Saturday 21 April 2012

A Fasciated Dandelion

Fasciated (cristate) Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale.  Nashenden Down Nature Reserve, 14 April 2012.
Fasciated (cristate) Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale.  Nashenden Down Nature Reserve, 14 April 2012.
This odd-looking flower is a Dandelion flower whose growing point has been attacked by something, perhaps a virus or a gall wasp, so that instead of growing as a round single stem it has spread out like a fan.  The general term for plants affected this way is fasciated, which means formed into a bundle.  This fan-like formation is called cristate, meaning crested.  It is quite common in cultivated cacti, but I don't see it very often in the wild.

Here is the whole plant, and if you compare this to a normal Dandelion rosette, you can see from this rather confused mass of growth why a name meaning "bundled" was applied.

Fasciated Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale.  Nashenden Down Nature Reserve, 14 April 2012.

1 comment:

  1. As Gellett Burgess said of the purple cow, I'd rather see than be one. In a sensient mammal this would be rather like a cancer or like being part of incompletely separate quartuplets. Cats born with six toes, especially on the hind paws, are not uncommon.

    ReplyDelete