As was the case last week with the Star-Apple flower based on seven - its symmetry also departing from its normal number five - horticultural manipulation of important species often screws up the genes so that you get species doing weird things. In Nature, Physalis species - usually weedy, and called ground-cherries or Chinese-lanterns - almost always bear five-lobed calyxes and corollas, and five stamens. Flowers with a symmetry based on six usually are limited to monocotyledonous species such as those in the Lily, Iris and Amaryllis Families. They taste so good that I like to just eat them raw, one after the other.īy the way, maybe you noticed that the flower in the picture bore six calyx lobes, or sepals, six corolla lobes and six stamens. However, they do belong to the same plant family, the Black Nightshade Family or Solanaceae, which also holds the potato, tobacco, chili pepper and petunias.Īround here everyone knows about the plant because the fruits are much used in a tasty but not hot, green sauce. Since regular red tomatoes are in the genus Lycopersicon, you can see that Husk Tomatoes/ Tomatillos, in the genus Physalis, aren't too closely related. When the bladders fall to the ground, fall and early-winter wind often rolls them, with the fruits and seeds inside them, across the ground for long distances - wind dissemination. Also, the mature fruits of wild Physalis species I know up North fill only a small portion of their bladders, so the bladders are mostly filled with air. Insects can't simply light on the fruit and begin eating or depositing eggs there. You can imagine the benefit a juicy fruit has from being suspended inside a bladder. Eventually the mature, tasty "tomato" will fill the bladder. On the right one side of the bladder has been torn away to show the immature, tomato-like fruit suspended inside. In that picture the image at the left shows how the "balloon" looks now hanging on the plant.
The fruit becomes something like a small, immature, green tomato suspended inside the papery, balloon-like calyx, looking like a Chinese lantern, as shown below: In the genus Physalis the calyx is important because it does something extraordinary: After the flower is pollinated and the ovary begins growing into a fruit, the corolla falls off but the calyx begins enlarging rapidly, soon completely inclosing the fruit. You can see a bug-eaten but vigorous sprout above.Ī 3/4-inch wide (1.8 cm) flower - back side on the left, frontal view on the right - is shown below:Ī back view of the flower is included so you can see the green calyx subtending the yellow corolla. As if to compensate for that, my Tomatillos, PHYSALIS IXOCARPA of the Nightshade Family, are four feet high (1.2 m), loaded with flowers, and fruits are starting to form. Nematodes are killing all my tomato plants. From the SeptemNewsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins, central Yucatán, MÉXICO
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