Gardens

My plan to take a walk in the garden this weekend came to nothing. We had a scare; a work contact tested positive for COVID. On Saturday we took an appointment for a test, and began to isolate. On Sunday night we found we were negative. Relief and frustration were the theme of the weekend. Relief at escaping the infection once again, and frustration about my plans for flower photography. So I had to search my hard disk for old images.

The featured image and the one above were taken in 2013 in Shillong’s Lady Hydari Park at the very end of October. The flowers are beginning to dry up. Photography made me begin to look closer at nature, and these photos marked a turning point for me. After looking at these flowers I found myself reading more about the structure of flowers. Each of these things, which I had taken to be a single flower should be properly called a pseudanthium, or a compound flower. Each is a collection of many flowers. It turns out that the lovely red and pink “petals” are each a complete flower. They are called ray flowers. Each of the central yellow flowers is also a complete flower and is called a disk flower. Single flowers only ever have three, four, five or six petals. Anything else is a compound flower.

I skip forty years

Lewis Carroll

I can hardly hope to match Carroll’s nonsense, but I skip four years to the next photo. It was taken on a rainy day early in October on the Kaas plateau. The plateau is full of plants which can’t be found anywhere else, and most of them flower in a week or two at the end of the monsoon. What I makes this image special to me is neither the flower, nor the whorls of hairy leaves which protect it, but the way the hairs prevented the rain water from wetting the plant . On this plateau, which is dry for nine months of the year, you can be sure that this is an adaptation which has survival value.

The next one is not a particularly beautiful flower, but three things give it a value to me. First, that it was the first flower I photographed after emerging from last year’s hard lockdown. Simple pleasures like walking in a garden seemed so unusual! I had only my mobile phone with me. But these phone cameras can now capture the delicacy of the light. That’s the second special thing about this photo: that the lovely mild colours were taken with a phone camera. And third, this is another kind of a not-so-simple flower. The large “petals” are modified leaves, and the real flower is the small five-petalled yellow thing.

This set of three images of the same flower come from the new camera I bought last year. It’s a great tool for flower identification. As I began to learn more about flowers I realized that identifying wild flowers is much easier when you pay attention to the whole plant. That’s why a wider view like the first is useful. But when you go close, those details require focus stacking; the image on the left is a composite with several different focal lengths. It also needed a digital equivalent of an ND filter to even out the light across the photo. The middle is a crop with one of the exposures, chosen to keep the focus on the yellow pollen sacs. The final photo is a closer crop of another exposure, which emphasizes the soft texture of the petals, and the way they repel the rain.

I wish I’d been able to walk out into a garden this weekend, but dipping into these old photos, especially viewing them in the different ways suggested by multiple challenges, was also quite a treat for me. It’s also a nice way to say thanks to people who have been trying to create communities from bloggers.

Zig zag

Sometimes, on a quiet day, I’ll page through old photos. Looking at 2017 I saw quite a variety of urban architecture. Let me take you through it roughly in chronological order. The featured photo is from Chicago, looking along Chicago River from Eastside towards River Point Park. The river is a feat of engineering, its direction of flow having been reversed at the beginning of the 20th century CE, and its course straightened between 1928 and 1930. I took this photo in February of 2017.

I found an interesting contrast with the ruins of the early modern palace inside Ranthambore National Park. Situated on the banks of the Raj Bagh lake, the middle-Mughal era pleasure palace is now given over to tiger watching. I don’t have the spectacular photos that you see of tigers inside this abandoned palace. The lightly engineered lake with a palace next to it was typical of the courtly architecture of pre-colonial India. I took this photo in January.

From March of that year I have a photo of the 11th century Rajarani Temple in Bhubaneshwar. The dull yellow-red stone called Rajarani in Odiya makes this one of my favourite temples. The 18 meter tall tower has an unusual five-fold symmetry. The clusters of rounded turrets that support the central tower look quite different from the other temple spires nearby. It is said that this style resembles the temple architecture of Khajuraho.

I would like to pair the temple with the image of the 12th century Marienkirche in Berlin which I took in November. However, there is little left of this old structure. What the photo shows is the 19th century and post-war restoration in characteristic red brick. The TV tower of Alexanderplatz looms in the background. The Family and I walked around this area on a gusty and overcast evening. The sky was a muddy brown from the city lights reflecting off it.

Churches in the middle of cities are never more forlorn than in New York. On a grey October day I walked by the Presbyterian church on Fifth Avenue and took this photo of New York’s mid-town towers looming over it. Completed in 1875, the 85 meters high brownstone steeple was meant to dominate the architecture of the city. But its time came to an end within a couple of decades as the invention of steel scaffolding gave rise to the skyscrapers that now dwarf it.

Glass and steel were the fancy new building materials from the end of the nineteenth century on. The new material seemed to annihilate the difference between indoor and outdoor. You see the delight that architects took in it across Europe. A friendly example of it was the San Miguel market, built in 1916. Not only did it allow in the beautiful light of June, it was also a place where you could relax and enjoy good wines and gourmet tapas. We spent more than one afternoon here.

Before steel and glass, and concrete, took over the world, the architecture of a region would be influenced by the material available. If New York was brownstone, the Sahyadris are full of this beautiful porous rock generically called volcanic tuff. Walking about the Kaas plateau in September looking at the strange wildflowers of the region, adapted to the unhospitable thin and metal rich laterite soil, I came across this abandoned colonial era bungalow. It was built from the red tuff dug out of the plateau. The bungalow looks like it was constructed about a century ago, give or take a couple of decades, and abandoned half a century ago. The walls are perfect, and with a little work on the roof it can be easily used again.

Let me end this tour of interesting architecture with a photo from December: the early modern fort of Mehrangarh in Jodhpur. The massive stone walls from the 15th century still show the scars from cannonballs which failed to bring them down. Standing at the base of the fort wall, you can see the wonderful palace loom over you. I was curious about the material used in the palace. It turned out that it used a mixture of granite, sandstone, and brick. A sturdy base, but with light and airy rooms which can soar up. The oldest palaces and forts of India which you can still see are about five or six centuries old, and this is among the oldest.

The guy whose feet are too big

When you have a tiny little flower waiting to be photographed, why do you want to ignore it and concentrate on the tinier droplets of water on stalks in front of it? As George Mallory is famous for saying, “Because it is there.” One of my last trips with a Panasonic of many years, was to Kaas Plateau, that unique and very difficult habitat which contains some species of wildflowers not found anywhere else. I’d scratched the lens when I fell off a slippery boulder, and spent a year thinking I would replace it. Also, sensors had become better, and data buses faster, so it made sense to replace the camera.

I dug up this image because in the last few days I’ve been obsessed with figuring out how to do at least a half-way decent job with black and white photos. It is something to worry about, but I’m getting there. The plateau bursts into flower for a couple of weeks towards the end of the monsoon. I’ve never been there when the sun is out. You see marvelous (but tiny) flowers, but you are always wet. It is a job keeping your equipment dry. Doing it in a mask is one thing that I do not want to try.

Flowers of the Sahyadris

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Kaas plateau is a seven hour drive from Mumbai. The herbs flower in the closing weeks of the monsoon: between September and early October. Many of the flowers you see here are also found in the nearby Mahabaleshwar plateau and in Lonavala, closer to Mumbai. Expect lots of small herbs, few bushes and trees only rarely. Be prepared for long walks in rain and mud, with no food and water except what you carry with you.

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Flowers and herbs of the Western Ghats, especially of the Sahyadris, are now well documented. There are many guides for amateur naturalists like me. I was introduced to the pleasures of flowers by Adesh Shivkar and Mandar Khadilkar; google them if you wish. There is nothing available yet for an amateur explorer of the fascinating tiny world of mosses and lichens (see the featured photo).

Purple bladderwort

The bladderwort (called Utricularia by botanists) is the biggest family of carnivorous plants. In the Kaas plateau we saw large fields of purple bladderwort. The plant is aquatic: it floats on the thin film of water trapped above the stone of the plateau. The long stalks of the plants grow leaves at intervals. The bladders, which give the family its name, grow along the leaves and usually stay below the surface of water. Bladderworts are widely known to be carnivorous plants. Their bladders trap tiny invertebrates. I later found that this two hundred year old picture of carnivory may be wrong.

Plants turn to carnivory when the soil is poor in nutrients. However, they do not give up photosynthesis; their leaves are still green with chlorophyll. Carnivory gives the plant nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen which are in short supply in the soil. The first blow to the idea of purple bladderwort being carnivorous came from careful measurements of the animals found in the bladders. These showed that at most 1% of the nitrogen and phosphorus that the plants need can come from the animals.

Yet more amazing is that each of the bladders seemed to contain a whole live ecosystem of the small invertebrates which were trapped. New bladders did not have them, and older bladders had more animals. So it seems that the purple bladderwort is not a carnivore. It must gain something else by sustaining this ecosystem inside itself. Unfortunately no one knows yet what the plant gains from this. But it seems that the purple bladderwort (named for the purple flowers you see in these photos) may not be a carnivore.

The Karvi does not bloom any more

The purple blue flowers of topli karvi (Strobilanthes sessilis) blanketed the plateaus of Kaas and Chilkewadi in September and October of 2015 and 2016. A photo I had taken in the windmill-infested plateau of Chilkewadi last year shows the flowering bushes. Last year the weekend I spent in these high plateaus near Satara was rained out; we did not see the sun at all. This year the threatening skies remained dry, but the topli karvi was not in bloom. It blooms every eight years. The next blooming is expected in 2023. Botanists give the name “mast seeding” to synchronous flowering of many plants of the same species after intervals of several years. The Western Ghats have several species of Strobilanthes which do mast seeding.

You can see one of the round bushes of topli karvi in the foreground of the photo above. I looked closely at it. It was healthy, free of parasites and seemed to be vigorous. As far as I know, these bushes do not die after a flowering, unlike bamboo, which dies out after a mass flowering. Botanists would call the bamboo monocarpic, and the topli karvi polycarpic. Around these bushes you can see other flowers. This patch was full of flowering shoots of the common balsam (Impatiens balsamica). I’ve seen other flowering shoots poking out of the karvi bushes. But it is easy to pick them out. The topli karvi is a low round bush with dark green hairy leaves with serrated edges (see the featured photo for a closer look at the leaves).

I’ve never seen the fruit of the topli karvi, although I was told that it remains on the bush for most of a year. I’m not sure whether this information is correct. This behaviour is attributed to a different species of mast seeding Strobilanthes in a Wikipedia article: the hill karvi or the Strobilanthes callosus. I’d also seen the hill karvi flowering last year, and did not see it this year.

Two years ago The Family had taken the photo of flowers of topli karvi which you can see above. I saw a few scattered bushes in flower this year. The featured photo shows a flower bud developing. If you really want to see karvi flowers, it seems quite possible that you should be able to do this every year. It is mast flowering that you must wait for.

Why did Strobilanthes take to mast seeding, whereas other plants in the same plateaus flower each and every year? Some people say it is because of variable rainfall and heat; some years are just not conducive to flowering. Maybe so, but then other nearby plants flower every year. Some say that these plants could be responding to the weather quickly by flowering, but then the eight-year cycle would not hold, because the monsoon does not have such a predictable cycle. A third set of people say that the karvi has this long cycle because it is synchronized to the long cycle of a pollinator. I haven’t seen a study of the pollinators of the karvi, and in any case this just shifts the problem on to another species. Why would the pollinating species have a long cycle? Since I have not seen the fruit of karvi, I do not know whether this has such large seeds that it is inefficient for the plant to seed every year. Could it be, as some believe, that synchronized seeding serves to produce such a large amount of fruit or seed that animals which eat these cannot possibly eat all the fruits or seeds produced in a mast seeding year? I guess someone has to study the animals which feed on karvi to find out.

Although the topli karvi grows widely, it is a mysterious plant. This is a mystery which I will not be able to solve. The solution will come from a younger person who can see it go through several cycles of bloom and fruit.

Sundews

The carnivorous sundew which you see in the featured photo is properly called the Drosera burmanii or Burman’s sundew. It is mistakenly called Burmese sundew sometimes. The story behind the name took me back to the origins of modern biology. It was described in detail in a book by the Dutch physician Johannes Burman, who spent a few years in Sri Lanka. His assistant in the production of this book, called Thesaurus Zeylanicus, was Carl Linnaeus. This was 1735, and Linnaeus had just published his own book, the Systema Naturae, which was to change the world by inventing a new way of naming all living creatures. Linnaeus’ naming system is the one all biologists and amateur naturalists follow. Darwin, in his book Insectivoruous Plants, remarked on the common trapping mechanism through the sticky “dew” which you can see in the photo, and classified all sundews into one family, which is still called the Droceraceae.

Darwin was a wonderful naturalist and asked most of the questions which keep drocerologists busy till today. Are the sundews selective about their prey? In the nearly three centuries that have passed since the first descriptions of sundews, all evidence indicates that they are generalized carnivores. They feed on whatever gets stuck in their dewy glue. How large can their prey be? Darwin believed that they feed on fairly small animals. Strangely, there have been no measurements of their prey since 1925; and that was the first one since Darwin himself. So, if you happen to take photos of any sundew with its prey, you will add substantially to the sum total of human knowledge. I scanned about 20 plants quickly, and if they had captured prey, then they were too small for me to see with my unaided eye (the photo here shows a small insect stuck to the plant). Are all carnivorous plants related? Fossils and genetic data seem to say that carnivorous plants evolved six times independently from completely different origins; so the bladderworts and sundews that I saw were not related.

A question that Darwin never asked is why a plant would turn from photosynthesis to carnivory. The general observation that these plants grow in nutrient-poor soil was taken as enough of an answer. However, there are other entirely photosynthetic plants which grow all around the sundew, so this is not a complete answer. Studies show that carnivorous plants grow and spread better once they get enough prey. Notice the bits of green on the leaves of the D. burmanii? These contain the usual chlorophyll that allow plants to use sunlight to make sugar. The density of spiny hairs is much smaller on this portion than in the red part of the leaves. So they also do photosynthesis, but they are less efficient at it. The complete story of carnivory versus photosynthesis is not yet known.

In the same patch of ground where I took the other photos, I also saw several flowering specimens of Drosera indica (one example in the photo above). This was first named by Linnaeus in 1753 based on a drawing of a plant collected in Sri Lanka. A field study in 2013 by Allen Lawrie found that there are actually 11 different species which were conflated into the single species D. indica. Are there several unrecognized species hiding behind this one label in India? I do not know the answer.

While we talk about names, you will notice that I have called these plants carnivorous instead of following Darwin and calling them insectivorous. This is because detailed counts of prey species indicate that sundews feed on anything the right size, without specializing in insects. I’ll not say much more about D. indica because I’ve already written about it in another post.

Are D. burmanii and D. indica in competition when they grow in the same patch of ground? Studies of prey captured by other carnivorous plants which grow together show that they capture the same species, and so may be considered as competing. I know of no studies of prey species among the sundews of the Sahyadris, but there is no reason to believe that they are exceptions. In that case the spreading stalks of the indica with their larger numbers of leaves possibly give it a photosynthetic edge. Maybe that is why they are more common. I wish I knew a professional ecologist who could answer these questions.

Dipcadi

“What’s that flower?” The Family asked me as I was stalking a Ceropegia. I looked around at the pentagonal white shapes on a stalk that was about 20 centimeters high. “I don’t know”, I said, as I took a photo for later reference. She soon found that it was not a flower. A flower has sexual organs, and this did not have any. Mandar explained that it was the opened fruit of the Dipcadi montanum. I’d posted about this plant from the Hyacinth family last year after a single sighting.

This year I’d seen it several times. In fact just a few minutes before I’d seen another stalk which had started fruiting. You can see the fruit towards of the bottom of the stalk in the photo here: a dark green knob. The chance sighting I had last year was of the D. montanum plant standing in a field of bladderwort (Utricularia). Each sighting this year showed the same thing. In fact, the purple spots which you see in the featured photo are purple bladderwort. The linkage between the two just got stronger in my mind because of this statistical improvement. Typically the bladderwort grows in poor soil, and gets nourishment from digesting small insects. There is evidence of a rich ecosystem which grows inside the bladder. Does this ecosystem produce benefits to the thin soil around it which are reaped by the bulbs of the Dipcadi? I don’t see anything written about it.

I got a sharp photo (above) of a flowering Dipcadi on the nearby lateritic plateau of Chilkewadi. The spots of white that you see in the photo are of globular pipewort (Eriocaulon sedgewickii). These are known to grow in association with bladderwort. In fact the field had some, although they do not appear in the photo. The triple association of Dipcadi, bladderwort and pipewort is very strong, and cries out for an explanation.

The rarest flower

The genus of plants called Ceropegia are pollinated in a very strange way, The Family explained to me. After her first trip to Kaas plateau two years ago, she showed me photos of this strange flower and explained how they trap flies to pollinate themselves. The upright flower opens up and flies come in to look for nectar. As soon as they land, the petals close into the cage shape you see in the featured photo. The frantic fly buzzes about and pollinates the flower. After this the flower droops down and opens up to let the insect out. In the bunch of Ceropegia vincaefolia that you see in the featured photo, two of the flowers are ready, and the droopy one has been pollinated already. These tall bushes were fairly common around the Kaas lake. Apart from the mode of pollination, I found the green colour of the petals rather unusual.

But the most marvelous sight of the trip was this tiny plant on the plateau: Ceropegia jainii. I was lucky to be with two naturalists who knew roughly where to look. This species is a little rarer than tigers. In the photo you see the green egg-shaped base called the crown kettle, and the purple crown tube formed by the five petals. If you look closely, you will see the downward pointing hairs inside the tube which trap the fly. If this flower is similar to that of the C. vincaefolia, then at the narrow bottom of the crown kettle is the hard-to-reach corolla. I was not going to dissect such a rare flower to look inside it. The whole flower is a little less than two centimeters long. You can see that it grows on an unbranched stalk with thick leaves. In the photo above you can see other buds forming on the stalk.

I was so thrilled with the sight that I noticed the caterpillar only after looking at the photo. It will eventually grow into the spectacularly coloured butterfly called the plain tiger (Danaus chrysippus). I don’t know whether there is an association between this and C. jainii. Since host plants of the plain tiger include other known milkweeds (family Asclepiadoideae) it is not impossible. On the other hand, I did not see the typical circular holes that the caterpillar makes in the leaves of its host plant. In any case, this is something to watch for in future.

Show and tell: the geology of Kaas

The region of the Western ghats around Satara and Pune are full of large plateaus and oddly shaped peaks. When you travel through them, the first impression you have of the mountains is that they look like a layered cake. I stood at the Thosegarh waterfall (featured photo) and found that even the monsoon-fed vegetation could not hide this appearance. The layers are a succession of lava flows, laid down in a massive burst of volcanism 60 to 100 million years ago. These successive layers of lava are called the Deccan traps. I found it hard to estimate the thickness of the layers by eye, but going by the heights of trees, perhaps they are between 50 and 100 feet thick. Since each layer of lava covers a considerable area, this means that each burst of volcanism would have lasted long and spewed out immense amounts of rock and ash. Not only would this have killed all life where it flowed, it would have dimmed the sunlight reaching the earth, and contributed to a mass dying of vegetation around the world.

In the 60 million years since it contributed to killing off dinosaurs, the traps have weathered. Today we see them as flat topped hills, cut through by deeply eroded valleys. Some of the waterfalls lead down to rapids extremely suitable for white water rafting. In other places there are very wide valleys. The town of Satara, which you see in the photo above, lies in the extreme western end of the rain-shadowed region of the Deccan. As a result it gets sporadic monsoon rains, enough to keep it green. The urban sprawl gets its drinking water from the river Umboli, which arises in the Kaas plateau, about 25 kilometers away. Traveling in this area, I saw many high plateaus. At one point each of them must have been home to the variety of flowering herbs and bushes whose diversity is now mainly visible in Kaas.

When you reach the top of one of these plateaus you see exposed rock everywhere. This is the volcanic rock called laterite, formed by weathering of the traps. You can see the dark porous rock peeping out from the low cover in the photo of the Kaas plateau above. There is hardly any soil. What little there is forms in little depressions in the rock. This area is covered by tiny herbs: mainly the carnivorous bladderwort (Utricularia) and sundew (Drosera) species, and tiny coexisting herbs. Between such rocky outcrops, there are deeper fissures where a little more soil can collect. There are higher bushes such as the Topli Karvi and arrowroot. There are very few trees on the plateau. What little soil forms is constantly removed by rain and wind. It is a marginal environment where extremely specialized plants grow. Twenty meters below the top, soil can accumulate, and the vegetation changes quite dramatically. It becomes characteristic of the rest of the Sahyadris. As a result, these high plateaus are like islands: the flora of each plateau is isolated from those of its neighbours.

When you walk through the Kaas plateau your eyes take in the evidence that geology determines ecology, that life is shaped by the land.