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Post by steev on Jul 14, 2016 19:24:48 GMT -5
Not so robust; the avatar menu doesn't list "scrawny".
Could it be a perennial, growing larger each year, rather than a plant that makes offsets, the blooming part dying?
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 15, 2016 9:38:13 GMT -5
Theoretically I suppose, though most herbaceous thistles don't really work that way.
But I was more focused on the size of the buds. The bases of flowers in the aster family don't expand much as they transition into seed production. Think of a sunflower for example. The size of the sunflower's disc is pretty much the size of the seed pad down the road. It stretches a little as the edges of the pad are bent back by the growing seeds but not a lot. The biggest bud I can see (near the center) has about the same diameter as a nickel. With seeds about the size of a sunflower seed, that is a really small space. I suppose it is possible that this plant just makes an extremely small number of seeds per bloom, but again, that would be odd for a thistle which like most asters is really built to make a LOT of seed. It could also be an example of low pollination gigantism (when the pollination is low and the seed has a lot of free room, it often gets unusually large in some plants) but the fact that I started with so many of them, and they were ALL that size, seems to argue against this. And if it is simply a matter of the plant being less mature than I think, and the buds having not yet expanded to their full size that that is going to be one seriously top heavy plant! (I wonder if what we are looking at is an example of bad luck; a plant that due to soil is stunted and is making a flower-head before really having the requisite bulk of stem to support it. I hope not)
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