My mother’s ecosystem

About six square meters big and containing nine plants and eighteen pots my mother’s ecosystem has been running strong since the late 1980s.





During the three summer months my mother is away, the plants are watered once a month by the neighbor. Within the glass enclosure the balcony works like a hot house and the plants thrive. Several of them extend shoots that take root in the adjacent pots. Some reseed themselves in further away pots. It is very interesting to observe that they all do well with limited amount of soil.

The cacti bloom from May to July. They produce big white flowers about 13-15 cm in length that last only a day or two. After the flowers fall off, brown fuzzy tufts remain in their place. I was able to take hasty photographs of the enchanting blooms in May.

The winter months provide more humidity and my mother might add a little vitamin into their soil. I can name only two of the plants on her balcony by their common names; the spider plant and the geranium.


               Chlorophytum comosum                                                    Pelargonium hortorum

Spider plant

The spider plant or Chlorophytum comosum is of the Asparagaceae family.  It is a flowering plant native to tropical and southern Africa and it has been naturalized in other parts of the world. Variegated forms are popular houseplants, variegated meaning the foliage having two colors.

Individual flowers are greenish-white and the inflorescences carry plantlets at the tips of their long branches, which eventually droop and touch the soil, developing adventitious roots. These are roots that originate from the stem, the branches or leaves of a plant.

The plant also has stems called stolons that do not bear flowers and have roots at the nodes.

Geranium 
It turns out that geranium is just the common name for the members of the genus Pelargonium which are also in the Geraniaceae family as true geraniums.

“Linnaeus originally included all the species in one genus, Geranium, but they were later separated into two genera by Charles L’Héritier in 1789”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelargonium)

Pelargonium is native to southern Africa and Australia, and the north of New Zealand. There are species native to other countries also, two of them being native to Turkey: P. endlichherianum and P. quercetorum. Naturalized P. horhotum is still the most favored geranium. It is an evergreen perennial that can flower throughout the winter months if it is given a warm, sunny and sheltered location.

                                        My brother Aydın and Gülten Örstan on her balcony in 2013

Our beloved mother passed away recently.  I did not wish to make changes to the previous outline I had planned for this post.  It was enough heart brake that I had to distribute her plants to fellow plant lovers and gardeners.

Mimosa

                                          Photograph: Tülay Karayazgan, Mimosa in Istanbul in March

Spherical things make me happy. Round egagropili, colorful marbles, the planets have always interested me visually. Mimosa flowers are also round and I remember feeling good about them as a child.

There were several mimosa trees in the small park across from our house. Mimosa or Acacia dealbata which belongs in the Fabaceae family is a species of Acacia native to southeastern Australia. It is widely introduced in the Mediterranean region.

           
                         November                              January ( Photo: Esra Selamoğlu)                                   March

Acacia dealbata is classified in the subfamily Mimosoideae of the family Fabaceae. The subfamily is divided into four tribes. A.dealbata belongs in the Acacieae tribe, yet it has the typical leaf and inflorescence structure of the Mimoiseae tribe. There are other acacia that have this characteristic.

A.dealbata is an evergreen tree or shrub that can grow up to 30 m tall. The leaves are bipinnate which means the leaflets are themselves pinnately compound. A. dealbata leaves are blue-green in color.

“The flowers are produced in large racemose inflorescences made up of numerous smaller globose bright yellow flowerheads of 13–42 individual flowers. The fruit is a flattened pod, 2–11.5 cm long and 6–14 mm broad, containing several seeds. Trees generally do not live longer than 30 to 40 years”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia_dealbata)

In the aforementioned park in Aydın there used to be a high band stand in the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. One day a week-it may have been on Saturdays-the city band came to play. The park has been paved and built over since.

                                                   A procession in Sliema, Malta in 2014

Acacia

Fabaceae is a large and economically important family of flowering plants and for the lay person it is not always easy to sort out the orders, the subfamilies, the genera and the species in this family. The group is the third largest land plant family in terms of number of species, behind only the Orchidaceae and Asteraceae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae).

The name Fabaceae comes from the Latin “faba” which means “bean”. Fabaceae is also called the pea family. Leguminosae is an older name still used and refers to the fruit of these plants which are called legumes.

There are three subfamilies:
In the Faboideae, the flowers have a specialized structure. “The upper petal, called the banner, is large and envelops the rest of the petals in bud, often reflexing when the flower blooms. The two adjacent petals, the wings, surround the two bottom petals. The two bottom petals are fused together at the apex (remaining free at the base), forming a boat-like structure called the keel.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae)

In the Mimosoideae, the flowers are globose inflorescences. All of the flowers in an inflorescence open at once.

The third group, the Caesalpinioideae mainly comprises of trees distributed in the moist tropics.

The subfamily Mimosoideae is subdivided into four tribes: Acacieae, Ingeae, Mimoseae, and Mimozygantheae.

After learning all this comes the task of discovering the binomial name. Does the acacia I know belong in one of these three subfamilies? Is it in the Acacieae tribe of the Mimosoideae subfamily? After checking out the internet images and the distribution information, Robinia pseudoacacia appeared to be the correct candidate. Is it named as pseudo acacia because it is not classified under the genus Acacieae but in the subfamily Faboideae? For the answers I would need to make the acquaintance of a botanist.

Robinia pseudoacacia is a deciduous tree of the genus Robinia in the subfamily Faboideae. It grows 4–25 meters tall. The leaves are pinnate and the flowers are white or pink, in pendulous racemes.

R. pseudoacacia is naturalized in Europe, Southern Africa and Asia. It grows so abundantly in Istanbul that it surprised me to learn that it is native to the southeastern United States and northern Mexico. The genus is named after the royal French gardeners Jean Robin and his son Vespasien Robin, who introduced the plant to Europe in the beginning of the 17th century.

                                                  

Have I been able to make the description as complicated for you as it was for me?

Here is a stanza and my approximate translation from a classic song called Akasyalar Açarken-‘When the acacia are blooming’, that everybody still enjoys immensely. The very talented Yesari Asım Arsoy (1900-1992) must have found love to be uncomplicated when he wrote this song:
Yarim gelir yanıma, Kanı kaynar kanıma             My love comes to my side, Gives me much love
Neşe katar canıma, Akasyalar açarken                  Adds joy to my soul, When the acacia are blooming

Wisteria

At the park near our place in Istanbul, the air was filled with the sweet smell of wisteria vines loaded with lavender blooms in April.

How to tell which kind of wisteria they were? Of the most common three kinds, the ones native to the United States do not smell. These had to be the Chinese (Wisteria sinensis) or the Japanese wisteria (Wisteria floribunda). I tried to find out if the twining (twisting to wrap around a sport) of the stems was clockwise or counter-clock wise. The twining was counter-clockwise I decided, and since the flower racemes were about 20-25cm in length, these were Chinese wisteria. The Japanese wisteria has very long racemes.

Wisteria is a genus of flowering plants in the pea family Fabaceae. The botanist Thomas Nuttall named the plant in memory of either a Dr. C. Wistar or his friend C. J. Wister, Sr. as his biographer notes. Sinensis indicates the Chinese origin of the plant.

Wisteria sinensis is a deciduous, perennial climbing vine. Flowering is in the spring just before the leaves open. The flowers are very fragrant. The vine is very hardy and fast-growing. It can grow in fairly poor-quality soils, but prefers a fertile, moist, well-drained soil and thrives in full sun. W. sinensis has a higher quantity of racemes than other wisteria.

                                       

The leaves are alternate, 15 to 35 cm long, pinnate with 9 to 19 leaflets. Pinnation is the feather-like arrangement of the leaflets arising from both sides of a common axis.

Wisteria can grow into a mound when unsupported. They do better when they can climb up a pergola or a wall. The supporting structure needs to be very sturdy, because mature Wisteria can become immensely strong with heavy and thick trunks and stems.

“The fruit is a flattened, brown, velvety, bean-like pod 5–10 cm long with thick disk-like seeds around 1 cm in diameter spaced evenly inside; they mature in summer and crack and twist open to release the seeds; the empty pods often persist until winter.

It was introduced from China to Europe and North America in 1816 and has secured a place as one of the most popular flowering vines for home gardens due to its flowering habit.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisteria_sinensis)

Wisteria can live for over a hundred years.

Judas tree

Judas trees, called erguvan in Turkish, are a symbol of Istanbul. When they flower in late March and throughout April the slopes on either side of the Bhosphorus are a sight to behold. The flowers come before the leaves, displaying their strikingly deep pink color profusely.

       

I was born in Istanbul but I didn’t come to live there until 1969, the year I started university. In those days urban development had not yet engulfed the natural environment. The slopes of the Bosphorus Strait were green and mostly untouched. I fell in love with what I saw and to this day I try to match every other place I visit or live in to that beauty entrenched in my memory.

Each year the blossoming of the Judas trees is noted by Istanbulites.

Judas tree or Cercis siliquastrum of the family Fabaceae is a small deciduous tree from Southern Europe and Western Asia. It grows up to 12 meters in height and 10 meters in width.

In 1753 Linnaeus used the name 'siliquastrum' derived from the Latin word 'siliqua' meaning pod to describe this tree. The genus name 'cercis' comes from the Greek word 'kerkis' meaning shuttle. The long, woody seedpods that hang vertically were likened to the tool used by weavers.

weaver’s shuttle

The origin of the common name is not certain. One explanation is that the name Judas is a corruption of the word Judean meaning the land of the ancient Judah tribe where the trees used to grow.

The flowers are produced on year-old or older growth, including the trunk which is called cauliflory. They are hermaphrodite and bees pollinate them. They are edible.

                                                            
The heart shaped leaves appear shortly after the first flowers.
                                        

Posidonia oceanica

Posidoniaceae is one of the 5 families of seagrasses, descendants of terrestrial plants that re-colonised the ocean between 100 and 65 million years ago. Seagrasses are monocotyledons (also known as monocots, one of two major groups of flowering plants or angiosperms that are traditionally recognized, the other being dicotyledons, or dicots) that are not true grasses (family Poaceae) but are closely related to the lily family, Magnolyophyta (http://www.marbef.org/wiki/mediterranean_seagrass_ecosystem). This kind of rich knowledge about plants accumulated over hundreds of years always amazes me.

The sole genus of the family Posidonia has 9 species: Posidonia angustifolia, P. australis, P. sinuosa, P. coriacea, P. denhartogii, P. kirkmanii, P. ostenfeldii, P. robertsonae and P. oceanica.

P. oceanica, common name Neptune grass, is named after the god of the sea. Poseidon is one of the twelve Olympian deities in Greek mythology. In Roman mythology he is Neptune.

My friends and I used to challenge ourselves to reach the darker waters above the P. oceanica meadows that were 150 or maybe more meters out from the shore at the Kadınlar Denizi beach in Kuşadası where we went swimming in the summers during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Several times a season decaying leaves from these meadows would hit the shore en masse. This phenomenon would usually take place at night and we would wake up to a beach line covered with dead dark brown leaves. This didn’t perturb us for we could easily walk over them and jump into clean clear waters with beautiful sand at the bottom all the way to the P. oceanica meadows. The grass would be gone the next day, carried away by the waves. Having Neptune grass in the sea is an indication of non-pollution in fact. This grass grows best in clean waters.

                              A picture of the town of Kuşadası (c. 1935) showing decaying Neptune grass that has hit the shore

There was another small bay nearby where the shore was permanently covered with dead leaves several meters high. I remember going out for a family picnic on this bed of grayish-brown dry leaves one time. The pile was soft and bouncy under our feet. It all depended on the currents, the winds and the compass direction the beaches were facing.

                                                          P. oceanica beds on the west coast of Corsica, in 2000

There is extensive research on P. oceanica and its significant role in littoral (coastal regions) Mediterranean ecosystems. Here are some facts about Neptune grass: It forms large underwater meadows in the submerged photic zone of sheltered coastal waters, photic meaning enough sunlight penetrates to permit photosynthesis; it has high rate of production which is the synthesis of organic compounds from carbon dioxide making it a high producer forming the base of the food chain; it structures and stabilizes the seabed thus creating habitat for many marine organisms.

P.oceanica is one of the largest, slowest growing, and longest-lived plants. In a genetic study of P. oceanica populations across the Mediterranean, individual clones spanning up to 15 km have been found. Based on the plant's known growth rate, such individuals are likely to be thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years old (Arnaud-Haond et al. 2012-http://eol.org/pages/1089001/overview).

This species is found only in the Mediterranean Sea occupying an area of only about 3% of the basin. This corresponds to a surface area of about 38,000 square kilometers. With their origin possibly dating back to the Pleistocene, some P.oceanica meadows have shown great resilience, persisting through environmental changes over millennia (http://eol.org/pages/1089001/hierarchy_entries/56317045/overview). Today, however, research indicates that P. oceanica populations are declining rapidly. This is due to human-induced disturbances such as coastal construction, trawling, fish farming, and climate change. Researchers warn that the ancient meadows of P. oceanica are declining at a rate several hundred-fold faster than the rate over which they spread causing an unfavorable situation this slow-growing, long-lived species of seagrass is poorly capable of recovering from.

                                                                                               dry rhizomes

As a lay admirer of this great plant I have been noticing for some time that the situation isn’t what it used to be in my youth. We used to find rhizomes of P.oceanica on the beach sand sometimes. There would be egagropili, the fibrous balls formed from materials of dry foliage and rhizomes shaped into balls by the under current, sitting on the sand. Most of them were 3-5 cm in diameter and perfectly spherical. They would feel like felt to touch. The one in the picture that I have kept is oval.

                            egagropili 

I do not remember seeing the fruit of P. oceanica. I am learning that the fruit is free floating and known in Italy as "the olive of the sea" (l'oliva di mare). They resemble small green olive drupes.


                   The Dilek Peninsula National Park and Kadinlar Denizi beaches on the Aegean Sea in Kuşadası

Kadinlar Denizi was one of the best beaches in the whole Mediterranean, I am sure. I don’t think that is quiet true anymore.

Things Mediterranean: