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Scrambling towards vinehood
Awhile back I wondered about the fact that there were so few epiphytic grasses. The attainment of this lifestyle seemed to be a daunting task for a plant family that is in other ways so adaptable. Two weeks back I was walking along a street when a discovery I made highlighted another lifestyle that seemed…
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How grasses directed and shaped human evolution
Note: Thank you to a reader for pointing out that skin pigmentation may also have been changed dramatically by the onset of agriculture. Did you know that many of the attributes of people today are a direct result of a few grasses? The domestication of grasses for agriculture started several thousand years ago, and occurred…
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As the Season Turns: Oplismenus burmanni
I loved my discovery of the shade-loving Oplismenus burmannii earlier this Summer (July), and so I decided to follow that cluster (and another large nearby one that I also found) as the days passed. The members of the genus have attractive leaves that sometimes belie the fact that they may be invasive, although there are…
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Bamboo Facts Bonanza
I visited two botanical gardens last month, and perhaps the best specimens in both (at least to me!) were the bamboos. The first botanical garden was the Harry P. Leu Botanical Garden in Orlando, FL, which I have visited several times before. The second botanical garden I visited was the Kampong: A National Tropical Botanical…
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Diversity Fails Part Deux
The Elton hypothesis states that environments with lower resident diversity will be less resistant to invasion. One possible reason for this is that a diverse assemblage of species or functional types is better able to fully exploit all the resources in the area, and thus the invader will not be able to find any niche…
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In Search of Shady Characters: Botanizing for Ichnanthus pallens and Lasiacis divaricata
As mentioned in recent posts, the shady understory of forests is normally not the optimal environment for grasses. And yet, many from an entire subfamily of the Poaceae (the Bamboos of subfamily Bambusoideae) and others such as species from genus Oplismenus (e.g. the invasive Oplismenus undulatifolius) and Microstegium (e.g. the invasive Microstegium vimineum) have adapted…
Sejarah Poaceae
The Story of Grasses – Grasslands and Grassy Open Ecosystems