Close-up of Enkianthus campanulatus flowers
Our current understanding of the plant family Ericaceae (which includes rhododendrons, blueberries and heaths) suggests that this genus, Enkianthus, is the “oldest”, if you are speaking in evolutionary terms.
In other words, if you investigated all of the genera of plants within this family, used shared characteristics to determine how closely plants were related, and then calculated the relationships between the genera based on those characteristics, you would discover that Enkianthus has been around the longest.
All other woody members of Ericaceae have characteristics which Enkianthus lacks; one of these is tetradinous pollen. This simply means that the fully-developed pollen grains are fused as a unit of four, and this is the case for nearly all woody Ericaceae except for Enkianthus. By contrast, Enkianthus has monadinous pollen–each mature pollen grain is a single unit. It could be argued that the evolution of tetradinous pollen in this family was one of the changes that allowed the woody plants of the family Ericaceae to diversify (it could also be argued otherwise, as there are other characteristics that are different between Enkianthus and the others–see Kron, K. A., Judd, W. S., Stevens, P. F., Crayn, D. M., Anderberg, A. A., Gadek, P. A., Quinn, C. J., Luteyn, J. L. Phylogenetic Classification of Ericaceae: Molecular and Morphological Evidence. The Botanical Review. 2002 68: 335-423. Perhaps if the development of fused pollen grains in woody Ericaceae hadn’t happened millions of years ago, you wouldn’t be consuming blueberry jam or cranberry juice today.
I enjoy your daily plants and your comments are delightful. Now I can look on the week end too.
Judy
Beautiful composition. You are a very talented photographer.
WOW! Very nice.
I saw a beautiful Enkianthus in Stanley Park and it had that great mix of green, yellow and orange leaves on the fall day I saw it. It,s a favorite ever since. I just got one for my garden and I’m going to train it with wide spaces between the branches to help show off the pendualous bell shaped flowers and seed pods.
This summer in 2012 at least in Northern Ontario there were no blueberries at all even in famous spots like Wawa and White River areas. There were also no insects such as mosquitoes and bees though I did see one or two stragglers. Also there are no frogs batrachians. I dont know but suspect that the extinction of mosquitoes and other insects had something to do with the lack of blueberries. I also saw no bunchberries cornus.
It is possible that these huge changes are merely the extremes of normal variation eg in Northern Quebec cariboo one year are in tens of millions the next barely ten thousand and of course rough grouse Bonasa umbellus and varying hare or rabbits are subject to extreme eleven year cycles as well as hawks and lynx which prey on them.
A local effect or a general cause such as climate change or cellphones or microwave or other forms of electromagnetic radiation or their cumulative effect. A very remote possibility is wind turbines which I did support but now I’ve had some doubts about their innocuousness. Of course pollution and chemicals are also likely culprits of these environmental disasters.
Clearly something is going on as the total lack of blueberries was nothing short of a calamity in Northern Ontario especially for the natives, and the wildlife of course.
But there are still sandhill cranes and speckled trout so they must be eating something even if all the mosquitoes and frogs are gone.
But no blueberries is unheard of. The plants are there the flowers did emerge but there was no crop of berries. In fact there was such a profusion of flowers that I expected a huge harvest. Yet there was none.