My last few posts have been about the colors and images of spring, as I encounter them in my rural area of the Southern Tier of New York. In my quest for images, I try to include my photography students at The Family Foundation School, a boarding school for teens at risk. My Monday class section visited a local waterfall which is very close to the school. I take my students to this location once or twice a semester, because it is only 3 miles from the school. Interestingly, I did not have my digital camera along that day. My students are working on a “Kodachrome” project, taking images on the last run of Kodachrome 64 slide film to be produced (ever) - but that is a blog entry for another day. Since my students were shooting film, I also had my film camera along.
As I was scanning the forest floor I was awed by the abundance of red trillium (trillium erectum), also known as “Stinking Benjamin” or “birthroot”. This plant is supposed to have a smell of rotting meat to attract flies for pollination, and was also used for medicinal purposes by the Native Americans (it was supposed to hasten childbirth and relieve menstrual symptoms - not that I would recommend consuming any part of this plant due to its high oxalic acid content.)
I did photography a red trillium with Kodachrome 64, but I cannot post that image here, as the film has not yet been developed. However, here is what it looks like.
Red Trillium (trillium erectum)
My students were off one their own taking pictures, and I also wandered around looking at the falls and the flowers on the forest floor. To my great surprise I saw the flower in the image below - about six feet away from the one in the picture above.
Red Trillium Oddity
Wow, I thought to myself - what is this? There was SO much similarity between this flower and the others that it almost HAD to be a genetic oddity. I went back and forth between the two, counted the flower parts, studied the leaves, sniffed both flowers (I did not detect any odors from either plant, by the way) and came to the same conclusion. This plant HAD to be a red trillium!
I did some research on different types of trilliums and looked at many images of different trilliums, as well as some variations on the norm. I did NOT find anything exactly like this plant, however I did find a an on-line site (Trillium Research) that shows MANY trillium varieties and does show some with anomalies (though none as extensive as the plant that I found), including flowers with differing numbers of flower petals. I did also pose a question (with images) on a nature forum for photographers, which I follow (you can see the post here on fredmiranda.com) and got an answer to what might be going on from one of the other forum members, Dennis Dietz:
“Usually when a flower does this it is a sign of triploidy, a situation where one or more chromosomes, instead of dividing normally during meiosis, fail to divide, giving the offspring a third copy of that/those chromosomes. In humans, Down’s syndrome is an example of triploidy. In plants, this is actually very common and often “harmless” though natural selection might act upon the triploid individual in one direction of the other. Most cultivated flowers with lots of petals are examples of this, roses (should only have 5 petals), tulips, etc.”
Dennis also recommended I try to pollinate this plant and collect some (only some, to interfere only minimally with nature) of the fruit and see if the plant can be propagated. In addition, he recommended I go back next year to see if the plant comes back with the same anomalous features. Definitely a recommendation I will follow!
I have also been showing all of this information to my students, and hope to share anything new with them as I find out more. This is what lifetime learning is all about - something we try to teach our students every day.
AND, in case anyone was wondering, I just HAD to take my digital camera back to the location where the plant was to capture the images in this post! Amazing the conveniences we take for granted, these days.
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