Ergot can affect humans and animals equally. Cattle and other herbivores that consume contaminated rye and wheat will also succumb to the disease. There are several ways for farmers and production companies to identify and disinfect flour of St. Anthony’s fire before selling it to consumers. Farmers cut the heads of the cereals affected by the fungi before milling. Sometimes, harvested crops are “cleaned” through a visual check; farmers will examine and remove dark purple and black ergot fungi, thereby neutralizing any suspected blights. The ergots collected from this process are buried more than 2 feet deep in the ground to prevent germination. Today, most commercially prepared foods for humans, birds, and animals are generally free from ergot infections. St. Anthony’s fire disease typically crops up today only in people and animals who consume directly and carelessly from the fields. Therefore, it is best to consume commercially cleaned or organically prepared and sold products, since the flour normally goes through a heating processing that kills the fungi.
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Ergot could be considered a catalyst for modern medicine, since it affected so many and spurred scientific inquiry about what caused the disease. St. Anthony’s fire disease was very common in Europe in the medieval period, but some intentionally used ergot as a poison to wipe out enemy populations by adding it to grain stores.
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EUCALYPTUS
Eucalyptus globulus
Take a Deep Breath
This unusual-looking tree is part of the myrtle family, which contains as many as 400 different species. It originates from Australia, although varieties are also grow in the Malayan islands. It has since been exported around the world to warmer climates, since it’s very fast growing and a ready source of timber, not to mention beautification. The largest of the species, the king gum, reaches heights of over 300 feet, with trunk girths of 25 feet—a whole lot of wood. However, those who imported the trees in hopes of reaping quick timber profits found that the best timber from the Australian varieties took hundreds of years to reach similar magnitude. What was touted as a “eucalyptus gold rush” of timber wealth that occurred in California during the early twentieth century quickly faded, since in American soil the trees failed to produce plank-size boards as rapidly as had been hoped. However, that timber rush left vast forests of these stunning trees that remain to this day.
Many types of eucalyptus go by the common name of gum tree. Their sap, known as kino, is sticky and feels like superglue. The leaves are oblong and rigid, and look and feel like green leather. The leaves stand vertically, stiff off their stalks, angling their edge (and not their face) upward to the light.
Why the Long Face?
Rigid and upstanding in youth, the leaves of eucalyptus trees begin to droop with age, seeming to hang in melancholy and turn sideways. Though puzzling at first, this strategy is now understood to allow older trees to conserve water and not dry out as quickly, since most species grow in regions with excessive sunshine. This leaf switching is yet another novel adaptation by plants to meet the challenges of a stationary existence.
Another by-product of the eucalyptus is its aromatic resin. Aborigines of Australia used the plants’ sap to treat burns, blisters, wounds, and insect bites. When the first British colonists encountered eucalyptus forests, they referred to the plant as a “fever tree.” They found that when they were infected with what they called “tropical fever,” the refreshing and uplifting scent from the plant cleared the sinuses and seemed to restore health. Now the oil from the leaves is distilled and used in aromatherapy. The well-known Vicks VapoRub, which generations of parents have daubed on the chests and under the noses of children, contains eucalyptus oil. The famous little blue jar of salve was invented by a North Carolina pharmacist named Lunsford Richardson. He first called it Magic Croup Salve in 1905, and marketed it as a treatment for croup, among other respiratory ailments. When he went to print the label for his new product, his last name, Richardson, was too long, so instead he chose that of his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua W. Vick.
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A Difficult Food
The tough, leathery leaves of the eucalyptus provide food for only one animal, the koala. But in order for this marsupial to digest the leaves it had to acquire a special bacterium in its digestive tract. This bacterium, which, incredibly, is transferred from mother koala to its infant by spitting into the newborn’s mouth, ferments the leaves and makes them digestable. Although eucalyptus oil has a pleasing menthol aroma, it gives the koalas a repugnant body odor.
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FENNEL
Foeniculum vulgare
Aromatic Creativity
Fennel is a perennial, highly aromatized, and highly favored plant from the family of Apiaceae, genus Foeniculum, of which it is the sole species. It is an umbelliferous plant, with feathery leaves and yellow flowers, considered native to the Mediterranean, though naturalized worldwide, and thrives particularly in dry coastal soil and on riverbanks. Apart from its famed culinary use, fennel is also food for some species in the Lepidoptera order, such as the mouse moth and the anise swallowtail butterfly.
Etymologically, the word comes from fenol or finol, which is from the Latin fenum or faenum, meaning “hay.” In Hindi, fenol is known as sonp or saunf. Foeniculum vulgare is a straight plant with hollow stems, fresh green in color, and can grow up to 2½ feet tall. Its finely dissected thin leaves are long for the plant’s size and can reach over 1 foot. The fennel’s flowers come in terminal umbels, like little umbrellas, only a few inches wide. These, however, are packed with thirty to fifty flowers with short pedicels. The herb’s fruit is a dry, grooved seed about 2 inches long.
Fennel is cultivated all over the world, mostly for its edible, intensely flavored leaves and fruits, which contain the strong aromatic compound anethole. This herb is highly adaptive and can take root in many open sites, including roadsides and pastures in northern Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia. One cultivar of fennel, Florence fenne, has a more mild flavor, and is sweeter and more aromatic; smaller than the original, this type of fennel, besides being a decorative plant, is also used as a vegetable, both cooked and raw, as purpureum and nigra.
Fennel seeds have traditionally been used to alleviate bloating, heartburn, loss of appetite, intestinal gas, and colic, but the plant is also useful for fighting respiratory infections, backache, coughs, bronchitis, visual problems, and bedwetting; it is even used against cholera. Native Americans used fennel poultices against snakebites. In some regions, women use this herb to increase the quantity of their breast milk, to bring about menstruation, and even to increase their sex drive. Its oil has also been used to flavor laxatives and is a component in some cosmetic products. It’s also a main ingredient, with the absinthium plant, in the emerald-green liquor absinthe.
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Hail Fennel
Fennel has been cultivated for a considerable part of history. It appears in Greek mythology; Prometheus used dry fennel stalks to perform his legendary act of stealing fire from the gods. A giant fennel seed from the species Ferula communis formed the sacramental wand used by the Romans to summon Dionysius, the god of drinking, at the start of their many lush festivals. The original Greek name for fennel was marathon, or marathos. It comes from the Battle of Marathon, literally “a plain with fennels,” the supposed site of the epic bloodshed. Old English finule is one of nine plants mentioned in the pagan Nine Herbs Charm, an Anglo-Saxon book of recipes for magic potions and remedies dating back to the tenth century.
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FERN
Pteridophyta
A Plant from the Beginning of Time
Ferns belong to the botanical group Pteridophyta, which contains more than 12,000 species. They are one of the oldest plants on this planet. According to fossil evidence dating back 360 million years, the land before the fern’s arrival was merely a reddish soil devoid of nutrients. Algal mats and bacteria were the only organisms that could survive the harsh conditions. Land plants prior to fe
rns were algae-like. Ferns were among the first plants to have leaves, stems, and roots. Mosses may have preceded their arrival, but ferns were the first to develop true pinnate leaves and an internal transport sieve system (known as xylem and phloem) to distribute nutrients, thus paving the evolutionary way for the vast array of flora we know today. Early ferns grew as tall as trees and came in numerous variations. Most of the earliest species from this period are extinct, but there are a number of prehistoric specimens still in our midst—surviving continental shifts and countless epic climatic changes.
Most of the existing fern species appeared about 145 million years ago, during the early Cretaceous epoch, which makes them contemporaries of the dinosaurs. Ferns have no seeds or flowers and reproduce by spores, similar to mushrooms. There are five groups of ferns, including horsetails, marattioid ferns, ophioglossoid ferns, whisk ferns, and the largest group, leptosporangiate ferns, also called monilophytes.
Nevertheless, the ferns we see are remnants of ancient flora, and though they have no economic significance—most have little food value—their simple beauty still astounds. To most humans, ferns seem mainly ornamental, but ecologically they are able to cleanse contaminated soil by adding nutrients. In addition, recent studies show they can even clean chemical pollutants from the air. Ferns play a role in homeopathic medicine and hold significance in both mythology and art.
Unlike the stereotype of ferns hiding in shady, moist woodland nooks, many fern species grow in a diverse variety of conditions, from dry, desertlike rock areas and mountain elevations, to open fields and bodies of water. However, they frequently seem to favor marginal habitats, often growing where no other plant can survive. Generally, ferns fare best in four specific environmental types: shady and moist forests; acidic wetlands, such as swamps and bogs; crevices in rock faces without full sun exposure; and, of course, the tropics. You’ll see them everywhere from the Scottish Highlands to the depths of the Amazon Basin. Many tropical trees, called epiphytes, are actually of the fern species—as many as 25 to 30 percent.
Many of the species have very particular requirements and can only exist within specific pH ranges found in soil. For example, the climbing fern in eastern North America grows best in moist, intensely acidic soils. The “bulbet bladder” fern can grow only on limestone. In addition, some ferns strictly depend on their association with various species of fungi that add nutrients to soil. With their wide flexibility, it’s not so astonishing that ferns have prevailed for millions of years. They are highly adaptive survivors.
Because ferns reproduce by spores, their life cycle is similar to those of other vascular plants. Here is a typical life cycle of a fern: The plant produces a small, flat, delicate structure, sometimes looking like a thread, called a prothallus. Here it enters into the “diploid phase,” where it produces haploid spores, or eggs cells with a single set of chromosomes. These cells divide in a process called meiosis, which reduces the chromosomes by half. In the next phase, the spores undergo cell division, or mitosis, growing into haploid gametophytes, which then go through mitosis once more, producing both eggs and sperm on the same prothallus. The sperm portion of the plant then fertilizes the egg, which stays connected to the prothallus. Once fertilized, the spore is ready to produce another fern.
Simple! But not really. The process of sporogenesis is yet another example of nature’s amazing ability to foster species under virtually any conditions. This reproductive system, in constant repetition for 150 million years, allows for the birth of new ferns all over the planet, and may continue to do so until the end of time.
FIG
Ficus carica
Mediterranean Sweetness
Part of the Moraceae family, Ficus carica is unique in a genus with more than 1,000 species, most of which are giant tropical rubber trees. Almost universally known as fig—other names are common fig and edible fig—its name is very similar in Italian and Portuguese (figo), French (figue), and German (feige). The Spanish call it higo or brevo, while Haitians named it figue to differentiate it from their smaller, dried bananas, which they call figs. The fig is indigenous to western Asia, and spread over time across the whole of the Mediterranean region. Its cultivation goes back thousands of years; evidence found in Neolithic sites suggests fig gathering or cultivation dates back to at least 5000 B.C. Over time, fig growing extended to Afghanistan, the Canary Islands, and even to Germany. Today the plant is still mostly cultivated in the Mediterranean and in mild-temperate climates, though it will grow in tropical and subtropical areas as well.
Ficus carica is a small tree, 9 to 18 feet tall, consisting of lots of spreading branches and a relatively lean trunk—about 6 inches in diameter. Roots are shallow and wide, covering 30 feet close to the surface or on top of the ground around the tree. In harder soil it will bore downward 8 feet or so with a stronger root. Leaves are palmate, divided into three to seven main lobes. The blade grows up to almost an inch long and as wide, and is rough and fairly thick on the surface, with a soft, hairy underside. The fig plant produces a copious milky latex for sap. Its fruit is known as a syconium—a fleshy, hollow receptacle with a tiny opening at the apex, partially closed by small scales. The fruit is pear-shaped, from ¼ inch to 1 inch long. It ranges in color from yellowish green to dark purple, bronze, or copper.
The common fig has all female flowers, which need no pollination. However, three less prevalent varieties have male and female flowers. The caprifig achieves pollination by a small wasp, Blastophaga grossorum. The Smyrna is cross-pollinated by caprifigs. The San Pedro, an intermediate fig, has its first crop reproductively independent, like the common fig, while the second crop depends on pollination. The fig’s skin is tender and thin, and its wall is whitish, amber, pale yellow, rose, pink, red, or purple. People consume figs fresh (juicy and sweet when ripe) or dried, and use them as a baking ingredient or in extraordinary jams. The fig’s seeds differ in size but are generally small, so there can be 30 to 1,600 seeds per fruit.
We cultivate figs in a few different ways. The vegetative method is the most common. After gathering seeds from dried figs and storing them in plastic bags or wrappings, farmers need only to add small amounts of moisture, and germination will begin in a few weeks. Once the sprouts bud and the leaves open, the plant grows to just an inch (which can take one year), before it is ready for transplantation to its final home in a field. For summer propagation, it is best to plant the seedlings in a sandy soil mix or moist perlite; when new growth starts, move the little plants into full sun exposure. Spring crops need their shoots cut before the tree starts vegetating; it should then be set into a shady place with a sandy soil mix or moist compost.
Cultural Aspects
Fig cultivation has accompanied much of human history, and the plant is iconic in many different cultures. The book of Genesis tells of Adam and Eve covering their nakedness with fig leaves after tasting the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Because of the story in the Bible, artists have often favored fig leaves for covering up parts of nude bodies in paintings and sculptures. Also, there are numerous passages in the Bible that feature the fig. For example, one section describes Jesus being hungry and finding a fig tree that has only leaves and no fruit. Jesus curses it (which is very astonishing!), and the tree then withers. The Bible also famously says, “each man under his own vine and fig tree,” to indicate peace and prosperity. The Koran also depicts the fig many times. However, the plant’s most significant role in history may be in its relation to the Buddha, who, according to legend, first gained enlightenment under an old, sacred fig tree.
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There has never been a consensus on what exactly the forbidden fruit was in the Garden of Eden. For centuries, most thought it was a fig. Later, during medieval times, Christian scholars claimed it was an apple. Figs, not apples, were likely to be more abundant in the area of modern Iraq, thought to be the site of the Garden of Eden. But, then again, it was the garden where anything could
grow.
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FUNGI
Fungal Lineage
The Strange Kingdom
Fungi, like animals, plants, and bacteria, are placed in their own taxonomic kingdom. They are distinct from the rest of the plant world. Though many naturalists had long considered various fungi to be plants, in the 1950s the American ecologist Robert Whittaker argued that fungi needed their own classification.
This large group of eukaryotic organisms (their cells contain a nucleus) includes molds, yeasts, rusts, puffballs, smuts, morels, truffles, and, of course, the most famous—mushrooms. So far, about 100,000 species have been discovered, but many believe there are as many as 1.5 million. The main characteristic that distinguishes fungi from plants is on the cellular level. Fungi have cell walls containing chitin, while the cell walls of plants contain cellulose. The part of the fungus that we see is only the “fruit.” Fungi cannot make their own food like plants do, and they have no chlorophyll. Fungi are mostly parasitic. Nevertheless, fungi are of great importance and function as the chief decomposers (or recyclers) in nature.
Fungi grow all around the world, though usually in hidden places, and play a profound role in nutrient cycling and exchange. Even though they subsist on dead matter, many of them are symbionts of animals, plants, or even other fungi, meaning they give back as much as they take. Some fungi are a prized food source, like mushrooms and truffles; another, yeast, is important as a leavening agent for bread, as well as for fermentation of beer, wine, and soy sauce. Others form useful antibiotics, and recently some detergents have begun including certain fungi enzymes. They are even added to biological pesticides—some species produce the bioactive element mycotoxin, which is extremely toxic to animals and humans. A few controversial species of fungi contain some psychotropic compounds and are traditionally used in some spiritual rituals. Like certain infamous mushrooms, some fungi also contain pathogens deadly to people, animals, and even plants.
The Big, Bad Book of Botany Page 11
