I tried to find a live specimen for the “porate anther dehiscence”. I had just planted an American wintergreen, which is in the Ericaceae family, but the squirrels had eaten all the berries! I decided to use my drawing of crowberry that I drew for EBOT 100 last summer. There are not a lot of the Ericaceae family in my area, so that was the best I could do.
For my plant bingo I chose to visit the North Pole Flood Control area and see what I could find that would fill out my sheet! I was able to find almost everything except porate anther dehiscence but I found an example of longitudinal dehiscence to replace it with.
This exercise was great because it really got me out of my comfort zone of plant morphology knowledge! Finding physical examples for these all new terms was really conducive to my understanding of the terms. It helped me discern different parts of flowers and this was a highly valuable activity due to how challenging it was.
Needle | Connation  | Actinomorphic |
Diadelphous | Silique | Inferior Ovary |
Palmate Venation | Adnation | Porate Anther Dehiscence |
This is the understanding of what I was looking for that I had in mind when searching for examples:
Needle: conifers. These were simple! It was fun to learn that they are leaves!
Connation: fusion of similar organs. This flowers petals were fused together in this flower! There were lots of flowers that had this characteristic, such as bluebells that we see all around Alaska.
Actinomorphic: radially symmetrical. This one was easy! Nice to know the term for this.
Diadelphous: stamen are fused together by filaments. I knew exactly what I was looking for, something that looked like about 9 or so stamens of the same height bunched together and fused at the same base, and one longer stamen also fused. I couldn’t get a good enough peek at the stamen of most flowers since I couldn’t dissect them, so this is the picture I grabbed that seems almost diadelphous, though I understand if I don’t get full credit on this one! I think my picture depicting adnation looks more similar to a diadelphous stamen fusion.
Silique: long, narrow seedpods splitting in the middle. I searched far and wide, but the garden did not have examples of this, though I hope I am correct in what I did find! This seems not quite long and narrow enough to qualify as a silique, but I think I am close. It is over two times as long as it is wide! I was mostly looking for the possibility to open by the sutures at either margin.
Inferior ovary: ovary below attachments of petals, sepals, and stamens. I never noticed this about some flowers so its nice that I can keep an eye out now.
Palmate Venation: several main veins radiating outwards from the base of the leaf. Here is my hand next to the plant for size!
Adnation: dissimilar organs fused together. I looked for a member of the Laminaceae family, that typically have stamens fused to their petals, for this one. It helped me recognize the laminaceae family!
Porate Anther Dehiscence: the anther contains pores to release its contents (pollen). To be honest I wasn’t sure what this would look like using my naked eye, especially since I couldn’t dissect or rip apart any of these flowers in the garden and put them under a heavy duty microscope. Would appreciate any tips on how to identify this type of anther with a naked eye, or any accompanying characteristics porate anthers have!
Here are some extra fun plants I saw 🙂 
At first, I thought this project was photos, so kiddos and I went to a nearby mountain lake area, hoping to find some blueberry plants as an example of poricidal dehiscence. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any. (although we did find some other cool plants I’d wondered about and never taken the time to identify and got gloriously covered in silty mud, so it was still a success:) I didn’t ultimately find any plants that use that method of dehiscence, so switched that to a lily which appears to use longitudinal. Other changes are the fireweed for a complete flower (is there a special name for its curl-i-que shaped stigma?), moving the connation spot (mixed it up on first application of flowers and they’d wilted before I caught it), and I couldn’t find a silique. I was excited, though, I believe the Spirea flowers have hypanthium cups? This was a fun assignment – I’d like to make one for my kids to do on our next hike. Under the Plant Bingo card, I included a couple pics I’d taken for the categories because they’re fun examples, I think:)
