Category Archives: Prairie Plants

Spines, Thorns, and the Plant Game

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Ok, to be frank, this is kind of a weird post.  For some reason, during the last month or so, my brain has paid attention to spines and thorns as I’ve walked through prairies.  Given the relative scarcity of other photographic subjects, I’ve taken pictures of spines and thorns.  As a result, you get to see pictures of spines and thorns too.  I’m sorry.  To make it up to you, I added a couple more Plant Game questions to the end of the post because people seemed to enjoy them last time.  I still haven’t come up with the perfect name for the Plant Game, though I did appreciate the suggestions many of you provided.

While spines and thorns might seem like odd photo subjects, I’m hoping you’ll see some of the beauty I saw.  Plants employ them to help prevent herbivory, but if you look closely, those sharp pointy things are kind of pretty too.

Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) thorns. Hamilton County, Nebraska.

Buffalo bur (Solanum rostratum) seed pods. Hamilton County, Nebraska.

Honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) thorn.

Woods rose (Rosa woodsii). Hall County, Nebraska.

Well, there you go.  Spines and thorns.

Now…

PLANT GAME!

The rules are simple.  Just pick the fake plant name from each list.  Three of the names are official names of plants found in Nebraska.  The other is one that I made up.  Should be easy, right? GOOD LUCK.

 

Introducing “The Plant Game”

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Last fall, I invented a silly game to play at a staff gathering.  People seemed to enjoy it, so I’ve decided to test it out as a periodic feature here on the blog.

Plants, like all organisms, have both a common name and a Latin name.  Latin names (e.g., Dalea purpurea) are most useful to scientists, but common names (e.g., purple prairie clover) are easier for most of us to remember.  However, common names can also be really goofy.  In fact, some of them are almost unbelievable, and that is the basis for this game.

The point of the game is to look at four alleged plant names and guess which one of them I made up.  Three of the names are listed in The Flora of Nebraska as official plant names, but one is completely fake.  See if you can guess.  I’m hoping that even trained botanists will struggle with some of these because they tend to use Latin names more than common names.

Let’s see how this goes.  I’ll provide the correct answers in a blog post later this week.  (Don’t cheat – just guess.  It’s more fun that way.)

 

Oh, and it seems like we should have a better name for this than “The Plant Game”, so if you have suggestions, please let me know in the comments section below.  Puns are welcome.