Friday, February 4, 2011

Friday Flora--stinking up the place

After last week's tease, the grand opening...

Stapelia (I lost the tag that had the species name--it's from my Mom's garden, which is better than yours). Since I was a sprout, I've had a thing about the Stapeliads. They're a group within the milkweed (Asclepiads) that produce succulent stems and five-petaled flowers that tend to be fly-pollinated. As such, they have evolved to attract flies--they smell like poop or rotting meat, and the flowers have the look of a morsel of carrion--down to the hair you can see fringing this flower. This one's pretty small, only a couple of cm across, but it can be smelt at arm's length. My Mom has one, "Piranthus foetidus" which has a tiny flower but you can smell it from several meters away.

So, now another tease:
Kind of a busy week, so not able to post much. Hopefully more next week.

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