WHY I DO THIS BLOG ON RARE PLANTS

This blog is a labor of love. Because of my love for unusual, tropical plants and the ways to make them prosper, I searched high and low for information and data on the more obscure denizens of the plant Kingdom my information database grew and I realized that Much of the Data on Obscure Species was Unavailable or written in a cold scientific manner. In Addition, many things in garden books will not tell you of the potentially bad aspects of plant species because they were compiled by people who did not actually grow the plants themselves.Finally,as a gardener of unusual plants, I and others searched relentlessly for species, pictures, seeds, and descriptions of plants that are Unusual and easy to maintain yet many of which are never seen outside of a botanical garden.
I talked to people and found that many of my friends and associates wanted cuttings (and had as much success with them as I did) It occurred to me that there are a great deal of people out there that relish unusual and odd plants but the mainstream Plant distributors only carry "Safe" plants, Yet the dealers who deal in unusual make a killing in the plant business. How are People supposed to know about these Floral finds unless they are exposed to them.

According to the report “State of the worlds plants”by researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, there are about 391,000 species of vascular plants currently known to science. Of these, about 369,000 species (or 94 percent) are flowering plants.


By scanning through several plant databases, including the the Plant List, the International Plant Names Index and the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, the team found that 391,000 vascular plants are currently known to science. Moreover, about 2,000 new plant species are discovered or described every year. Many of these newly described are already on The endangered list

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#plantgeek


HYDNORA africana

RARE PLANT SPECIES ...HYDNORA AFRICANA
Current mood:  creative
Category: Blogging

Family : Hydnoraceae
Common names : jackal food ( Eng. );


PHOTOS COMING SOON



Hyndora africana is one of the most bizarre-looking plants on the African continent and certainly not the most common of plants to be encountered in the veld on any casual hike., an unusual flesh-colored, parasitic flower that attacks the nearby roots of euphorbia in arid deserts of South Africa. The putrid-smelling blossom attracts carrion beetles.

image Credit: Martin Heigan (via creative commons)

Description 
Hydnora africana is a parasitic plant on species of the genus Euphorbia. It has such an unusual physical appearance that one would never say it is a plant. It looks astonishingly similar to fungi and is only distinguishable from fungi when the flower has opened
The plant body is completely leafless, void of chlorophyll and is brown-grey. As it ages, the plant turns dark grey to black. A network of thick rhizophores or subterranean stems and roots traverse the soil around the host plant. These fleshy, angular, warty stems bear a series of vermiform (shaped like a worm) outgrowths commonly referred to as roots, ± 10 mm that connect to the roots of the host. The plant body is only visible when the developing flowers push through the ground
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1 comment:

  1. JeffJuly 28, 2010 at 2:34 PM

    the link doesn't work, where it says "just email me"

    ReplyDelete

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