Plant Portraits 1. Columbines

 With this post, I begin a new series, featuring fanciful AI-assisted illustrations of plants in the context of their natural environments and their historical relationships to human culture. As always, they are intended to be informational, botanically accurate, hopefully entertaining, and free of all advertisement or monetization. However, these portraits may be somewhat speculative  in nature, particularly those with historical or cultural components. They combine elements assembled widely from internet sources, and rendered with modern AI tools. they may also be somewhat idealized in that they display flowers in greater abundance and more perfect condition than usually found, and with animals that are often hard to see in nature. These are imaginary pictures I wish I could see, but they are all intended to provide enlightenment as well as enjoyment. NO REAL PEOPLE APPEAR IN ANY OF THESE IMAGES.

The use of AI is much discussed and debated these days. Is it harmful or beneficial? It is both of course. Every bit of technology, since the first rock picked up by an unnamed hominid ancestor, can be used to help or to harm. The AI genie is out of the bottle, and the lid is lost. It's a tool we can use where it is helpful, though we must try our best to control its darker side. For the plant pictures presented here, the results were irresistibly stunning.

That said, this first post returns to the subject of my very first blog on this site: my favorite flowers, the columbines, of the genus Aquilegia (famiily Ranunculaceae). There are roughly 70 species of this genus, mostly in North America and Eurasia. There has been some limited use of this genus in folk medicine, for such things as treating head lice and cleansing the skin, but toxic cyanogenic glycosides in their tissues dictate very careful dosages, and they are seldom used anymore. Columbine seeds and plants, however. are of multimillion dollar value in the horticultural trade.

Aquilegias are one of the few genera of flowering plants capable of producing pigments in all colors of the rainbow (Think about it. What other genera do you know have that versatility?) Typically, flowers in this genus have a long nectar spur extending from each of the five petals, the length reflecting the feeding organs of the birds, butterflies, hawkmoths or bees that feed in them. You'll see one exception below. 

The western red columbine, Aquilegia formosa, is found widely in the western mountains of North America. It is seen here in the lower left, in the alpine meadow of Paradise, in Mt. Rainier National Park, along with purple lupines, scarlet Indian paintbrush and the seed heads of Anemone occidentalis. Red columbines are pollinated primarily by hummingbirds.

The Colorado blue columbine, Aquilegia coerulea, lights up a meadow near the Grand Teton range in Wyoming. It is pollinated primarily by bumblebees and hawkmoths, but occasionally by hummingbirds.

The rarely seen Aquilegia jonesii is endemic to the northern Rocky Mountains, and occurs in open, rocky habitats at high altitudes. They are pollinated primarily by bumblebees during the short alpine summer.

In this imaginary setting, prehistoric indigenous Hopi children admire the blooms of the western yellow columbine, Aquilegia chrysantha, growing in damp soil by a stream. The Hopi's iconic cliff dwellings are in the back. Western yellow columbines are pollinated primarily by hawkmoths, sometimes in the nighttime, or occasionally by hummngbirds.

A family of the Bai ethnic group of western China, is dressed for a celebration and walking past clumps of pink-flowered Aquilegia ecalcarata, a species lacking the usual nectar spurs on its petals. It is  pollinated by short-tongued insects like syrphid (hover) flies.