… One of the top questions we have been getting about Spike the titan arum is “How do you know how much water to give it?” The care and feeding that we have given Spike and its fellow titan arums—our … Titan arums require well-maintained conditions of high humidity and high temperature—similar to their natural conditions in the tropical rainforests of Sumatra. Therefore, the cultivation is …
Type: Blog
… & Blooms exhibition features a huge variety of live butterflies. One interesting example is Caligo atreus, also known as the yellow-edged owl, or our favorite: the magnificent owl. … (You will typically see the eyespots when the butterflies’ wings are closed.) This is thought to help them ward off predators. Caligo translates to “darkness,” which corresponds to the fact that they prefer to fly in the early morning before …
Type: Blog
… A striking century plant is putting on a show in the final stages of its life—it’s blooming for the first and only time in … at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Agave ocahui is known as the century plant because people used to think it flowered only once every 100 years. A more accurate estimate is that it blooms once after 25 to 30 years of growth. The Garden’s century plant came from The Huntington Library, Art …
Type: Blog
… A longtime favorite of staff and visitors alike, the zebra longwing ( Heliconius charitonius ) is native from South America to south Texas and Florida, and occasionally an immigrant can be found as far north as Nebraska! … One very interesting thing about these beauties is that they roost communally in groups of 25 to 30 butterflies. In the Butterflies & Blooms exhibition, they tend to use the same branch night …
Type: Blog
… This is the story of a road trip I took with some corpse flowers, the rock stars of the plant world. … at bloom time—a hybrid of week-old gym socks and a rotting mouse that you just can’t seem to find in your kitchen. The Garden began collecting titan arums, or corpse flowers, in 2003. There’s a worldwide conservation effort to preserve the species, as it is considered “vulnerable”—unless the circumstances threatening …
Type: Blog
… which monarchs lay their eggs, and its caterpillars, also called larvae, eat milkweed leaves to grow. But these plants have other interesting characteristics, including blooms that are amazingly complex. Milkweeds are found mostly in open prairies and savannas and are known to most by their fruits, which are pod-like structures (follicles) that split open to release … milkweed (A. verticillata) , which often can be found at the very edge of highways where there is little competition or dry pastures and degraded prairies, and swamp milkweed (A. incarnata) , …
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… you may find this plant: You can’t miss the orange flowers of this jewelweed, but look closer to find the seedpod hanging below and to the right of the third blossom. Its scientific name is Impatiens capensis , and jewelweed has some interesting features that make it worth getting …
Type: Blog
… We humans have used technology to become masters of communication. But we are far from the only species with an impressive array … Scarlet Mormon (Papilio rumanzovia) Photo by Bill Bishoff Consider the butterfly’s ability to see ultraviolet light. UV light is a spectrum of light between 10 and 400 nanometers that humans and most other animals cannot …
Type: Blog
… the sedges and grasses along side the trail. (This was when my hearing was still acute enough to detect such high-frequency sounds.) It took me a while, but based on the emphatic commotion, I … are technically known as insectivorous mammals. Insectivores are critters that depend, to a large extent, on invertebrates, mostly insects, for their survival. I wasn’t sure which … in length, with the tail being about a quarter of the length of the body and head combined. It is by far the largest of the shrews we will see here. They are generally a velvety, dark gray …
Type: Blog
… a fair bit of brewing myself. Despite seemingly endless beer varieties, beer making boils down to just a few basic ingredients. So what’s really happening during the major steps in the brewing … process? And what do all those colorful beer-making terms mean? Malted (germinated) barley is used as a base in beer and scotch. Photo via Finlay McWalter, Wikimedia Commons. GFDL A … carbohydrates will feed the yeasts during fermentation. The brewer doesn’t want the grain seed to completely germinate, though—if it did, the embryo would “eat” all of the food reserves, …
Type: Blog
