Spurge laurel - made for the shade

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about a lone spurge laurel Daphne laureola plant, that I first found 35 years ago and is still thriving, partially hidden in the shade of a holly and hawthorn hedge at Wolsingham in Weardale. 

It's an easy-to-overlook plant until early March, when it produces these tight clusters of lime green flowers. The flowers, whose nectaries are at the bottom of the floral tube, attract long-tongued bee pollinators during the day but, like all Daphne species, they're scented. Their fragrance is weak during the day but much stronger at dusk, when they attract moth pollinators.


It's a very uncommon plant hereabouts. This year the shrub narrowly escaped serious damage when a tractor with a hedge cutter was used to trim the hedge. It was saved by the fact that it's a shade-loving plant and was so well woven into the gloom at the bottom of the hedge that the cutter could only reach a few of the tips of its twigs. I've rescued those and managed to root a couple, and if I can grow it in the garden next year I hope to take a closer look at the kinds of moths that are attracted to its nocturnal fragrance.

A Dandelion with a Difference

I found this strange-looking dandelion in Newcastle this afternoon, growing beside a footpath in the city. Unlike typical dandelions (see picture below) which have a spiral whorl of florets each with as single long petal with a toothed tip, with very long petals around the margin of the flower head, this one had very short spoon-shaped petals throughout, so the flower resembled a pom-pom with numerous long styles, each tipped with a bifid stigma, sticking out of it. Quite decorative for a dandelion. There are mutant varieties of chrysanthemum sold commercially that are very similar in form - but a lot larger.

This (above) is a typical dandelion inflorescence. Normally each individual dandelion floret is quite a complicated affair (see here for details) with the long style elongating through a tube of pollen-laden stamens, followed by the splitting of the stigma tip to reveal its receptive surface - a complex arrangement that is totally redundant because dandelions set seed without the need for any fertilisation by pollen, by a process called apomixis. The seeds that are produced are all clones of the parent - so in a week or two, when the flowers have run to seed, I'll go back to this abnormal plant and collect some - they should breed true and produce exact copies if this is a genetic mutant.
 

The other curious aspect of this mutant, seen here from above, is that all the florets are female - there is no trace of stamens or pollen. It seems the mutation that truncates the petals also inhibits the development of the stamens.

There's more on dandelions here.