Day 4 of Florida Trip (pictures are in random order)
A lot of fruitful searching of Google images has enabled me to pretty confidently identify the plants in today’s posts. To recap a previous post, I often use words like ‘might’ or ‘could’ because in science we never say we are 100% (99% possibly) certain about results, we have to leave room for errors and other explanations, it is part of the scientific method. This is why it is very important that experiments are repeatable and well documented. In identification, things are changing constantly due to genetic analysis and different theories of species definition. As I’ve posted before, some things require microscopic observation to differentiate between species. All that aside a lot can be said for typing in ‘orange flower 5 petals Florida’ and then looking at the pictures for something that looks close. You have to be aware of the whole plant however, some flowers look similar but the rest of the plant is different.
All that being said, today I have identified some more non-natives that are used as landscape plants particularly in Florida. Before I get to the new non-natives I have another picture of a swamp lily (native) and there was a sort of hedge with oleander and hibiscus (2 additional non-natives), most likely the same variety of hibiscus that we have on our porch.
Umbrella flat sedge comes from Africa and has escaped and become established in disturbed wet habitats. Also from Africa, specifically the southern part, we have the burn jelly plant which at first I took for an orchid. Almost all orchids exhibit bilateral symmetry of their petals which means that if you cut down a single plane (the center/middle) you have two identical halves. However upon closer inspection of my picture it looked like the petals were actually evenly distributed around the center (radial symmetry) which eventually led me to find the burn jelly plant. Additionally from South Africa and also bright orange, we have the bird of paradise flower. Not to be confused with the bird of paradise bush I saw in Arizona.
For our next non-native we go to Brazil with the golden trumpet flower. Apparently the sap is highly toxic and all parts of the plant are cathartic (indicated in the scientific name) which means they act as a laxative highly increasing bowel movements (polite and scientific way of saying it all), so one shouldn’t ingest any part of the plant. As a general rule of survival I would not ingest any plant parts unless you have been well educated by a reliable teacher in the identification and preparation of edible plants.
The last flower I identified comes from the Caribbean and I caught a bee visiting this peregrina flower cluster. Apparently the leaves of this flower are highly variable which makes identification tricky if no flowers are present.
phototerrascientia 