Flower in Ulysses: Stuck in the Middle

In honor of Bloomsday, June 16

IV.

The morning of December 16, 2004 is cold. Henry Flower sees this through his kitchen window, pausing in the middle of scrambling breakfast for his wife Moira, who was still in bed: a bright clear blue through the trees, though it was only 8 a.m. Still, implacable, its substance invisible, Flower stares at one thing (nothing) and thinks of another (subject).

The yolks, an uncomfortable color, saturated ochre against the inverted bowl of a Scandinavian sky stare up at him, he a reflection hanging over a viscous pool. Caught between action and decision, the fact of thought arriving just before its content, Flower does not beat the eggs. They cannot be unbeaten and, if beaten twice after an interval, may not be the same. The meal still unmade will not be complete; it lacks flesh.

V.

On Main Street in Trumansburg heading for the P.O., Flower crosses the eponymous creek and passes the café. He does not stop in now and recalls the mornings past when all he wanted was a cup and no protracted interaction, and bought it at a service station instead.

VI.

His unread letter in his pocket, Flower, his hat pulled down around his ears, pauses before the millstone memorial. It begins to snow. Down the hill Flower sees a bent figure limping toward him through the white air: his tricorn bound down, his overcoat clutched before him: Abner Treman, long dead, returning home shy one foot.

VII.

At the Free Press Flower stares at the reflection of the front page in the window and recalls the smell of Hassidic boys hunched over their texts on the northbound A train. But for the grace of circumstance, therewent he.
In the office he places a classified ad that reads simply, “Help wanted,” with his number. A young man drops off a letter to the editor that he did not write. Flower will see to him later.

VIII.

In the Falls restaurant Flowers eats a silent meal alone and thinks about the earlier, happier days of his marriage. On his way in, Neely Blynn, an old flame, went by him and said, “Hello, Henry” without a trace of rancor. Last month he returned home to find his wife, an actress, had gone away on tour. She had left a note on their bed and he had never found it, having slept on the couch in the living room the entire time she had been away.

IX.

Feeling strangely expansive after drinking three Yuenglings in the Falls taproom, Flower regales fellow patrons with his interpretation of the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man as a retelling of the Grail quest. His interlocutors are divided between puzzlement and disinterest.

X.

Neely Blynn encounters the ghost of Abner Treman on East Main and in the snow mistakes him for a tramp. She presses three dollar bills into his chapped fingers. He stares at the portraits of his former commanding officer and then moves off toward the warm café.

XI.

While eating a plate of fries in the Pourhouse, Flower watches his wife’s tour manager make his stolid way across Main, his figure blurred by fogged glass and flaked air. Flower knows the terminus of Malloy’s excursion and smiles wanly as the fiddler in the corner makes his way through “Rockin’ the Cradle.”

XII.

As the evening darkens, the Pourhouse fills with well-known faces and opinions. Flower finds that he is listening to an attack on his plan for peace in the Middle East. His companion, his good eye rimmed red with exhaustion, is loudly insisting that the Palestinians have every right to every acre, and he will not hear Flower’s “perverted thoughts” on finding a reasonable compromise between European and Near Eastern traditions of land use.

XIII.

The young woman next to him is leaning forward as if she would like to hear words that he is not speaking. This provides a view of which she seems proud. Flower looks up at the silent television. He sees footage of a hummingbird suspended before a conical corolla, its beak plunged inside, and he smiles.

XIV.

At the home birth of his niece Flower thought it possible that she would learn to speak by making every sound every generation before her had uttered and then just join them together when she was ready to be understood.

XV.

Flower is standing outside, where the wind and snow have stopped, looking up at the stars.
Flower:     I see shapes that I’m not supposed to see. Look there’s Moira. She doesn’t look happy.
Moira:     What ever happened to my breakfast? What ever happened to you? You just disappeared … about 10 years ago.
To escape the speaking sky Flower ducks into a doorway and up the stairwell to sound of a party. Once inside he spies the young man from the newspaper office and makes for him.
Flower:    Didn’t I see you earlier today?
Daniel Icarus: I believe you saw right through me, sir. I now I am looking right through you. What of it?

Big Friendly Flowers

Sunflowers are impressively large. They are probably one of the few flowers–hollyhocks being another–that can frequently be taller than you are–sometimes much taller. These members of the aster family are fast-growing annuals and perennials; some of them can reach 15 feet.

If you are used to seeing sunflowers growing in rows or bunches at the back of flowerbeds, then it is a bit of a shock to see fields of them stretching away into the distance when you first stumble upon a commercial planting of them. Sunflowers (Helianthus annus) were cultivated first by the tribal peoples of the Great Plains.

Helianthus annus

Lewis and Clark wrote of seeing them growing and in use. Archeological evidence indicates they were domesticated and subjected to selective breeding for over 5000 years. Early Spanish explorers of the Great Plains brought the seeds back to the Old World where they became a commercially cultivated crop, initially in Russia, and then throughout Europe. By the early 19th century, as Lewis and Clark walked across the northern Great Plains, witnessing the aboriginal cultivation and use of the plant on its native ground, commercial cultivation in Russia was reaching 2 million acres.

For the first several hundred years of its European sojourn the sunflower was largely grown as an ornamental. In 1716 an English patent was approved for the extraction of oil from the seeds. By the late 18th century commercial cultivation for oil production was in full swing. In addition, to oil production though, another variety was grown for direct consumption of the seeds.

In the late 19th century the sunflower returned to the US from Russia as a commercial crop. The Canadian government took the sunflower quite seriously and began a breeding program in 1930. Through the 20th century the popularity of sunflower oil increased and consequently so did the amount of acreage under cultivation, spreading down from Canada into Minnesota and North Dakota.

The first place that I can recall seeing sunflowers grown commercially was in Germany. In addition to sunflower oil, the Germans are quite fond of grinding up sunflower seeds into a meal and adding it to bread.

Commercial growing

The German fondness for incorporating sunflower meal into bread as spread over the decades into neighboring European countries and is not unknown in the United States.

The mammoth nodding heads of sunflowers (which, most people know, get their name from their heliotropic habit) are not actually single flowers at all. In fact, each ostensible “flower” is composed of two types of blossom. Each apparent petal is actually a single sterile “ray flower,” the primary of which is to collectively attract insects and other pollinators. The “disk flowers,” which fill the region inside the ring of ray flowers are the sexual organs of the plant. Each tiny flower holds both male (anthers) and female (pistil) organs.

Although they contain both genders, sunflowers are self-sterile; the pollen of a given plant needs to be transported to another plant in order for fertilization to take place. In other words, if you wish to your own sunflowers to breed true to variety, you have to grow them several miles from other varieties in order to produce seed that will produce plants that resemble the previous generation. As this sort of geographical isolation is unlikely, you are better off doing the pollination manually.

Manual pollination is done by first insuring that no insect pollination can take place by¬–just before the disk flowers open–covering the selected flower heads with a bag made of porous material (air should circulate and moisture be allowed to escape in order to avoid mold). After the flowers open and the anthers have emerged, you can brush the pollen off of them into a plastic bag with a paintbrush. Take this pollen to a second plant, dust the pollen off the anthers of that plant into a second bag, and then brush the pollen from the first plant onto the pistils of the second. Repeat the pollen transfer process, brushing the pollen from the second plant onto the flower of the first.

After the Flowers Are Gone

Metal vase from India

Sure. The flowers are the primary attraction in a flower arrangement, but the vase is not exactly beside the point. A florist will, of course, supply you with a vase when you purchase an arrangement, but is it likely to be (1) particularly distinctive, (2) your taste, or (3) something the recipient will want to keep?

Vases can be made out of ceramic, glass, plastic, or metal, although the last will be prone to oxidation and may supply ions to the water that are harmful to the flowers.

Ceramic vases can be either mass-produced or handmade. With a little planning a gift-giver could even commission a local potter to throw a vase for a particular occasion. After the flower arrangement withers, the vase is a lasting memento of the occasion.

Patronizing your local potters is also good for the regional economy. You will likely have to spend more money than you would simply purchasing a ceramic vase off of the shelf in a store, but the object will be a unique one if it comes from the hands of an artisan.

You may be surprised by how many potters you find in your area, if you start to look for them. In the small village where I live we have Cold Springs Pottery and Salmon Pottery.

Alex Solla's pottery

Alex Solla of Cold Springs Pottery makes pots coated in deep saturated glazes that are reminiscent of Fiesta pottery of the 1920s and ‘30s. These bright, intense colors may be reflective of his Miami youth.

Mary Ellen Salmon coincidentally moved to Trumansburg from south Florida and, in addition to throwing her own pots, has taken on the managerial task of gathering together the work of other artists—including Solla—in the gallery adjacent to her studio.

Mary Ellen Salmon's pots

Salmon also teaches people to throw pots, which makes the point that you don’t even have to purchase the vase that you are going to send your flowers in: you can make it yourself. But then that would be the kind of planning that is pretty rare these days.

Glass vases that are made locally would be a little bit harder to come by, but here in the Finger Lakes region it is not out of the question because of the presence of the Corning corporation, its Museum of Glass, and its subsidiary Steuben Glass. In addition to the influence of Corning, the Finger Lakes region is home to at least one independent glass artist: Christian Thirion, whose studio is in Watkins Glen. As with pottery, buying a handcrafted glass vase will be a tad more expensive than getting one off the shelf, but art glass is, if anything, more exotic than hand-thrown pottery and likely to be an appreciated accompaniment to your gift of flowers.

Bakelite beakers

Plastic flower vases don’t have to be as bad as it sounds. Plastic has been around far longer than we tend to think. The first plastic was called Parkesine—it was invented by Alexander Parkes of Birmingham, England—was developed in 1862. But the earliest plastic you are likely to find—and you will have to cruise your local antique stores—is Bakelite, which was the first plastic developed from a synthetic polymer. It appeared in 1909, originating in the Yonkers laboratory of Belgian-born Leo Hendrik Baekeland. During the 1920s and ‘30s many household items were made from Bakelite and the material now has an established ‘retro appeal’.

Virtually any container can be used as a vase. The essential criteria are that it stand upright and that it holds water. Earlier this month (May 2009) the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on the campus of Cornell University featured an exhibit of flower arrangements—created by the Garden Club of Ithaca—paired with paintings. Some of the pairings involve a flower arrangement that is simply similar to the one in the painting. Many of the arrangements, however, have a more oblique relationship to their fellow works of art. The vases that support the arrangements are often as not as interesting and original as the flowers themselves.

Two Celandines and a Swallow

Greater and lesser celandine are not particularly closely related; their shared common name seems based solely on similar colored flowers. The greater variety is also known as the celandine poppy (Chelidonium majus) and, indeed, is a member of the Papaveraceae, or poppy, family. The lesser variety is sometimes called figwort (Ranunculus ficaria) and is a member of the Ranunculaceae, or buttercup, family. The species are only distantly related, as both families are part of the order Ranunculales.

Greater celandine

Both of these Old World taxa have been introduced to the North America as ornamentals and have escaped into the wild to become invasive species. Lesser celandine is particularly troublesome, as it emerges very early in the spring (late February to March in some areas), before native spring wildflowers and quickly forms continuous carpets of vegetation above the ground and mats of roots and tubers below ground.

Three years ago we received a load of mulch free of charge from the village government. The department of public works collects brush, wood, and bags of weeds from the curb and chips it, creating large steaming piles of mulch down near the sewage treatment plant. Thinking it would be great to have free mulch for our flowerbeds we ordered a load and spread it around the property.

It was apparently full of lesser celandine tubers and the following spring there were large patches of the plant in several locations around the yard. Initially we were charmed by the glossy leaves and bright, cheerful yellow flowers, but the following year we noticed that it had expanded its coverage greatly and began to take steps to rid our of nascent meadow garden of this invasive pest.

Lesser celandine

Lesser celandine is an ephemeral, which is to say that after it finishes in flowering the vegetation withers and dies back, coming back the following spring from the roots using energy stored in its tubers. Because it flowers before many bees are active the plant has an alternative method of spreading, producing bulbils on its stems, which fall to the ground after the plant flowers and sprout to form new plants. It also spreads vegetative by sprouting new plants from its root mass.

Two methods are recommended to rid your property of this pernicious plant. Small patches should be dug up with a trowel or small shovel, making sure to get all the roots and tubers. Larger infestations can be treated with glyphosate-based herbicides (e.g., Monsanto’s RoundUp). Because the plant emerges before native plants, the herbicide can be applied to kill it without harming other species in the same area.

Greater celandine is also regarded as an invasive in some areas, but does not seem to be as aggravating as its lesser cousin. Much has been written about this plant in alternative medicine circles because of its reputed curative qualities. Botanists consider all parts of the plants to be generally poisonous, but, as is often the case, herbalists and other medical maven outside the mainstream consider small doses of the poisonous isoquinoline alkaloids to be beneficial for curing everything from an upset stomach to cancer.

The plant also exudes a yellowish sap or latex when it is broken open. This substance has been traditionally used on small wounds to sterilize and heal them, although handling the plant can cause mild dermatitis.

The common name of both of these species, “celandine,” is derived from the Old English celidoine, which through Old French and medieval Latin, is sourced to the Greek word khelidon or “swallow”. Although there are many species of hirundine bird in Europe, generally only one of them is called “swallow,” the others being referred to as various types of martin. Hirundo rustica is often called the European swallow, but is a Holarctic species; the same taxon in North America is called the barn swallow. It is the only North American or European species with an actual swallow-tail, which is to say, very deeply forked.

European swallow

European swallows migrate to sub-Saharan Africa each winter, some of them traveling all the way from the United Kingdom to South Africa. The greater celandine was so-named because it begins to flower when the swallows begin to arrive in southern Europe and stops flowering when they depart in the fall. Its other vernacular name is “swallow-wort,” wort being the general Old English name for “plant”.

Meditation on Oleander

Born a little soon, raised on too much moon,

learned to get by on “Leave me alone.”

Be the restless one, be the burning son.

Then you filled your hands with oleander and

all the strippings of pride gone astray.

All that secret work, all those pretty words

that still don’t hold you

Now you spend your days in the dappled rays

of his love like a fern in the shade.

In a world of green no one’s ever seen

and oh it holds you.

Nerium oleander

“Oleander” is a song on Kris Delmhorst’s new album, Shotgun Singer, that she apparently recorded entirely on her own in a friend’s house up in the Berkshires. It is a delicate and dark piece of chamber pop; the melody is spare, with space between the notes, but the overall effect is claustrophobic. The cello largely carries the melody, but a piano contributes strategically placed single notes and an effects-laden guitar adds a repeated phrase.

She sings very close to the microphone, very quietly, so that the breath of the room itself is part of the delivery. The music makes clear the ambivalence of the lyrics. In three short stanzas Delmhorst describes a transition in someone’s life, a change that takes place after filling one’s hands with oleander.

Oleander is generally accepted as being one of the most poisonous plants known. All parts of the plant are full of toxins and even touching it can produce a rash. Eating it can be deadly. On the other hand, the alternative medicine community considers extracts of oleander to have healing properties.

Oleander in a market place

Nerium oleander is a shrub that grows in dry river washes from Spain and Morrocco through the Mediterranean and into south Asia. It’s large range and its reputation as a source of toxins have brought it to the attention of people wherever it is found and it has many names (rosa de jardin, laurier rose, zakhum, arali).

The name used in English seems to be derived from its tendency to exude an oil (oleo) from its trunk. The flowers have a fringed corolla and appear at the ends of the branches in clusters. There are many different color varieties within the species and these have been exploited to produce over 400 cultivars. The shrub is frequently planted as an ornamental, in part because of its flowers and also because deer will not eat it (the toxins affect many species other than humans).

In A.D. 77 Pliny the Elder claimed that oleander extract mixed with wine was an effective snakebite cure. In the 1960s Turkish doctor, Huseyin Ziya Ozel, discovered that villagers in hill towns used an extract of oleander to treat wounds. He then developed a purported remedy for cancer using an extraction from the plant. This concoction, called Anvirzel, has been marketed in several countries outside the United States, but, because it is marketed as a drug rather than a supplement, it is subject to regulation by the FDA and it is therefore unlikely to be marketed legally in this country any time soon.

Mainstream sources of information, including the International Oleander Society, tend to stress the toxicity of the plant, while alternative medicine and other New Age sources of information promulgate the curative properties of extracts from the plant. It is this ambiguity that makes Delmhorst’s “Oleander” so enigmatic.

Kris Delmhorst

The imagery of the first stanza—“born a little soon, raised on too much moon”—has a New Age feel to it. The image of the “burning son” is also a trick because unless you see it written, you would not know whether she meant “sun” or “son”. You would therefore not not be sure whether the protoganist is male or female, or the nature of the implied relationship in the third stanza.

The transformation wrought by the gathering of oleander and “all the strippings of pride gone astray” is a life spent in the “dappled rays of his love like a fern in the shade,” which is not exactly a triumphant outcome. Is this sheltered life an improvement? Who is he? And what, indeed, “holds you”?

And because you do not know, you want to hear it again … and again—like an event in your own life that changed everything, and you are still not sure how. So you keep turning it over and over in your mind, wondering if, like oleander, it was a cure or a poison.

Beautiful Filler

G. paniculata

Baby’s breath (Gypsophila) is one of the most popular “fillers” for cut flower arrangements. After you tell the florist that you would like a dozen roses, or six lilies, or any mixed bouquet, they will generally set off the blossoms that you actually asked for with sprays of small white flowers and greenery. Quite often those small white flowers will be baby’s breath.

Although the genus is native to the Old World (Europe, Asia and North Africa), Gypsophila paniculata has been introduced to the United States and is found throughout the eastern half of the country, sometimes becoming invasive. Planting Gypsophila may be prohibited in some areas because of its invasive tendencies, so it would be best inquire with the Soil Conservation Service or the state environmental agency before adding it to your garden.

The genus name means “chalk lover,” and the plant prefers mildly basic, calcium-rich soils. Gypsum is calcium sulfate (CaSO4 • 2H2O), but a more common calcium-rich mineral is calcite (CaCO3), the principal mineral of limestones. Chalk is a form of limestone, generally composed of microscopic fossils.

G. muralis

The genus is a member of the family Caryophyllaceae, which also includes the pinks and the carnations. There are both perennial and annual species. “Common gypsophila” (G. paniculata) is a perennial species native to eastern Europe, but commercially grown in the United Kingdom, Israel, and the Netherlands. It grows to be 24 to 36 inches in height and the flowers are single (five petals). (Several species and many cultivars have doubled petals.) G. muralis, an annual, is one of the European species that has been naturalized to the United States. Another annual, G. elegans (showy baby’s breath), is often included in “wild flower” seed mixtures and has consequently been widely introduced across North America.

Gypsophila prefers full sun and light, well-drained soils. It can be planted as seed in the fall in (U.S.D.A. Plant Hardiness) Zones 7 and 8, but in colder areas it should be sown in the spring. If seedlings are planted, they can be put in the ground about a month before the last frost. They should be planted about eight inches apart; baby’s breath flowers better when it is a bit crowded.

Once they are established they need little care. When the flowers are removed for use in arrangements, the plant (especially the annual species), will blossom with renewed vigor. The plants don’t even need to be deadheaded. All varieties, both perennial and annual, die back to the ground after the frost hits them. The perennials will come back from their roots, while the annuals will have seeded themselves for the next year.

Baby’s breath is also a good dried plant. Whether you take it from your own garden or preserve the “filler” from a florist’s arrangement, simply hang it upside down in a warm, dry place. Once dried, the flower and leaves of baby’s breath look almost as vital as when they are fresh.

Gypsophila has been cultivated since 1759 in England, so it’s use by florists has a long pedigree. In the 1990s, it began to fall out of fashion as a filler, but it has recently staged a surprising revival. It has become trendy among “celebrity florists” and other trendsetters to create bouquets that consist of baby’s breath and a little foliage and nothing else.

Although “baby’s breath” is the most widespread common name for Gypsophila (and usually refers to G. paniculata), florists have many other pet names for the plant, include “gyp,” “gypsy,” “million star,” and “diamond spray.” These names tend to vary regionally. In the UK the wild plant is referred to as “soap wort,” not to be confused with the Saponaria species of southern Europe, which go by the same common name.

Dating With Lichens

Lichen-encrusted tombstone

A visit to an old graveyard, particularly one that has not been cared for, will generally reveal tombstones covered in lichens. Lichens are composite organisms; they are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a green alga (or a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides the physical infrastructure and the algae do photosynthetic duty to supply sugars. The lichen takes a form that resembles neither the fungus nor the alga with the symbiotic partners interpenetrating each other to create a life-form that resembles a primitive plant.

Lichens grow on tombstones because they are adapted to colonizing very dry environments that have very little in the way of nutrients available. They are found on barren rock right up into the polar regions, where the extreme cold adds an additional challenge. In better-maintained cemeteries, the lichens are generally scraped off because they soon begin to obscure the engraving on the stone. In addition, the lichens also chemical degrade the surfaces to which they cling, breaking down the rock into its constituent minerals.

"Spanish moss"

Lichens have many different habits, but most fall into three categories: crustose, foliose or fructiose. The most well-known fructiose variety is probably the misnamed “Spanish moss,” which grows in great bedraggled mats from live oaks in the Deep South. Foliose species are characterized by having leaf-like sheets, often arranged in a rosette pattern. Crustose lichens may look almost painted on to the surface where they are growing or resemble a gray-green stubble.

Austrian botanist Roland Beschel developed lichenometry in the 1950s. He was looking for a method of dating glacial moraines in Alpine valleys. These linear piles of boulders, gravel and sand stretched across the valleys, marking the location where a glacier had advanced and then remained, its rate of advance equaling the rate at which it was melting back. Eventually the rate of melting exceeded the rate of advance and the glacier retreated up the valley. Some valleys in the Alps have a whole series of these moraines with the older ones (furthest down the valley) having been deposited before the beginning of written records. Crustose lichens are the slowest growing lichens and they often grow in regular circles and are therefore relatively easy to measure.

Roland Beschel

Beschel measured the diameters of crustose lichens that were growing on stone surfaces that could be dated independently. This includes tombstones, as well as very old buildings and bridges for which there are either dated cornerstones or written records for their date of construction. In this way, Beschel established a relationship between the increasing diameter of the lichen and the increasing age of the structure on which it grew. He allowed for a period of approximately a decade between the erection of the structure and the commencement of lichen growth. The next step was to find and measure lichens on rocks that were part of the valley moraines.

Many of these moraines were deposited during the so-called Little Ice Age, which came and went episodically from the Renaissance (15th century) through the 19th century. Beschel could measure the diameter of lichens on these natural landforms and then back-calculate at age for them through the curves that he had derived using the man-made structures covered with lichens. In the 60 years since Beschel first published the technique it has been used throughout the world to date Holocene landforms that were too young to date reliably with radiocarbon and too old to date reliably using historical records.

Circular lichens

Lichens grow most slowly in the most northern (or southern climate), so the utility of lichenometry is greatest in the polar and subpolar regions. Anyone who wishes to date stone walls, foundations, or other stone structures that have been abandoned and have become encrusted with lichens, needs only to create an age-diameter curve using local dated surfaces like tombstones. It is important to create a age-diameter relationship locally because the rate of lichen growth will vary regionally, giving a different slope to the curve in different locations.

Hypoallergenic Flowers

“Horticulturalist Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping, found that allergenic plants are often favored by landscapers: ‘School after school is landscaped with the most allergenic plants possible. Even at hospitals I see landscaping so explosively allergenic that it makes me shudder.’” (www.achooallergy.com)

Male flower is on the right

Some allergy-sufferers, fearing a reaction, decline to have flowers in their homes or to visit gardens (let alone do the gardening themselves). Pollen is the vector that aggravates the immune system. Ogren points out that landscapers tend to plant male plants (which produce the pollen) because they do not produce fruit, which then has to be cleaned up … by the landscaper. Species that have male and female flowers on separate plants are referred to as dioecious, literally “two houses.” So, for the allergenic person, one option to plant only female plants in their own gardens and harvest only female plants to bring indoors as cut flowers. It also be noted that not all pollen is created equal. Pollen grains are disseminated by many different means.

Bat at a flower

Many people will have seen the dramatic stop-action films of bats sipping nectar from tropical flowers and emerging with a snout covered in yellow dust, which they then transport to the next flower. Some birds also carry out this task, as do myriad insects in addition to bees. Pollen grains that are transported this way tend to be larger and cannot be carried far in the air. They are much less likely to make their way to a human nasal passage from the flower, and therefore not an appreciable hazard to the pollen-allergic. This article at achooallergy.com includes a list of plants that may be safely planted and another (longer) list of plants to avoid. It also lists a number of steps that the allergenic can take to minimize exposure to pollen.

Dahloan Hembre, a Florida resident, was diagnosed with pollen allergies, particularly to oaks and her progressive-minded allergist suggested that she alter the landscaping around her house to reduce the number of allergens present. This meant taking down a beautiful old oak and a pecan, and removing several shrubs. The oak was replaced by a dogwood and the shrubs by azaleas. Her flower beds filled up with snapdragons and daisies. In other words, hypoallergenic does not mean boring or ugly.

Spray roses

When it comes to sending cut flowers to the allergenic there is also no need to panic. Many quite standard-issue choices are not aggravating to the immune system. For example, roses, especially those that are still tightly budded, are a safe choice. Spray roses are better than long-stemmed roses. In the aster family, dahlias and chrysanthemums are generally not an irritant. In lilies the pollen-bearing anthers are so large and singular that they can be removed, so that the allergen never makes it out of the florist shop. Many florists will fill out an arrangement with baby’s breath. Apparently the double-flowered variety is preferable to the single-flowered. If you are sending potted plants, hydrangeas, begonias, cactuses, and orchids come in many varieties and, as they are insect-pollinated, do not have pollen grains that stay air-borne for long.

Modern molecular genetics is presently engaged in an effort to produce plants of normally allergenic species that are hypoallergenic. Through a process called “gene silencing” the sequence that produces the allergens in pollen is turned off, resulting in a plant that is otherwise normal, but hypoallergenic.

Existing techniques are “post-transcriptional,” which means that the messenger RNA (mRNA) is prevented from producing a protein from the portion of the genome that includes the allergen. All silencing is “epigenetic,” which means that the DNA sequence itself is not altered. Rather, portions of it are prevented from expression for subsequent generations. This has been observed as a natural process, but can also be induced. Current work is focused on crop and weed species, which are widespread and wind-pollinated.

Why Plants Are Where They Are

Why are there different plants in different places? If you revisit a place decades later, will the same plants still be there, only having grown larger? How do plants get where they are? All of these questions (and more) are asked by plant biogeographers. Many students of biology who pursue the subject in school out of a childhood fascination with natural history will be stunned to find out that they have sit through lecture after lecture about photosynthesis and chloroplasts, the parts of the flower, plant genetics and other topics before the course may (or may not) eventually get around to talking about plant distribution.

Eugenius Warming

The descriptive stage of plant biogeography was largely accomplished in the 19th century by explorers like Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin (on the voyage of the HMS Beagle). Interpretive plant biogeography took the raw data of the explorers and tried to find patterns in it.

Danish botanist Eugenius Warming taught the first university course on ecology at the University of København in the 1880s and presented a summary of the world’s biomes in his landmark work Plantesamfund. Biomes are large-scale ecosystems that have similar environmental conditions (e.g., rainfall), but generally different plant (and animal) species on different continents. The dynamic stage of plant biogeography involves the study of the development and interaction among plants, including the idea of plant succession, the change in the composition of plant communities over time.

Through the late 19th and into the early 20th century, an entire vocabulary was invented to describe newly understood phenomena. Physical environments were described as xeric, mesic, or hydric, depending on the amount of rainfall they received and the amount of water they retained. The plant communities varied accordingly. Series of communities that developed in these environments were called xeroarchs, mesarchs and hydrarchs, respectively.

If the plants themselves were seen as the driving force in succession, then the evolution of communities was said to be

Pioneer community

autogenic. That is, the plants were modifying the inorganic environment to make it more suitable for them. For example, pioneer species of plants may secrete chemicals that physical break down rock to begin the process of soil formation. When the physical environment is in control of plant distribution it is referred to as an allogenic plant succession. Locations at environmental extremes (polar, desert) are likely to be examples of this phenomenon.

The landscape may be denuded of plants in several ways precipitating the recovery of vegetative cover through the process of succession. The surface of the land may be rendered by barren by erosion (by water or ice), or on steep slopes by mass wasting (i.e. landslides). Geological causes include faulting, mountain-building and volcanism.

Climatic causes include droughts, flooding, snowiness, protracted windiness (which removes soil), and freezing and thawing. Lightning and the ensuing fires can reduce thousands of acres to ash. Other biota may remove some or all plants from the landscape. Grazing by livestock eliminates species that cannot withstand the constant clipping. Insects (locusts, gypsy moths) may defoliate entire plant communities. Beavers may drown acres of plants. Pathogens like chestnut blight may selectively remove dominant species from a community and cause reshuffling of dominance in the remaining species. Plants move into an area in the form of seeds, or as partially pieces of plant that can establish itself vegetatively.

Ecesis is the process of germination, growth and reproduction. Once individual plants are established in this manner, many pioneer species spread by aggregation, spreading like carpets over the landscape. The first plants will compete aggressively for light, water, nutrients and pollinators. Eventually the community reaches a state where it shares the available resources and can perpetuate itself indefinitely. Frederic Clements referred to this as the climax stage.

Beech-maple climax forest

Clements originally conceived of each region has having a single (mono-) climax community. Subclimax stages were recognized as being stalled on the way to climax by some limiting factor (wind, water or the lack of an important nutrient). A disclimax stage was produced when an invading factor (e.g. chestnut blight) reversed the direction of seral progression. Clements and his followers eventually recognized polyclimaxes, in which the nature of the climax community was affected by various factors. The concept of an inevitable climax community has been largely abandoned since the 1950s as the ideas of Henry Gleason became accepted. See separate entry.

The Plant Succession Debate

The ecologist community of the 20th century divided over the nature of plant succession on both an ecological and a geological timescale. During the last glacial advance of the Pleistocene Epoch ice sheets covered nearly all of Canada and the northern third (more or less) of the United States. Beginning approximately 18,000 years ago, these continental glaciers began to melt

Seral stages

back, uncovering a landscape that had been entirely denuded of vegetation (not to mention soil). The pattern of re-vegetation of these post-glacial landscapes was the focus of the debate.

Frederic Clements, a botanist with the Carnegie Institution, developed a theory of plant succession in early 20th century that introduced the idea of a “climax community” to the professional lexicon. Clements described a series of intermediate communities (seres) that occupied a given location between the reintroduction of vegetation (pioneer species) and the climax (final) stage. In addition to series beginning with the absence of vegetation, the progression of communities could also start after recovering from a disturbance. The most well-known example of this is “old field succession,” which describes the recovery of a natural landscape on abandoned agricultural land.

Frederic Clements

Clements descriptive work was underlain with the belief that the species within communities were interadapted and that all members of a particular seral stage would be reintroduced to a given locality at essentially the same time and come to dominate the place in a unison manner. Clements thought of plant communities as analogous to organisms. In an organism all the organs work together to make the body function; in a plant community all the species work together (associations) to make energy flow the community properly.

Henry Gleason, a younger contemporary of Clements, initially endorsed and employed Clementsian concepts in his early research in the Midwest, but after moving to the New York Botanical Garden, Gleason began to develop a new theory of succession. Gleason first questioned the analogy between an organism and a plant association. His own fieldwork suggested that plants were not found together in a statistically significant manner. Rather, a given plant species’ own ecology determined its distribution, regardless of what other species were present.

Henry Gleason

This “individualist” model of plant distribution did not gain much ground in the ecology community for several decades. In the 1950s further work by Robert Whittaker began the overturning of the Clementsian model in the professional community, but the terminology introduced was used in ecology classes right through the rest of the 20th century. While the plant ecology community works on a timescale of hundreds of years at most, the paleoecology community, employing the sedimentary record, works on a timescale of thousands (to millions) of years.

In addition to the actual organic remains of plant parts (leaves, bark, flowers etc.), plant communities of the past can be reconstructed from fossil pollen. Bogs are a primary source of fossil pollen because they are isolated from other water bodies and the pollen that collects in them represents only the immediate vicinity and is therefore more likely to represent a single plant community rather an amalgamation of several. However, pollen recovered from small ponds and larger lakes is also used in the absence of bogs and fens.

Thompson Webb of Brown University led a large-scale effort to use pollen records to document the recovery of North American plant communities in the wake of the retreat of Pleistocene ice sheets. Beginning in the 1970s and culminating the 1980s with the COHMAP (Cooperative Holocene Mapping Project), Thompson’s group collected pollen records (dated with 14C with an accelerator mass spectrometer) and mapped the northward migration of plant species over several thousand years.

Pollen map for spruce

The primary conclusion germane to this discussion is that Gleason’s ideas were borne out by the pollen data. In the aftermath of continental glaciation, Clements climax communities did not march northward together as an association. Instead between the windswept barrenness of the glacial front and the “climax forest community” of the present day, all kinds of non-analogous plant communities occupied the landscape at any given location.