12/24/2012 6:06:01 AM
I have a hundreds of photos of Lomatium triternatum taken over 6 years, most from Riverside State Park
I have reduced them to around 135 or so. That’s too many. The problem is not knowing what does and what does not advance understanding. Restated: The problem is ignorance.
I’ve done my best, for now. Next year I will know more and, I hope, I will have better photographs to demonstrate what I have learned.
The photographs I have are organized after a fashion but I need more information about Lomatium triternatum to arrange a photo-biography and I need more and better photos to fill out a photo-biography.
This is ‘a lick and a promise’.
Any help you can give me will be appreciated.
I begin this writing with a digression on plant sexuality then go on record bits of this and that about Lomatium triternatum taken from various internet websites. The information is skimpy to say the best that can be said for it.
I’ll do better next year.
If there is a next year.
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Digression on flower sexuality
Writers seem to think that we want to hear about the greatest, the most and the best, number one in any category. And they seem to be correct.
A writer for Wikipedia says that flowers are the reproductive units of Angiosperms. [Angiosperm is defined as ‘flowering plant’, wouldn’t you know it.]
He/she says flowers are the most varied physically and show the greatest diversity in methods of reproduction of all living organisms.
Ok, whatever.
Whether or not this is true, flowers do have considerable variety in their sexual arrangements.
Botanists complicate a situation that does not need additional complication by calling the same thing by different names.
Flowers are male or staminate. They are female or pistillate. If they are either male or female they are dioecious [Greek, dioecy, 2 households], diclinous, imperfect or incomplete.
Flowers are combined male and female or perfect or hermaphroditic or monoclinous. [Some sources add ‘synoecious’ to this list: [http://www.life.illinois.edu/help/digitalflowers/Flowers/13.htm]. The Dictionary of Botany doesn’t have synoecious.]
Flowering plants sometimes have male and female reproductive organs in different floral structures on the same plant.
Flowering plants have male flowers or female flowers or ‘perfect’ flowers or two of the foregoing or all three.
Some flowering plants have flowers of two or all three sexual orientations at different periods of their development.
Most plants with large showy flowers are ‘perfect’.
A ‘complete’ flower is a ‘perfect’ flower with petals and sepals. Not all ‘perfect’ flowers are ‘complete’.
End Digression
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LOMATIUM TRITERNATUM
Lomatium triternatum is said to have ‘perfect’ or hermaphroditic flowers early and sometimes male or staminate flowers later.
It is pollenized by insects but it can be self-pollenizeing.
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‘Triternatum’ means three times ternate, the leaves are split three times, three times. [Some are ‘split’ three times only twice.]
L. triternatum was first collected by Lewis of Lewis and Clark in Idaho
[The genus, Lomatium, was named by Constantine Rafinesque in 1819.]
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Lomatium triternatum is in the Apiaceae family or Umbelliferae family, the Parsley or carrot family.
Apiaceae have umbels, hollow stems and are often, but not always aromatic. Carrots, parsnips, parsley, celery fennel and dill are Apiaceae.
An umbel has flowers stalks [peduncles, pedicels, rays] radiating from a common point, each with a blossom at the apex.
An umbel maybe compound, with stalks radiating from the stalks that radiate from the main stem of the plant.
Plants in other families sometimes have umbels. Onion inflorescence is an umbel.
Wikipedia warns us that parsnips, like many other members of the Apiaceae family contain furanocoumarin, a photosensitive chemical that causes a condition known as phytophotodermatitis.
It is a type of chemical burn, not an allergic reaction. Gardeners should use gloves handling foliage and ‘shoots’. No mention is made of L. triternatum in particular or Lomatium in general with respect to using gloves if you handle it. They didn’t mention carrots, either.
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The Lomatium triternatum inflorescence is a compound umbel.
The Lomatium triternatum umbel has primary rays [peduncles] of unequal length, the long rays much longer than the short rays [pedicels] which are of equal length. The long rays elongate with age.
Slichter says it has 6 to 18 rays.
Lomatium triternatum is a perennial.
It is native to the western United States Washington State
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Burke lists 28 Lomatium, 4 subspecies and varieties of L. triternatum. Southwest Colorado Wildflowers says, Intermountain Flora says, accurate identification of the several dozen species of Lomatium is ‘notoriously difficult … some species are highly variable …’
Stems are said to be solitary or few with fine stiff hairs.
The leaves are chiefly basal or low cauline with one or more, reduced, on middle or upper stem.
Malheur Experiment Station, Oregon
Native Plant Network – Propagation protocol database, Aberdeen , Idaho
Above ground growth is slow because the plant expends energy developing a substantial taproot.
It goes dormant in mid-summer. It looks dead.
First year most plants only produce a few leaves.
Most plants will not produce flowers or fruit during the first two to three years. Seed production fields at Aberdeen , Idaho
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Lomatium triternatum will not produce flowers and fruit for two to four years
Plants in bloom
Leaves
Stems [Burke says the stems are “… covered with fine but stiff hairs.” No hairs show here.]
Nodes with sheathing
Dry plant
Blossom opening roughly in sequence
Blossom back, side
Blossom close-ups
Plants in seed
Failed seedpods maybe
Seedpods
Red seedpods
Open seedpods
Husks
Patches, Lomatium triternatum is very productive
Lomatium with rays of equal length. The primary rays of Lomatium triternatum are not equal in length.
This is so helpful. Taking the plant all the way through its lifecycle with these detailed and enlightening photos is a great gift.
ReplyDeleteKeep it up.
Can you refer to the location? even if just vaguely?