Jalpipari

Monocots abound. They may be only a quarter of all flowering species of plants, but that’s still a huge number of species. The striking blue petals of this dayflower (Commelina clavata, Jalpipari, of the family Commelinaceae) was actually what attracted my attention when I ambled past the rice fields outside the village of Pargaon. not far from the Pimpalgaon Joge Dam in Pune district of Maharashtra. The centimeter sized flowers were trimerous: three petals, three stamens with yellow anthers, and three stamenoids (false stamens). The pistil was below the anthers. The leaves were smooth and lance shaped,

PoWO lists the range to be in Sri Lanka and India, stopping west of Assam, then jumping to Myanmar, skipping Thailand to appear in Malayasia and then on the islands of Java and Sumatra. These geographical gaps must arise because of inadequate reporting. I’m pretty sure that this plant grows on the berms of rice fields in Bangladesh, Assam, other states of the north-eastern India, as well as in Thailand. Many of the dayflowers have edible leaves, and I read reports that the leaves of Jalpipari are eaten in southern Africa (where it must also grow). I wish I knew that. I would have tried to get a few of these plants home to grow in our balcony herb garden.

This note is added later in the day. I took a look at photos that I took during a walk in Nameri national park on 5 November, 2015, and came across this photo. It is clearly a photo of Commelina clavata in flower. Nameri in in Assam, and rather far east of the West Bengal border, being right at the border with Arunachal Pradesh. The national park is part of a larger protected ecosphere as the Pakke Wildlife Sanctuary of Arunachal. This observation therefore extends the range of C. clavata almost all the way to the eastern border of India. It may be just a matter of time before the gaps in PoWO’s range map are filled in.

Dayflower

Dayflowers (family Commelinaceae) should be easily identified you think. They have only three petals, and all three-petalled flowers are monocots. But sometimes four petals are fused into three. You need to count how many stamens there are: multiples of three or not. Once you have got to monocots, you have cut out three quarters of all flowering plants, and identification should be straightforward. There are only about 60,000 plants remaining to choose from. But it is easier to recognize dayflowers from their false stamens, the staminodes. These are the three stems bearing what look like minute white flowers in the middle of the flower in the featured photo. The stamens bear the purple pollen sacs that you see. The flower is about half a centimeter across, and, since it lacks a pistil is male. I don’t have a photo of the female flower. If you look carefully, you’ll see a tangle of filaments near the center of the flower. I wonder what purpose they serve.

I made life harder for myself by not examining the plant carefully when it was in front of me. I was misled by the leaves of a pea-like plant through which the bare flowering stem arose. Eventually I found a photo in which the plant was visible in the background. From that I found that the stem probably lies along the ground, and sends up an erect branch bearing a few buds. The lower leaves are lance-shaped, about 2 to 4 cms long. Unfortunately, I can’t see what the upper leaves (along the flowering stem) look like. Still, there is enough evidence that this plant is Murdannia spirata. I found it in a ditch near a rice field, which agrees with observations that the species likes wet fields. PoWO lists its range as encompassing India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, southern China, Vietnam, and across the sea in Taiwan, and parts of the Philippines and some parts of Java. It has also been introduced to Florida, where it seems to thrive. I have not been able to find its name in Marathi, which perhaps indicates that it is not very common in the Sahyadris.

I was glad I found the little anecdote about the genus Murdannia being named after Murdan Ali, who was the keeper of the herbarium at Saharanpur in the mid-19th century CE. He is said to have compiled a checklist of plants of Western UP in Hindi which was unpublished and is now presumed to be lost. Nothing else seems to be known about him. Botany and plants do not seem to catch public imagination, although pharmacology would be a non-starter without it.