Wildflower Deep Dive is my effort to collate and share the reasons Blue Ridge wildflowers have the colors, intricate shapes, and timing that they do... and encourage you to look closely and see more!
Contact: Bruce Patterson.
The Big Underlying Idea of these posts is that everything in nature has an explanation. Every structure, movement, timing requires both the energy to perform/create it and a genetic program whose instructions cause the structuring, event, or action to reliably occur in every plant every year. Genetic programs don't happen by accident; they evolve over many generations and through many steps. Evolving, maintaining and executing these features is costly. Since the plants we see today are the winners amongst a vast array of extinct competitors, these extravagances can reasonably be assumed to provide some a useful advantage to the plant's goal of having descendants. Naturalists have cracked the code on a large number of fascinating processes, and as I learn about them, I want to share them here.
Beware the unspoken assumption that "it's all about us"– humans are almost never relevant to the pollination process. This is why many lovely flowers are essentially too small to see, smell bad, or appear disappointingly inconspicuous. Of course, for domesticated plants (daylilies, corn, wheat, tomatoes, broccoli) the reverse is true; humans have stepped in and directed selection toward our ends, so asking pollinators about them is unfruitful. One side effect is that human versions may be unable to survive in the wild, unattractive or non-nutritious for pollinators, or have obscured or inactive reproductive elements.
We're not the target. 1) Rattlesnake Plantain, each flower smaller than your pinkie fingernail 2) Canada Wild Ginger--right on the ground, generally hidden by the plant's own foliage 3) Dutchman's pipe. Most commonly blooms 20-30 feet up in a tree... and smells like rotten meat
Caveat: Every now again, we discover that something is an accident of history, or even an arbitrary change in a genetic program that caused no harm, and by happenstance became the norm. Assuming purpose/intent for any heritable trait is a reasonable first position... but not 'proven' until a biological role is demonstrated.
Me: My iNaturalist profile page
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