SHRS tour part 3

Hi everyone;

It’s Sunday and it has just started to get what we call cold here, 70 degrees. Soon it will stop raining everyday and we will have the best of south Florida weather. Last time I left you with a question about the Triassic epic. That is the time period between 250 and 200 million years before the present, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. First let’s talk a little about the function of this research station. It is to collect and preserve tropical and subtropical¹ plants that can be used for food, fuel or fiber. That means plants we eat, burn for heat, or use to build stuff. We also collect plants that look really good in a house or yard. Our first stop on today’s tour is a place one of our chemists nicknamed Stonehenge for the circle of rocks surrounding it (see picture). Rocks we put there to stop people from parking on the young plants growing under the trees.

Before I show you these plants let me explain that the station is setup with one set of imaginary lines running south to north and another set of lines running west to east. Every plant in our collection has an address (picture below), identified by where two lines cross.

¹ Subtropical roughly refers to a temperature of greater than 50 degrees all year round.

People that know more about the internet than I can use the Grin system (government acronym for Germplasm Resources Information Network) and Google Earth to make a satellite photo of this individual plant. A friend of mine prepared a map of this tour with a satellite photo marked with the location of each plant we will see. However, when I put it down to take a picture of a flower about 20 feet up in a tree, a gust of wind blew my map away. It also shook the branch so hard I did not get a clear picture of the flower.

The first plant on our tour belongs to one of the oldest surviving plant species. Zamia floridana (see picture below) has been around for some 200 million years! They date back to the days before plants invented flowers, so they produce seeds in the cone found at the center. This Florida native is sometimes called ‘coontie’ from the Native American Creek word for ‘flour root’. The stem can be pounded and dried into a material that is used like flour. It was so popular in the early 1800’s that almost all known plants were harvested for food. Today it is illegal to take one of these plants from the wild.

Zamia floridana

So, what does Samuel L. Jackson in the movie Jurassic Park and Zamia floridana have in common? They were both dinosaur food.

Okay, I admit that was bad. I’ll make it up to you by showing you something really cool. This next picture is of a tree taken through a leaf. From May to December it is hot and wet here. If a leaf falls to the ground the environment is just perfect for fungi and other microscopic creatures to decompose soft tissue between the leaf’s veins. Recalcitrant² veins form this see-through skeleton.

Next on our tour is Ficus benjamina, a great place for a gnome³ to live. As F. benjamina grows it drops down those runners to help support branches as they spread out. Ficus are good for food, fuel and fiber. They produce an edible fig. However, just because you can eat something does not mean you will like it. I’m told this fig taste very, very bad! Latter we will see some very good tasting figs.

² re·cal·ci·trant [ rə kálssitrənt ] (adjective): stubbornly resisting treatment or handling.

³ Gnome (noun) dwarf of folklore.

Ficus benjamina

Ficus benjamina

This next tree is a Caesalpinia (Fabaceae family). This tree was given to us by Brazil in 1943. We will see several members of the genus Caesalpinia latter. Several members are used to make medicines, but we are not quite sure of the species name for this fellow so I can’t be more specific.

Caesalpinia species

Caesalpinia flowers

To end today’s part of the tour we have Colvillea racemosa. It is named for Sir Charles Colville, Governor of Mauritius from 1828 to 1833. Mauritius is an island off the southeast tip of Africa near Madagascar. It was the only known habitat of the now extinct dodo bird. The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a flightless and very tasty bird. No one lived on Mauritius until about 1638 so dodo’s never learn to fear people. Once the island was settled people quickly began to catch and eat dodos. By 1681 poor dodo was extinct. This led to the expression ‘dead as a dodo’, which means your gone for good.

Although they named this tree after Sir Charles, nobody really liked him. In fact, during his whole time as governor people were in revolt against his version of British rule. Even many back in England thought he was kind of a dodo.

 Colvillea racemosa

C. racemosa flowers (out of focus)



Looking up to take pictures of these flowers is how I lost my satellite map. From the picture of the flowers you can tell I’m not a professional photographer.

Colvillea racemosa and Zamia floridana are both rare and indangered plants so you are among the few who have seen them.

That is all for this week.

Next week, what is more fun than a barrel of monkeys?

Have a good week,

Grandpa Stewart



USDA-ARS-SHRS tour

The U.S. Plant Introduction Garden at Chapman Field

Statring center right is a road just left of the line of buildings. This was the main runway in the days Chapman field was an air base. One of those buildings was an airplane hanger. They would push planes up that small hill standing just below the buildings. With the plane’s nose facing up, mechanics would stand in a ditch so they could get under the engine for repairs. The burm running along that road is still here. At the very end of this tour you will see what we have planted there today. At the beginning of the road was the front gate (see picture below). Since 1926 we have removed the native pine and added that pretty green color to plants.

Notice the difference in government cars from 1930 to today (white and cream colored vehicles in center of bottom photo). Today’s government cars are gas efficient hybrids! See, we even added some green to our cars.

At the first stop on our tour we will see Collecia. This is part of my private floral collection. It was hanging in my office for about two weeks until the mess on my desk got so high it blocked the view. It now hangs in my home, above the stairwell landing. The artist is Joan Liebowitz. You can see more of her work at her website (www.joanliebowitzart.com). Some of the flowers she paints are part of our collection here so you can compare her abstract impressions to the real plant. Cool!

I’ll start the tour next e-mail. But first, what does Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park and Zamia Floridana have in common?

E-mail you next Friday.

Love Grandpa

Chapman Field in the Beginnning

Hi,

I know it has been a long time since my last news letter. But the government is broke and it just would not be right if someone saw a public employee roaming these beautiful grounds taking pictures. So I snuck in on a Saturday to take these. The place where I work is called the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service – Subtropical Horticulture Research Station. Wow! Now you know why the government uses acronyms¹! This one is USDA-ARS-SHRS, which is still a mouthful so the locals call it Chapman Field. It was named after Lt. Victor Chapman (see picture), the first U.S. airman killed in World War 1.

 Lt. Victor Emmanuel Chapman on the right

During World War 1 this station was an Army Air Corp flight training base. This very spot is reported to be the site where the greatest of all World War 1 Flying Ace was trained (see picture).

In the late 1890’s The USDA needed a place to house tropical and subtropical plants it was collecting. They built a small station in downtown Miami but as the collection grew a larger place was needed. In 1923 a bunch of good old boys, never meaning no harm . . . no that’s the Dukes of Hazard. I’m talking about some young talented botanists, who convinced the Army to transfer Chapman Field over to the USDA.  On April 26, 1923 Drs. David Fairchild and Walter Swingle (the two dashing young men on the bottom left and right) opened the U.S. Plant Introduction Garden at Chapman Field (USIG at CF, you can see our acronym grew as the station got bigger).

¹Acronym n. A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

  

The Boys

top left to right: Joseph James, Theodore Holm, M.B. Waite, P.H. Dorsett

bottom left to right David Farichild, B.T. Galloway, Walter Tennyson Swingle

This is what the station looked like in 1926. What you can’t tell from this picture is that there are 20 gazillion mosquitoes lurking in the swamp below. At one time the CIA funded a study to train mosquitoes to attack troops who were not drenched in their top secret insect repellant. Insects have a phenomenal sense of smell so it worked great. However, the repellant was top secret so only generals with the highest of all security clearance could use it. The trained mosquitoes were release on April 20, 1923, by the end of the week the Army transferred Chapman Field to the USDA. Their first mandate was to get rid of the killer bugs (or at least that is the story I was told).

To be continued