Garden city pollen

Sep 11, 2018 • 11:19 AM UTC

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varuni

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In early June, I was visiting family in Bengaluru . Located at almost the same latitude as hot and salty Chennai , Bengaluru’s elevation of about 900m above sea level, makes it possible to have pretty home gardens and lovely public parks, earning it the description of the Garden City of India. So I took a break from all the pollen from trees to sample pollen from Bengaluru garden plants.
I started with 2 very common flowering garden shrubs:

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Temple tree ( Plumeria spp.)

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Ixora coccinea
Here’s this strange looking flower called Golden Shrimp and it pollen:

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( Pachystachys lutea )
(You can see different sized pollen but I suspect there are in different stages of dessication.)
While the flowers looked very much like the common Kanakambram , it turns out that they may not be that closely related , although they do both come under Acanthaceae . Among other characteristics, this group has petals that are fused into a tube (or “sympetalous corollas”).
There was also this cute purple flower with purple stamens. You can see various stages of dessication of the pollen grains here too.

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And this plant which has these tiny flower-like things at its leaf node:

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(But I’m not really sure they are flowers. Anyone knows?)
There was also this other strange red flower hanging close by. It’s common name is Hanging Lobster Claw and is a Heliconia

species . Here is the dissected floret and its pollen:

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(Some of them almost look triangular, maybe that where the single pore is?)
There was also this pretty plant with spirally arranged l eaves commonly known as the Insulin plant that was flowering:

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( Chamaecostus cuspidatus )
It’s a monocot (as you maybe able to tell from the venation in the leaves) and closely related to ginger (family: Zingiberaceae ) although they have been given their own family Costaceae now. Much like the other Zingiberanae flowers I looked at ( Banana and the previous Heliconia

species ), the flowers and pollen are sticky.
There were also a few lilies growing near by, so I got some (white and stringy looking) pollen from its anther too:

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Peace Lily (

Spathiphyllum wallisii

)
While a rose (maybe) is a rose, as I have noted in an earlier post , ‘lily’ is not always a lily. Just like the Easter ‘lily’ (subtribe: Asparagales ), the Peace ‘lily’ is also not botanically a lily — but from another, different, non- Liliales order called Alismatanae . In fact, Alismatanae along with another order, Aranae , make up the aroids, a basal monocot group. Many of these plants are highly specialized to their environment and according to the TOL page: “these features are reductions in form which have confounded attempts at phylogenetic resolution for the group”.
There is a ‘grade’ (group of taxa), Lilioid monocots , which apparently includes our Easter Lily but not this Peace Lily? There seems to have been a recent re-classification of these groups based on molecular phylogenetics which makes it more accurate but also invariably more complicated 🙁 (I’ll try to read more about the different types of ‘lilies’ and write a separate post about it soon.)
PS – Check out a full list of pollen I’ve looked at here:
Pollen list