Anhydrous Wit

Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Monday, September 18, 2017

Beauty Is Only Bark Deep

My employer has been awarded the contract to install irrigation & landscaping outside a new business under construction, so I am reviewing our bid & the plan to make sure the project begins smoothly.

In the plan notes, the landscape architect specified, "Place plants upright and turned so that the most attractive side is viewed."  How exactly are we supposed to do that?  The plants can be driven around or walked around or even flown over (if you're a bird).  You can see them from all perspectives.  It's not like this is a Christmas tree set with it's least attractive side facing the wall.

The landscape architect also specified, "Shade trees shall be straight unless otherwise specified."  I never thought of plants like this before.  Can you have a gay tree?

Flowers can have both male (anther & filament) and female (stigma, style, and ovary) components.  These flowers are traditionally (though perhaps discriminatorily) called "perfect" flowers.  Alternatively, flowers can be male or female.  If male & female flowers are present on the same plant, the plant is referred to as monecious.  (This is commonly the case for cucumber or gourd plants, for example.)  If they're present on separate plants, the plants are called dioecious.

As far as I can tell, male flowers are equal-opportunity fertilizers, carelessly sharing their pollen as much as possible.  Pollination in plants most often occurs via insects or wind transporting the pollen from an anther to a stigma, either within the same flower or between different flowers.  (Wind-pollinated species such as Mulberry, Ash, Juniper, Oak, or Pecan are common problems for people who experience allergies.)

Sometimes, such as with many fruit species, a tree is not self-fertile; it requires a different tree (almost always of a different cultivar) to successfully produce fruit/seeds.  This means, for example, you'd have to plant a Bing Cherry and a Stella Cherry in order to get Bing fruit.  (Stella is self-fertile, as well as being a good pollinator.  Does that make her a hermaphrodite?)  Then you might have a problem because you don't have room for two trees, or maybe you just don't want that many cherries.  (Don't worry; the birds usually beat you to them, anyway.)  However, some clever horticulturist figured out thousands of years ago that he (and let's face it, it was probably a he because women were discriminated against more then than they are now) could graft part of one tree onto another, so two different varieties could grow on the same specimen (this must occur within a species), and one tree could successfully bear flowers & fruit from each cultivar.  Does this make the plant transgender?

One nursery we use offers a "six-way" Apple tree, with six cultivars grafted onto one plant.  Is that like a plant orgy?  Would watching bees pollinate the flowers be like watching porn?

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