​Greetings fellow Foxies,
A wet winter has enabled me to see the root structure of Drosera bulbosa/red-leaved sundew. I see it in water-gaining red soil areas in Foxes Lair and in moss beds on or around granite outcrops. Leaf colour varies from green to yellow and red, the latter due to nitrogen deficiency when plants are waterlogged or stressed.

Rosette sundews such as this,survive over summer as a fleshy root tuber. In winter a fleshy stem called a rhizome emerges and grows to the surface where it develops roots and leaves​. At the end of the season, the top withers and dies as nutrients are drawn back into the tuber. Daughter tubers may then be produced, as a base for new plants.
Due to their location, these plants are at risk of being washed away or snapped off by running water, which undermines them or breaks off clumps of moss containing them. A plant below, which snapped of at the surface has developed another tuber to find soil and make new roots.

Images below show plants that were washed out of the soil with roots and tuber intact. One had an emptied tuber as its resouces were used to produce a rhizome in search of soil

​When we wander around the bush admiring the wildlife and wildflowers we walk over an ancient, complex, and fascinating ecosystem of  algae, lichens, bryophytes, and fungi.
It is thought that land plants and fungi spread to land via freshwater ponds. First were simple algae, which would have produced mats of dead material, which became food for the first fungi about 450 million years ago. About this time south-west Western Australia was a part of Gondwana, which was above sea level and close to the equator. I am tempted to think that these great events occurred near present-day Narrogin. Well, several kilometres above Narrogin, as the land surface has eroded down that much since then.

​Around this time bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornwarts) also appeared. Bryophyte sexual reproduction can only occur in the presence of water, but they survive and produce clones in dry conditions.

I spent hours wandering around on hands and knees inspecting moss and liverworts. They are very common once one gets down to their level, and they look deceptively like higher plants. No way!  Unlike true plants, bryophytes lack true roots and stems. They directly absorb nutrients and water into their ‘leaves’ and have very different life cycles.

Consider first the life cycle of a higher plant.
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Adult plants have two sets of genes in each cell (diploid). Most plants have a male gene and a female gene (monoecious plants, hermaphrodites) with flowers that have male (anthers with pollen) and female (ovary with egg) parts. Gymnosperms have male and female flowers on a single plant.  Dioecious plants have male and female plants, each with have two male or two female genes and develop male or female flowers. In the short-lived flower phase, cells in anthers and ovary split to form pollen and eggs that have only one set of chromosomes (haploid cells/gametes), which are brought together to fuse and develop into diploid seeds.

In the bryophyte life cycle, resistant haploid spores become long-lived plants (gametophytes), which have only one set of chromosomes. The plants produce sperm and egg receptacles. When conditions are wet enough, male sperm swims over to fertilise eggs on other (dioecious) plants or parts of the same (monoecious) plant.
​Unlike higher plants, the (double-gene) fertilised egg grows into a very short-lived 'plant' (a sporophyte) inside the egg receptacle of the parent gametophyte, which  continues to nourish it. The sporophyte usually grows a narrow stem ending with a fruiting body called a sporophore. Inside the sporophore, double chromosome cells split into single chromosome gametes, which form wind-dispersed spores.
The spores can resist drying, which enables mosses and liverworts to colonise seasonally dry and freshly disturbed soil.

Liverworts come in more shapes than the 'typical' flat liver shaped gametophyte above, and can easily be mistaken for moss.
Some distinguishing features include

• They contain oil glands in their tissue.
• Gametophytes can be elongated or crinkled, but the sections have linear growth. Moss generally have spiral growing points.
• Liverwort sporophytes have shorter, clear to black stalks and glandular spore capsules. Moss have longer green stalks and container-like spore capsules, which often have a noticeable lid and/or spike.
• At Narrogin, liverworts tend to be in wetter spots, whereas moss is more generally common.

 
​The bryophyte gamete phase is very hardy. I often see clumps of moss clones in the driest parts of the landscape such as gravelly rises and breakaways.  Clumps completely dry out over summer. After rain they rapidly rehydrate  and produce more clones within the clumps. 
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The image shows a gametophyte clump with spore-bearing sporophytes, and clone fragments that have broken away to be carried away by runoff to establish downslope. Most dry area clumps with sporophytes are hermaphrodites. These produce both spore and egg receptacles on the same plants, so less rain is needed to splash sperm on to the eggs, than in separate male and female gametophytes. 

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​I wish I could take a time machine back to see ancient forests.
Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by giant mushrooms 8 meters tall and one meter wide, over a knee-high understorey of bryophytes, other fungi and lichens. These Prototaxites fossils have been dug up in Saudi Arabia.

​Greetings fellow Foxies,
Recently I was delighted to find a third Wurmbea lily in the Narrogin area, the delightful Wurmbea drummondii. Wurmbeas are associated with unrequited love, medicine, aromas and of course, sex. They flower in June-July. 
Wurmbeas (common name ‘nancies’ are named a after a German aristocratic botanist named Friedrich von Wurmb (1742-1781). Friedrich and his brother fell in love with the same woman until he generously Joined the Dutch East India Company in Indonesia and studied palms and orangutans. I wonder whether the woman’s name was Nancy, or she had any say in the matter?
The genus Wurmbea is in the family Colchicaceae (a folk remedy for rheumatism) that contains the alkaloid colchicine. Gout-riddled red wine drinkers rejoice. Before you graze, it has also been implicated in livestock deaths.

​The tiny Wurmbea flowers have a superior (above flower base) ovary and waxy tepals (combined petal/ sepal). The stamens lean outwards from the ovary until the anther is near the middle of each tepal: I wonder why, and for which insect? As it turns out, each tepal has a nectar secreting spot (nectary) on the top near the anthers, which would attract insects to them. Perhaps there is another attractant that would then draw the insect to the central ovary and pistil.
I think that flies are main pollinators. Apparently some wurmbeas emit an odour to attract coprophagous (poo-loving) flies. However, I asked my sensitive sniffer wife to smell Wurmbea tenella flowers and she reported a sweet aroma.

​Wurmbeas are the LGBTI equivalent of us in the plant world.
Some species are straight with normal flowers containing both male (anthers) and female (pistil and ovary) parts.
​An example, Wurmbea sinora occurs uncommonly on gravelly soil in Foxes Lair.
​Some species have male and female plants (dioecious).
Stressed flowers produce less seed in a flower that has to maintain both male and female parts. In more stressful locations dioecious plants are more successful because each flower can put all its resources into male or female flowers. A good example is April-flowering dodonaea humifusa that sprawls over rocks in red clay on the Granite Walk.

​Beautiful but uncommon dioecious Wurmbea drummondii occurs on redder soils like gravelly loams on the Highbury and Three Mesas walks.
Andromonoecious plants have normal flowers as well as male flowers on youngest growth. Apparently, this occurs rarely in Wurmbea drummondii. Note that flowers tend to become redder with age.

Dainty Wurmbea tenella (Eight Nancy) is common on granitic soils. It differs from other species in having eight (sometimes more) tepals. If you look carefully you may find that flowers have variable or even no anthers. The images below show differences that I found in Foxes Lair.

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Burchardia is another genus in the Colchicaceae family in the district.The flowers look similar to Wurmbeas, but the plants are larger and do not contain colchicine. I tend to see them more on stream-side soils, particularly the stately Burchardia monantha. These pics are from Quinns reserve.

​Hello fellow Foxies,
Tiny (1cm) delightful blue Tall Lobelia Lobelia gibbosa flowers are out now. Each single stemmed plant has small, withered leaves on a fleshy stem with one to four pale blue striped flowers that are hard to spot, but is worth the search.
The larger Tufted Lobelia Lobelia rhombifolia (October/November) also has (deep) blue flowers that remind me of a fleur-de-lis. They are hardy annuals that only occur in ones or twos, mostly and sandy spots with little vegetation. I think they would flourish after a fire.

​Lobelias belong to the Campanulaceae family with two other late-spring annuals in Foxes Lair, Isotoma hypercrateriformis and Wahlenbergia gracilenta (rare here) that occur in the claypit area.

​World-wide the Campanulaceae family is known for large and showy flowers, but not in WA.
They share these distinctive features.

• Inferior (under the flower) ovary.
• They exude a nasty sticky white sap when cut.
• Instead of starch they store energy as inulin. Unlike starch, inulin is digested in the colon rather than in the stomach, and is very good for gut health. Before you harvest lobelias for the inulin, note that it may cause gaseous eruptions in the bowel department (a curse on Jerusalem artichokes!), and:-
• Some plants contain toxins. The common name for Isotoma hypercrateriformis is Woodbridge poison.
• Some plants like Lobelia gibbosa and Isotoma hypercrateriformis have fleshy stems that enable flower and seed formation to continue long after the leaves have died.
• Campanulaceae and Asteraceae (sunflower family) have a remarkable stigma and stamen arrangement that is described in the extract below from this web page.

 
Inside the flower, the five stamens are arranged closely together around the central female style and are often fused together, thus forming a little cylinder. When they are mature, the stamens release their pollen into the centre of the tube they form, where the pollen collects. The style will then grow longer, slowly pushing the mass of pollen out of the tube, where it then falls on the backs of bees that visit the flower for nectar. Once all the pollen is pushed out and the female style is mature, the tip will split open to reveal sticky surfaces where it can receive pollen from other flowers. In other words, the flower will not pollinate itself, because the pollen is released and pushed out of the way before it is ready to be pollinated.
After much crawling around on tick-infested ground I managed to photograph this arrangement in Lobelia gibbosa. From the flower base, the tube curves up through a split in the upper petals and down again to end where it will brush the back of insects entering the flower. 

​Upper petals have been removed from the images below to show the fused stamen tube.