It’s the vernal equinox and out in the garden, the spring flowers are blooming.
It pleases me no end me to think that these little figlets are made up of hundreds of the most secretive of flowers, snuggled inside a hollow-ended stem.
As you can imagine, pollinating figs is an extreme sport. It’s undertaken by the fig-wasp, which spends much of its 48 hours of life on a suicide mission for fig fertility. The male wasps hatch, blind and wingless, gnaw their way to one of the as-yet-unborn females, mate with them (eww), chew them an escape tunnel (still not redeeming yourselves, guys) and then die without ever having experienced life outside their flowery prison. The females emerge and flee, spreading pollen as they go, only to find and squeeze into a second syncope (the fig “fruit” to you and me) through a hole so tiny she rips her wings off in the process. If she’s lucky she gets to lay her fertilised eggs amongst the miniscule flowers inside and promptly, you guessed it, dies.
It’s really quite a disturbing life-cycle. It’s with some relief that I can say that my three fig trees – a White Adriatic, a White Genoa and a Brown Turkey – are, like most cultivated figs, sterile mutants. That sounds bad, but it’s a walk in the park compared to the Gothic splatterfest of the caprifig’s lifecycle.
Figs are one of the very first plants to be cultivated by humans: they have been propagated by us since the Neolithic era, over eleven thousand years ago. And the outcome of our long association with ficus carica is virgin birth. Yep, that’s the meaning of parthenocarpy – the way that common cultivated figs produce fruit from female flowers unsullied by any male influence. Since their fruits are sterile, they rely on us to do the hard work of allowing them to reproduce. Bloody skivers.
Actually, humans are quite fond of producing such feckless fruits. Bananas are a good example. They’re sterile, thanks to their three sets of chromosones – just like those fast growing “triploid” Pacific Oysters I wrote about in my last post, reproducing thanks to genetically identical “daughters” and “granddaughters” that spring from the plant’s base. Fig wasps and caprifigs have co-evolved – maybe in some weird cultural way, modern humans with their taste for large, fast growing and seedless fruit and our virgin orchards have done the same.
One way or another, people, myself included, seem to get a perverse kind of pleasure in frustrating plants’ attempts to have babies.
My broccoli, encircled by landcress that deals death to invading insects and safe inside the kids’ superannuated, net-enshrouded trampoline frame – has done really well this year. Now the weather is warming up, however, it’s taking a real effort to thwart the reproductive desires of my brassicas. Those tasty flower buds really really want to go the full distance and burst into bloom and it’s taking a serious commitment to broccoli-eating to cut them off at the pass.
I tried, but it’s too late for that for the rocket, the mizuna and the tatsoi – these spring flowers are in bloom, like it or not.
I’m happier about these vernal blooms: magnificently monochrome broad beans in all their line-print glory.
I was a bit worried about my broadies this year, incarcerated as they are beneath the chook dome, my first line of defence against the brush turkeys. Would the pollinators be able to make it through the 1 cm square lattice of the dome’s aviary wire? As I noodled around in the garden the other day I had my answer. A European bee hovered indecisively, making careful mental calculations or perhaps looking for a door handle. Eventually, it seem to sigh and alighted briefly on a wire, adopting what can only be described as a pike position and plunging through for a perfect 10 entry.
It’s a bit early to say, but I think I can see a few tiny bean pods forming so I’m hoping that while I’ve been otherwise occupied we’ve been visited by other elite insect athletes up for the gymnastic challenge.
The local birds seem to be almost as ambivalent about the signs of spring as I am about my brassicas going to seed. The bowerbirds are doing their valiant best to rip all the buds off the liquidambar and the little wattlebirds have been paying excessive attention to the flowers on the chinese lantern. They’re either defending them from insect attack or eating them – I’m not quite sure which.
I don’t think these red wattlebirds would be capable of doing any damage to the heavy duty flower of a gymea lily, even mob handed. These monster blossoms are bird pollinated – the red colour scheme is a dead giveaway apparently. I guess this is the honey eater equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Since you can roast and eat the roots and the young flower spikes it could even be supersized bush tucker for us humans too.
Enjoy the equinox: may all your spring flowers be excellent eating!
  