I was very kindly hosted by Dr. Tal Levanony, the Curator of Tel Aviv Botanic Gardens, for my short but immensely enjoyable visit to this delightful plant collection, in the late afternoon. The Garden has a number of focal areas, including extensive and impressive succulent collections and a tropical greenhouse.
Tel Aviv Botanic Gardens, a view of part of the extensive succulent collection.
The Israel native and widely used plant, Moringa peregrina (Forssk.) Fiori, flowers and fruit. Growing in Tel Aviv Botanic Garden.
But it was the specialisation in Israeli native plants and habitats that was of most significance to my visit, most interest because of its novelty to me, and direct relevance because it included an accession of Papyrus. This part of the collection was planted in as close approximation to the natural conditions of the habitat in question as resources permitted. One habitat represented is the wetlands of the Hula Valley.
The plant held in Tel Aviv BG hails originally from the Hula Valley Nature Reserve, and, therefore, although cultivated provides another opportunity to detect genetic variation – there must be only an extremely small chance it came from the same plant that I collected sample culms from a couple of days ago. Because cultivated, it provides another opportunity, assuming close genetic affinity, if not complete genetic correspondence with the Hula Valley material, to compare the effect of cultivation and by inference the effect of variation in growth conditions on the morphotypes of this plant compared to the ones I collected at Hula and Agamon. Given the huge scale of morphological variation in this species, it is clear that we need to take advantage of every opportunity we can to amass evidence of ecological, edaphic, and other physical impacts on the growth and phenotypic expression of plants of this species, and that plants of known provenance grown in entirely different conditions are an invaluable source of such information.
Cyperus papyrus in Tel Aviv Botanic Gardens, swathed in climbing plants at the base, growing in a wetland area.
Just one plant is grown in a recreated wetland area which included familiar associate species such as Phragmites and Cyperus dives, and therefore with consideration for its vitality, one stem only was collected. Like other material collected previously, it was selected for being at anthesis, the most appropriate stage for full morphometric analysis, since some of the key diagnostic characters of Chiovenda and Kükenthal are floristic and particularly of the anthers themselves.
I am very grateful to Dr. Levanony for so enthusiastically supplying this sample and recognising the value of the extended study in which we are involved.
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