South American tropics. There are a few exceptions, but none of them are notable. Approximately 3/4 of the species known in this genus are either threatened or endangered due to habitat loss, which makes the entire group incredibly vulnerable to extinction. These flowers are actually remarkably difficult to grow from seed in a greenhouse, so plants in some locations were hunted almost to complete eradication for the international tropical plant trade. Now, ornamental species are grown in greenhouses and propagated from cuttings, which means two things: first, they are no longer collected in the wild (or at least very little wild collection), and second the populations grown in cultivation are all genetically identical. This could be devastating for the flower trade (and once again for the wild Anthurium populations) if there was a pathogen that invaded greenhouses and flower plantations and wiped out all of the plants because they had no resistance.

The Anthurium flower, like the Jack-in-the-Pulpit flower (which you can read all about HERE), is a specialized type of flower. Anthurium species break all the rules when it comes to determining if a plant is a monocot or a dicot. Monocots have flower parts in multiples of 3s, and have long, narrow leaves with parallel veins. Dicots have flower parts in multiples of 4s or 5s, and have wide, broad leaves with net-like veins. Anthurium is a genus of monocots with broad leaves, veins that are somewhere between parallel and net-like, and have one inflorescence made up of tiny flowers that have their flower parts in multiples of four. Someone should tell these plants that they need to read more botany books to learn the rules! Anthurium flowers are made up of two parts: the spathe, or the white shield-like petal surrounding the rest of the inflorescence (its role is to attract pollinators), and the spadix which houses all of the tiny little flowers (thousands of them less than 1 mm across!). On the bright side, we've made up a new rule concerning the ways to tell monocots and dicots apart when the plants refuse to read books: whenever you see a plant with an inflorescence made up of a spathe and spadix, it's always a monocot!

The palm with the pony's tail

Species name: Beaucarnea recurvata

Common name: ponytail palm

Location: UWO Greenhouse

The ponytail palm is not a true palm, and its closest relative might surprise you. It is native to Mexico, but is used as an ornamental plant throughout much of the southern United States (it is cold-hardy to 6 degrees Celsius and is incredibly drought tolerant), South America, tropical southeast Asia, and Australia. This "tree", like true palms (one of which you can read all about HERE), is not actually a tree at all. It has no tissue called the vascular cambium, which is responsible for producing secondary xylem which is what we refer to colloquially as wood. If you don't produce true wood because you don't have secondary xylem, you can't be a tree! There are many monocots that masquerade themselves around town as being woody; bamboo, lucky bamboo (a completely different group of plants), palms, tree ferns and bananas all lack the ability to produce true wood (you can read all about bananas HERE). This doesn't mean that we can't use them as building material! All of these species produce a tissue type called sclerenchyma in great volumes which contributes to their stem stability (except banana; they produce collenchyma which is a tissue very similar to sclerenchyma. They also don't have a true above-ground stem!).

The ponytail palm, as mentioned, isn't a palm at all. It's actually a close relative of the asparagus family, and if I had of caught this plant while it was flowering it would have been much more obvious. The flowers produced by this species are almost identical to the flowers you would see if you let the asparagus in your garden go to seed. It's amazing the kinds of morphological variation you can get within a family!

The swollen base of the stem of this plant is designed for prolonged periods of drought. It almost acts as a water canteen, which can allow the plant to go for months without a significant source of water. If the plant went long enough, the base of the stem would start to shrink as the tissue and the water it contains starts to be reabsorbed by the plant. During the next major rainfall, the plant would reabsorb its water again and regrow the swollen stem base.

Bertie Ferris has a lily

Species name: Hemerocallis sp. (Hemerocallis 'Bertie Ferris')

Common name: Bertie Ferris daylily

Location: Ontario

Today's blog post (and for the next few blog posts) is going to be short and sweet. Since daylilies seem to be so incredibly popular with gardeners (there are hundreds of "official" cultivars of daylily registered in the United States; Canada doesn't have the same type of registration system each time a new cultivar is made), I figured I would provide a blog-post-slideshow of all of the daylilies we have in our garden and that I can find on campus. Some are prettier than others, but each are pretty in their own respect. Yes, I seem to have a soft spot for most daylilies (the notable exception will be featured at the end of the series) yet hate hostas. Feel free to call me a hypocrite if you must :)

This cultivar of daylily likely has the species "base" Hemerocallis fulva as most other cultivars. This is becoming harder and harder to discern, however, due to morphological divergence between cultivars, and the fact that cultivars from different species are now being bred together. A neat phenomenon that can't be reproduced with many other popular garden and landscaping plants. The cultivar was registered in the United States in 1969, and has won many awards since then for "prettiest daylily" (although I'm sure they call their award something flashier and slightly more professional-sounding than that).

If you'd like to read more about daylilies in general, please click HERE to visit a previous blog post about them.

The Superman of the flower world

Species name: Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus

Common name: Daylily

Location: Ontario

This species of daylily is native to China, Russia, Slovenia and Italy, and was one of the very first of the genus Hemerocallis that was used for hybridization and domestication into its thousands of current cultivars. Many species of this genus have the ability to become invasive (such as the Tiger Lily, which many people think is a native North American wildflower), but to my knowledge this is not one of them. One of the qualities of daylilies that makes them not only attractive to gardeners but also very successful in a non-cultivated setting is their ability to withstand many different growing conditions. They can tolerate extreme cold during dormancy periods, and can tolerate extreme heat and dryness during the growing season. Some species can also tolerate periods of flooding, high winds, and frost. For this reason, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) recognizes this plant as "successful" in hardiness zones 1-11, meaning from Alaska to Puerto Rico and Hawaii! Like Easter lilies, daylilies have three petals and three sepals, but because they're impossible to distinguish when the flower is mature we say there are six tepals.

Daylilies of all species and varieties are incredible potential learning tools when it comes to education about basic genetics. Most cultivars of daylily have the ability to hybridize, and there are quite a few gardeners that attempt every year to "create" their own cultivar by cross-breeding the daylilies in their back yards. I can imagine this being a great activity for kids in a school yard: plant some daylilies and have them grow until they are established (2 seasons at most), then set the kids out with paint brushes, plastic bags and different coloured string when the flowers are mature. Take the paint brush and rub it against the stamens to pick up pollen, then against the stigma to deposit the pollen. Put a plastic bag over the flower and secure with coloured string so you know what flower has been pollinated by who. Allow the fruit to start developing, then remove the plastic bag to let air circulate. Once the fruit is mature, open the pod to release the seeds, plant them in the ground and see what happens! I've heard of some people generating some really unique colour patterns as a result of "borrowing" pollen from daylilies around their neighbourhood and pollinating their own flowers. And who's going to miss a little pollen?!

Surprisingly enough, daylilies are actually a food source in China in some dishes that have become very popular in North America (and some I eat quite often!). The flowers, in China called gum jum or golden needles, are dried and used in hot and sour soup, Buddha's delight, and moo shu pork. There are some cultivars that have edible rhizomes, but others would irritate your stomach lining so it's best not to attempt to consume any of them. Despite this, historically the plant was used in a tea-like preparation to relieve stomach ache!

The original Stinking Benjamin

My appologies! For the last 4 days I've been at two different conferences, and so have been a wee busy. More regular blog postings are starting again tomorrow!

Species name: Trillium erectum

Common name: red trillium, wake-robin, stinking Benjamin

Location: Nova Scotia

I took this photo while out with Tanya on a guided excursion of an area in Nova Scotia called Cape Split. Felt like a walk up a mountain carrying the pack mule with all of its stuff, to be rewarded with a beautiful view of the Bay of Fundy. Once we were done absorbing the view we started our (incredibly short) trek back down the "mountain", only to find out that the walk wasn't all that long at all! The red trillium is native to Eastern North America, especially the Maritime provinces.

Most of the 40-50 species in the Trillium genus are at risk of population decline across their entire range. Despite this, there is only one species that is protected by law in Ontario against picking since it is officially a threatened species and has a greatly reduced population size. The common white trillium, the provincial flower of Ontario, is only prohibited from being picked in Provincial and National Parks, and on land owned and controlled by a Conservation Authority. In the United States, it is illegal to pick trillium flowers in Michigan, Minnesota and New York. This isn't because it's a threatened species, it's because picking the flower prevents the bracts and leaves from making sugars to be stored for the next year's growth. This impedes the growth and reproductive abilities pretty severely of the trillium. The white trillium is also the state flower of Ohio, and the official government emblem of the Ontario Government. Like the Jack in the Pulpit plant, the trillium is characterized by having flower parts and leaves in multiples of three: three petals, three sepals, and three leaves. This makes the plant trifolate, and a monocot.

Red trillium flowers are definitely not suitable for picking for the dinner table. A dark red-purple colour in flowers often indicates that they will smell terrible, like rotting meat. This implies the flowers are pollinated by animals attracted to rotting meat, usually flies. Like another native Ontario wildflower, bloodroot, the seeds of the red trillium are dispersed via ants (called myrmecochory). The ants are attracted to the fruit of the flower because of the fleshy elaiosome that surrounds the seed. This elaiosome contains lots of lipids (fats) and proteins, which the ants use as a rich source of nutrition. Once the ants have consumed the elaiosome, they transport the seeds into their disposal chambers underground where they can germinate the next spring and grow into a new trillium plant. Despite this complex association between trilliums and ants, these plants rarely actually reproduce sexually via their seeds. Like many of the spring wildflowers that I've blogged about so far, trilliums have rhizomes that store nutrients for the plants to use to grow the next spring.

To my knowledge, there is no medicinal or nutritive benefits (either perceived or actual) of consuming specifically the red trillium (although, there are stories about other species of trillium having medicinal value in preventing and treating bloody diarrhea). It contains calcium oxalate crystals in a special form called a raphide, which would make the plant toxic to consume by humans. The crystals can perforate the intestines and cause ulcers. Plus, I don't imagine they taste very good!

Tulipmania!

Species name: Tulipa sp. (probably Tulipa gesneriana)

Common name: tulip

Location: Nova Scotia

I took these photos when my friend Tanya and I were in Nova Scotia for a conference in May one year. The tulips there were in full bloom (they were a little past their prime in Ontario, but it's cooler in NS so it was a nice colourful surprise), along with the rest of the late spring wildflowers and cultivated flowers.

Tulips have a long-standing tradition of being one of the most popular ornamental flowers to humans worldwide. The Dutch were the ones that got the ball rolling during the Ottoman Empire (weren't you disappointed, too, to learn that this wasn't named after the invention of the footstool?) in the mid-1500s. Officially, the first documented case of planting tulip bulbs in Europe was in 1559 in Germany, with the bulbs arriving in the Netherlands in 1593 (the bulbs being planted at Leiden University). On the books, 1594 is the first tulip flower year for Holland, and these first flowers were the ones that led into Tulipmania and the commerical tulip flower trade.

Tulips do grow from bulbs and take many years of growth to build up the storage tissue in the bulb before they are prepared to flower. If you were to grow a tulip plant from seed, depending on the variety it would take between five and eight years to wait for a flower to appear. That's a lot of waiting, and an amount of time most people are not prepared to invest into an ornamental garden. So how is it that we put bulbs in the ground and they flower in the spring? Well, someone else has done the waiting for us. In fact, Holland is still the biggest grower and exporter of tulip bulbs worldwide (they've had a lot of practice!), and they dig up the bulbs that have formed every year and sort those by size. The bulbs big enough to flower the next spring are sent for export and sale, while the ones too small to produce a flower are set aside to be planted again. By the time you buy a bulb in the store, it has been deemed by the experts to be ready for flowering. If you do plant bulbs and not all of them flower, don't despair! Give them another year and I'm sure you'll be happy with your efforts. If you've been paying attention, you should be able to point out based on the third picture that tulips are monocots (click here for a refresher course in monocots vs. dicots, look at the third paragraph), since they have flower parts in multiples of three: three petals, three sepals (since they look so similar, we call them tepals like in Easter lilies), six stamens and three lobes on the stigma.

Tulipmania is often regarded as the first economic bubble in human history: tulip prices in 1637 skyrocketed to almost 10 times the annual salary of a skilled tradesman (that would be like you walking into a garden store with the keys to a ferrari, leaving the ferrari and taking a marigold plant home with you), then suddenly crashed. For those people that "cashed in" on the tulip market and sold everything, they also lost everything. To get fancy patterns on tulip tepals, the bulb must be infected with a virus called the Tulip Breaking Virus, or TBV. This is what causes the streaks of colour running vertically along each tepal. Since the virus must be in the bulb to cause the colour pattern, this pattern can only be seen in the mother plant and not in the seeds that plant produces. For this reason, "broken" tulips are relatively rare, and at the time of Tulipmania they were incredibly valuable. The most rare variety, called Semper Augustus, was not only a broken tulip but also a black tulip. To see a black flower is incredibly rare in nature, and for it to also have white streaks running through the tepals made them especially sought-after; so much so that there's a documented case of someone offering 34 acres of land for one Semper Augustus bulb.

The bubonic plague is also tightly tied to the story of Tulipmania: in 1637 the tulip trade came to a grinding halt since no buyers of tulip bulbs showed up to February tulip auction. The speculation for why this is the case is that the plague was rampant during this time, and there was widespread fear over catching it in populated places. Since tulip auctions always drew large crowds, the crowd just decided this time to stay home. By May of that year, the price of tulips was back down to baseline levels, and have remained relatively stable even today.

Peekaboo! I see you!

Species name: Arisaema triphyllum

Common name: Jack-in-the-pulpit, bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip

Location: Ontario

Jack in the pulpit flowers are great examples of exceptions in the plant world, which is one of the reasons why I like them so much. It is another example of a native eastern North American plant. We have these growing in our back yard, which confused me at first (like they do many people) since I mistook them for poison ivy and ripped out all of the leaves one year (with gloves on!). The leaves of poison ivy and jack in the pulpit are both what are called "trifolate", which means there are three leaflets coming out of each "leaf point" on the stem. Once this plant starts to flower, however, is very obvious that it's not poison ivy! Silly me. Like the last plant in this blog, hyacinth, jack in the pulpit also grows from a corm.

One of the amazing things about this plant is just how variable it can be depending on environmental conditions, and what type of genetic variation it contains. The flowers themselves can range in size from 12-36 cm tall, and can be anywhere from pure green (like in the photo) to green with dark brown (almost purple) stripes. The "jack" on the inside can also be bright green or dark purple-brown, or anywhere in between. The plants themselves can be from 30-65 cm tall, depending on nutrient levels of the soil.

In general, a good rule to use to figure out if a plant is a monocot (in other words, most closely related to grasses) or a dicot (in other words, most closely related to an oak tree) is by the shape of their leaves and the number of flower parts. In general, monocots have long and thin leaves with parallel veins and flowers with flower parts (petals, sepals, stamens and stigmas) in multiples of three. Dicots have broad leaves with net-like veins and flower parts in multiples of either fours or fives. Jack in the pulpit, then, seems to be a dicot. Its leaves are broad and have net-like veins, and unless you have a very powerful hand lens it's impossible to tell if flower parts are in multiples of 3s or 4-5s. Unfortunately...that would be incorrect. This is a monocot! One unusual group of monocots is the family Araceae, which includes the peace lily (a common ornamental plant, often used as an aquatic plant in wedding centrepieces). They have broad leaves with (mostly) parallel veins (but some are cross-wise) and a specific type of flower called the spathe and spadix. Here, "Jack" would be the spadix and his pulpit would be the spathe. If you zoom in on the spadix, you would see that it's actually a multi-flowered flower head (called an inflorescence), with each little facet on the spadix being one flower. Neat!

But, of course, the uniqueness of this plant doesn't stop there. This is also a great plant to demonstrate all of the unique evolutionary mechanisms plants have derived to avoid self-pollination or inbreeding. There are separate male and female flowers on the spadix, but never both at the same time. Usually the plant starts with predominantly male flowers (if there are female flowers, they are not mature yet) that are producing pollen. Flies are attracted to the spadix because they are much warmer than the ambient air (thanks to the spathe), and they have a rather...unpleasant smell. The fly is covered in pollen, then travels to another flower. If the plant plays its cards right, the next flower will be predominantly female flowers (if there are male flowers, they are no longer mature) which are receptive to receiving pollen. The fly deposits the pollen onto the stigmas, and pollination occurs. Even neater!

This plant is absolutely toxic if consumed raw (it contains calcium oxalate crystals which can perforate the digestive tract), but is actually often cooked as a root crop like you would cook potatoes (but boiled a bit longer because they're much tougher) and eaten. I have never tried it so I can't vouch for what it would taste like, but I can't imagine it would be too flavourful. Native North American people often used this plant as a medicine to treat sore eyes, rheumatism, bronchitis, snake bites, and to induce sterility. Whether or not it's an effective treatment against any of these I have no idea. I wouldn't recommend experimenting.