Pollen of Night Jasmine

Oct 07, 2018 • 9:14 AM UTC

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gagandeep_SD15

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Har singhaar or Night jasmine belongs to family Oleaceae (Jasmine family)
It was one of the plants observed on my visit to P.N Mehra Botanical garden at Panjab University, Chandigarh.
It is a medicinal shrub or a small tree. The sweet scented flowers are small, attractive with white petals and an orange-red tube in center, opening at night and drop off in the morning, This is why it is called Night jasmine as the flowers open towards the evening to night and drop the next morning and the fallen flowers look like a decorative carpet. The branches bend down with the weight of the flowers and buds.

Flowers are arranged at tips of branches terminally in clusters of 2-7. Calyx is green and campanulate. Anthers lack filaments and are present in the orange-coloured corolla-tube. Fruit is flat, brown and heart cordate-shaped containing a single compressed seed.
The pollen dusted out of the anthers were spherical in shape and seen to have smooth exine under a foldscope.