Top Flight: The Churchill Rocket Range

You may have heard the old saying that “nature abhors a vacuum”. To understand this expression, you probably won’t need to look any farther than your own lawn. Although lawns may start out as monocultures of Kentucky Bluegrass (Poa pratensis), they never stay that way. Inevitably, species like Common Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) show up, prompting a flurry of weeding and spraying of herbicides. We are told by lawn care companies that “healthy lawns won’t allow weeds to grow” but that statement is simply not true. Just look at any wild ecosystem in the world. Is it a monoculture with just one species? No, there are always many species. Weeds eventually invade lawns because monocultures are NOT natural. Ecosystems want to return to a natural state.

Native prairie ecosystems are natural polycultures: systems with many plant species. © Manitoba Museum

But why did lawns even become popular in the first place? In Europe, in the 16th century, wealthy landowners began growing lawns to flaunt their status. They didn’t need the land to grow food, they were rich enough to grow completely useless grass on their property instead! As the European middle class began to grow, they also aspired to demonstrate their wealth by growing at least small patches of lawn, if they could. This Western appreciation of the lawn aesthetic still remains with us today, but there are signs that its time is up. Concern about the impact of lawn care pesticides on human health and vulnerable pollinators has prompted many municipalities to enact bans on these chemicals.

Further, the popularity of polyculture lawns is experiencing a resurgence. Polyculture lawns more closely mimic a natural ecosystem by including both grasses (ideally, low growing native species like Blue Grama a.k.a. Bouteloua gracilis) and low growing, broad-leaved plants, such as clover (e.g. Trifolium), native violets (e.g. Early Blue Violet a.k.a. Viola adunca), pussytoes (Antennaria spp.) and yes, maybe even some dandelions. Broad-leaved plants provide pollinators with food, and some species, like legumes, naturally add nitrogen to the soil, reducing the need for fertilizers. In shady areas where grass won’t grow well anyway, ground covers of taller, native plants like Ostrich Fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), Western Canada Violet (Viola canadensis) and Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis) are great alternatives.

Trying to keep your lawn “weed” free is like running on a treadmill: you spend lots of energy but you never get anywhere. Why not embrace the diversity of plant life, and save your money and back-breaking labour for something else?

When I tell people I am writing a book that describes all of the plants that grow in Manitoba, they are often incredulous. “Don’t we already know how many plants species there are in Manitoba” they ask. Sadly, the answer is no. 

Believe it or not, botanists documented and collected two flowers that were not believed to grow in the province, for the first time ever in 2021. White Avens (Geum canadense) and Tawny Cottongrass (Eriophorum virgatum) grow in northern Minnesota and western Ontario. However, they had never been scientifically collected in Manitoba before. These species join 268 other species of vascular plants that have been scientifically collected since the publication of the “Flora of Manitoba” book in 1957. 

Further, the Royal Alberta Museum’s moss specialist, Dr. Richard Caners, also recently collected 34 species of moss that had not yet been officially documented in Manitoba. So, on average, nearly five new plant species have been added to our provincial list of flora each year for the last 65 years. 

You don’t even need to do field work to find new species! In the last several years, Museum volunteers discovered several previously unknown species in the Museum’s collection of pressed, dried plants. These preserved plants, called “herbarium specimens”, officially confirm the presence of species in the province. Along with the specimen, data on when and where it was collected are provided. The Manitoba Museum alone has over 50,000 of these herbarium specimens. What makes them so valuable is that they can be examined by experts without having to travel back to the area where the plant was collected. Scientists use them to determine the rarity of species, and understand how the climate has changed over time, among other things. 

One of my jobs as Curator is to make sure that all our plants are identified correctly.  This requires studying the  most up-to-date scientific research. While examining specimens of Yellow Evening-primrose (Oenothera biennis), my volunteer and I determined that two specimens were, in fact, a species that was not confirmed to be in Manitoba until very recently: Oakes’ Evening-primrose (O. oakesiana). 

So why are scientists still finding new plants in Manitoba? Part of the reason is that scientific field collecting is poorly funded. There is a widespread perception that Canada is well-explored biologically, and that there is nothing unusual left to find here. So, such expeditions are typically deemed unimportant and not funded. Another reason is that Manitoba has relatively few roads in the northern ¾’s of the province. This makes it very difficult, and expensive, for scientists to visit pristine areas where rare plants may grow. 

When I say that a plant species is “new” to the province, what I mean is that no scientist had collected, preserved and stored a sample of that species in a registered herbarium.  This does not mean, however, that no one has ever seen the plant. Someone may have seen it, but not realized that it was anything unusual. 

As the stewards of large tracts of undisturbed land, Manitoba’s Indigenous peoples are likely aware of the presence of plant species that professional botanists do not know much about. The Manitoba Museum is beginning to work with Indigenous peoples to incorporate their knowledge on the distribution and rarity of the province’s plants into our database. 

When most people think of plants, they typically picture flowers: cherry trees in bloom, colourful tulips and exotic-looking orchids. This is because 90% of all living plant species are flowering plants (i.e., angiosperms). But when dinosaurs first evolved 225 million years ago (mya), flowers were nowhere to be found.

The first land plants did not produce seeds; instead, they reproduced using spores. Like amphibians, they needed water for reproduction, which restricted them to habitats that were moist. These spore-producing plants included mosses, liverworts, club mosses, horsetails, ferns and several, completely extinct plant groups called Rhyniophytes and Zosterophylls. When the first dinosaurs evolved in the Triassic Period (252-201 mya), spore-producing plants, like tree ferns and human-sized quillworts (e.g. Pleuromeia), were common (Palmer et al. 2009). Although these sorts of plants still exist today, their ancestors looked much different than the ones we are familiar with.

Above: Many modern flowering plants, such as Early Yellow Locoweed (Oxytropis campestris), coevolved with pollinating insects, such as bumblebees (Bombus). © Manitoba Museum

So, when you visit the Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibit at the Manitoba Museum during summer 2022, remember to look closely at the murals behind the dinos. They accurately portray the kinds of plants that supported those ancient creatures so long ago.

Mural art from the Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibit showing ancient vegetation communities. © Ultimate Dinosaurs Presented by Science Museum of Minnesota. Created and Produced by the Royal Ontario Museum. Mural Artist: Julius Csotoyi

References

Benton, M.J., Wilf, P. and Sauquet, H., 2022. The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution and the origins of modern biodiversity. New Phytologist, 233(5), pp.2017-2035.

Condamine, F.L., Silvestro, D., Koppelhus, E.B. and Antonelli, A., 2020. The rise of angiosperms pushed conifers to decline during global cooling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(46), pp. 28867-28875.

Cui, D.F., Hou, Y., Yin, P. and Wang, X., 2021. A Jurassic flower bud from the Jurassic of China. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 521.

Palmer, D., Lamb, S., Gavira Guerrero, A. and Frances, P. 2009. Prehistoric life: the definitive visual history of life on earth. New York, N.Y., DK Pub.

Like many of you, I am eagerly awaiting spring so that I can start planting my vegetable garden. There’s nothing better than eating bruschetta with freshly harvested vine-ripened tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) and steamed green beans (Phaseolus sp.) with fried cream (see recipes at the end). My mouth drools just thinking about it! But the funny thing about tomatoes and green beans is that they are not actually vegetables: they are fruits masquerading as vegetables.

In fact, there are many other things we think of as vegetables that are actually fruits: avocados (Persea americana), cucumber (Cucumis sativus), eggplant (Solanum melongena), okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), olives (Olea europaea), peppers (Capsicum spp.), snow peas (Pisum sativum), squashes including pumpkin (Cucurbita spp.), tomatillos (Physalis spp.) and zucchini (Cucurbita pepo). We tend to define fruits as plant parts that are sweet and vegetables as plant parts that are not sweet. However, botanically, a fruit is a ripened ovary that contains seeds inside it, so all of the aforementioned plants meet the definition of a “fruit”, even though we rarely eat them the way we eat fruit (in a pie with ice cream!). For this reason, some people call them “vegetable fruits”.

Complicating things further is the fact that the fleshy parts of some “fruits”, like apples (Malus domesticus), pears (Pyrus spp.) and strawberries (Fragaria spp.), are not actually ripened ovaries at all, but greatly enlarged fleshy petals, or upper flower stalks.

“Aha” you might be thinking, what about bananas (Musa spp.)?  They don’t have seeds. You may have noticed though, that there are little black specks inside bananas; those are tiny ovules (unfertilized seeds) that never ripened  because the plants are sterile. Since people don’t usually like spitting out seeds, plant breeders have found ways to produce sterile, seedless varieties (often with an odd number of chromosomes) of certain plants such as citrus fruits, watermelons (Citrullus lanatus) and bananas.

There are actually four different kinds of vegetables, which vary according to the part of the plant you are actually eating: roots, stems, leaves, or inflorescences. Root vegetables are either fairly slender taproots (e.g. carrots or Daucus carota), or swollen, tuberous roots (e.g. sweet potato or Ipomoea batatas).  Roots store starch that the plant can use the following year to grow new leaves.

The non-green parts of bulbs, like onions (Allium cepa), are actually special, fleshy leaves that store starch. Some vegetables, like broccoli (Brassica oleracea), actually consist of upper stems and unopened flowers, known as inflorescences. See the table below to find out what your favorite vegetables actually are.

To finish off, here are two of my favourite “vegetable fruit” recipes. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to wait a few more months to try them.

Coarsely chop however many fresh tomatoes you want to eat, and put in a bowl. Mix in coarsely chopped onions and some sliced fresh basil. Pour in enough olive oil and balsamic vinegar to generously coat. Season with salt and pepper and toss. Let sit for 15 minutes. Heap onto garlic toast and savour the flavour of summer!

Steam fresh yellow or green wax beans until tender. Meanwhile, finely chop some onion and sauté with butter till golden over medium heat. Add cream to pan and cook, stirring until thickened. Add paprika, salt and pepper to taste. Pour over cooked beans and toss. Bon appétit!