You Say Chasmogamous and I Say Cleistogamous

 The super quality of today comes from learning something completely new. I'm pretty sure this is not a case of my simply forgetting something I learned a long time ago. I'm totally blown away.

I couldn't stop thinking about the five-part violet flower having a three-part seed pod. Things in the mustard family have four-part flowers (four petals, four sepals, four part ovary, four-sided pods). Tulips and juncus have six petals, etc, which fuse into a three-sided seed pod. But five to three just doesn't compute.

I didn't really get the answer to my question. I thought maybe the lower petal, the "lip" was two fused petals such as in snapdragons, but that doesn't seem to be the case. (I suppose there doesn't have to be an answer, it just "is"). But I found out a whole lot.

Remember those little closed pods I showed you yesterday? I brought a few inside to look at more closely. Here's one.

Well, it turns out that the violet (and some other plants) produce two kinds of flowers. This is a cleistogamus flower. Huh?

First, let's sort out those big words. We already almost know them. We know monogamous and bigamous and polyagmous. Yup... all referring to a type of marriage. Well, it seems there are two more words in this series. Chasmo- is open, and cleisto- is closed. I will try to remember this because cleisto- sounds like cloister (not etymologically related), and chasmo- sounds like chasm, an open yawning gully (these are etymologically related). So chasmogomous flowers are open to pollination from anyone! These are the big, showy purple flowers we all know and love in violets in the springtime.

Well, in a plant, promiscuity can be a good thing. It leads to genetic diversity and strengthening of the population.

Now let's take a break from the big words and look at that little "pod" again. The little green pointed things that look like leaves are the sepals. And there are five of them, as you would expect from a plant that has five petals. If you rotate this, you see there are three sepals that are larger and wrap around to the stem, while two of them are smaller and lapped to the inner layer. In this picture you can see two of the larger sepals and one small inner sepal.

Those two inner sepals do not become major divisions of the pod. Looking at the end, you can clearly see there are three sections.

But, jumping Jupiter! This is not a seed pod. It's a cleistogamous flower. That means it's closed. As in completly closed. It never opens; it self-polinates, and is not even monogamous. More like a hermaphrodite. Some plants produce cleistogamus flowers in the fall, and violets are big on the activity. The process takes fewer resources than growing petals, necter, or large quantities of pollen. They insure reproduction even if slugs or rabbits eat all the pretty flowers, or someone mows the lawn.

Furthermore, these violet seed pods dehisce, which means they open violently and fling their seeds out into the world. In fact, this was closed when I brought it in the house but it split into that pinwheel in just a few minutes.

The next stage is the pinwheel full of seeds that I showed you a couple of days ago.

Now, I'll have to watch for the chasmogamous seed pods in the spring.

I worked on necessary stuff, punctuated by weeding the rock garden all day.

See Common Blue Violet's Promise