University Greenhouse, Part VI: More Scenes from the Tropics

I was tempted to post on another topic today  (so badly tempted--you'll see why tomorrow), but since I promised more greenhouse pictures, here they are.

The first plant from this batch was grouped (as you can see) with a bunch of bromeliads, so I don't know if it's a bromeliad or not. Either way, its bloom was attractive.

My friend who accompanied me on this outing said she was only interested in flowers, not foliage, but even she was intrigued by the coloration on this plant. That's one wonderful thing about plants in general: they're so diverse that some species look like science fiction gone mad.

Has this plant been drinking blood from people's livestock? Or from people? I smell a Little Shop of Horrors sequel.

This next plant is a little sweeter. I don't know if this shot was taken pre-or-post-bloom, but it was pretty either way, and I bet it's dazzling when fully open.

Now comes the star of our show: Theobroma cacao. At first, when I saw this tree's football-shaped fruits, I thought perhaps it was a starfruit variant. I thought it very odd, though, that the fruits would hang right off the trunk instead of the tree's smaller branches.

To give these some sense of scale, each fruit is about as tall as a large man's hand, from the wrist to the fingertips. Meaning they're substantially bigger than my hands.

But then I saw this.

Theobroma = food of the gods. Cacao = cocoa. It's a chocolate tree. That moment was when I realized, once and for all, that I had picked the right university to attend. They have a vanilla plant and a chocolate tree in the same room. I'm a foodie in general, but I have about 30 wicked sweet teeth, so I was caught in a cross between foodie heaven and plant geek heaven. I still am, really. I also want to know who gets to keep these heavenly fruits, though it would take a lot of them (and a lot of time and money, too) to create much chocolate.

So now that I've gotten that out of my system, onto the next plant! This one's called Zambia furfura. Its base looks like a woody artichoke, but its foliage is really something to behold.

Plant rant time: the veins you see on these leaves are parallel and roughly equal in size. This means that our friend Zambia is monocotyledonous. Monocots are plants that only have one seed leaf. If you cut a cross section of one of their stems, the xylem and phloem will basically be distributed randomly throughout the width of the stem. In this case, this is relevant because the veining gives a distinctive, textured look to the leaves, which is what I like about them.

A few days ago, I showed a picture of a fern and briefly alluded to the method by which ferns reproduce (and the fact that ferns need moist environments to reproduce). Well, here's what ferns look like when they reproduce. Those clusters on the bottom of the leaves are called sori (sorus is the singular version). Sori release spores into the air. These spores are not seeds; they develop into a weird leaf-like structure called a prothallus. Prothalli develop male and female reproductive parts, and those allow fertilization to occur, producing an embryo. The embryos become the new fern, not the prothalli. However, this can only happen when the prothalli are wet because fern sperm is considered "swimming sperm," and it can't move except through water. That is why you'll find a lot of ferns in wet woodland areas rather than dusty, open plains. Man, that's two plant rants in a row!

Here's a break for your brain: I don't know what this plant is, but it grows in a spiral pattern, so it looks cool.

This unnamed plant is another of those that look so exotic to me that they seem extra-terrestrial. Alternatively, this plant would fit in on a seafloor.

I hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about plants (and seeing what chocolate fruits look like)! Have you ever thought a plant looked like it would be at home on another planet?

Next post: terribly exciting news!