I really enjoyed this post! Look wistfully at pictures of Welwitschia, indeed! I got to see some in person a few years ago when we went to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, and my wife was very forbearing with my gaping at the unassuming piles of green straps.
If you’re interested in learning more about what the plant developmental toolbox looks like and how it’s been deployed throughout plant evolution, I’d recommend David Beerling’s Making Eden. It’s a pop-science book but pitched at the upper end of that range. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is also fun if you want an intro to the crazy stuff that happens in the fungal kingdom.
Can you give a hint or link as to why that plant is so exciting? A cursory google left me at a loss. I love learning why other people are excited, and sharing their excitement.
I geek out about unusual plants. I find Welwitschia interesting because it’s kind of an outlier. It’s a gymnosperm, meaning it doesn’t produce flowers, is wind-pollinated, and forms seeds differently than an angiosperm, but it doesn’t look like other gymnosperms. Central examples of gymnosperms are conifers, with less-central examples being things like cycads and ginkgo trees, but Welwitschia looks nothing like those, or really any other plants I can think of. It’s got a central meristem (growth zone) and two leaves that grow from that meristem at their base. The plant basically grows by elongating the two leaves, and they can get 4+ meters long. These things grow in the Namib desert and the wind blows the leaves all over the place and splits them at the veins (which run parallel down the leaves), so the mature plant looks like a pile of dirty green ribbon in the middle of the desert. Growing 4-meter leaves is also something of an unusual survival strategy for a desert plant. Like a lot of desert life, they grow slowly and can live a long time (possibly millennia!). The fact that it’s unrelated to other desert plants like cacti or Euphorbias mean we can use it to get another data point about desert adaptation at a genome level as well.
I really enjoyed this post! Look wistfully at pictures of Welwitschia, indeed! I got to see some in person a few years ago when we went to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, and my wife was very forbearing with my gaping at the unassuming piles of green straps.
If you’re interested in learning more about what the plant developmental toolbox looks like and how it’s been deployed throughout plant evolution, I’d recommend David Beerling’s Making Eden. It’s a pop-science book but pitched at the upper end of that range. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is also fun if you want an intro to the crazy stuff that happens in the fungal kingdom.
Can you give a hint or link as to why that plant is so exciting? A cursory google left me at a loss. I love learning why other people are excited, and sharing their excitement.
I geek out about unusual plants. I find Welwitschia interesting because it’s kind of an outlier. It’s a gymnosperm, meaning it doesn’t produce flowers, is wind-pollinated, and forms seeds differently than an angiosperm, but it doesn’t look like other gymnosperms. Central examples of gymnosperms are conifers, with less-central examples being things like cycads and ginkgo trees, but Welwitschia looks nothing like those, or really any other plants I can think of. It’s got a central meristem (growth zone) and two leaves that grow from that meristem at their base. The plant basically grows by elongating the two leaves, and they can get 4+ meters long. These things grow in the Namib desert and the wind blows the leaves all over the place and splits them at the veins (which run parallel down the leaves), so the mature plant looks like a pile of dirty green ribbon in the middle of the desert. Growing 4-meter leaves is also something of an unusual survival strategy for a desert plant. Like a lot of desert life, they grow slowly and can live a long time (possibly millennia!). The fact that it’s unrelated to other desert plants like cacti or Euphorbias mean we can use it to get another data point about desert adaptation at a genome level as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia
Genome: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24528-4
Thank you for explaining. That indeed sounds odd on a marvellous way. :)