Edited by Richard Walker, Sunday, 5 Aug 2018, 23:10
Yesterday I found a fine stand of teasels.
These are common teasels but a close relative, or perhaps just a cultivated variety, apparently with hooked spines, was once used for raising the nap on fabrics such as velvet.
It literally teased out the fibres. The suffix -le is an Old English or Middle English formation that indicates an instrument, a thing for something. There are other examples: a thimble is an instrument for a thumb; a handle for a hand; a shovel may shove; a beetle may bite, and a weevil may weave (a cocoon).
The botanical name is Dipsacus, from Greek διψακος = thirst (think dipsomaniac) which seems to come from the way the connate leaf arrangment leads to small pools of water collecting around the stem.
Traditionally the teasel is also called (amongst many things) Venus’s basin/bath/cup, presumably for this feature. Small insects may fall into the water, so naturalists have often speculated that the teasel may be semi-carnivorous (compare Venus fly-trap). Francis Darwin wrote on this [1].
But there was no hard evidence, until a recent study [2] provided support for this idea. Researchers fed teasels with insects. The teasels didn't grow faster or bigger, but they did produces significantly more seed.
[1] Darwin, Francis. “On the Protrusion of Protoplasmic Filaments from the
Glandular Hairs of the Common Teasel (Dipsacus Sylvestris). [Abstract].”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. 26, 1877, pp. 4–8. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/113363.
New blog post
Yesterday I found a fine stand of teasels.
These are common teasels but a close relative, or perhaps just a cultivated variety, apparently with hooked spines, was once used for raising the nap on fabrics such as velvet.
It literally teased out the fibres. The suffix -le is an Old English or Middle English formation that indicates an instrument, a thing for something. There are other examples: a thimble is an instrument for a thumb; a handle for a hand; a shovel may shove; a beetle may bite, and a weevil may weave (a cocoon).
The botanical name is Dipsacus, from Greek διψακος = thirst (think dipsomaniac) which seems to come from the way the connate leaf arrangment leads to small pools of water collecting around the stem.
Traditionally the teasel is also called (amongst many things) Venus’s basin/bath/cup, presumably for this feature. Small insects may fall into the water, so naturalists have often speculated that the teasel may be semi-carnivorous (compare Venus fly-trap). Francis Darwin wrote on this [1].
But there was no hard evidence, until a recent study [2] provided support for this idea. Researchers fed teasels with insects. The teasels didn't grow faster or bigger, but they did produces significantly more seed.
[1] Darwin, Francis. “On the Protrusion of Protoplasmic Filaments from the Glandular Hairs of the Common Teasel (Dipsacus Sylvestris). [Abstract].” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. 26, 1877, pp. 4–8. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/113363.
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017935
Picture credit: http://ww2.rspb.org.uk/community/wildlife/homesforwildlife/b/gardeningforwildlife/archive/2011/12/26/teasing-the-goldfinches.aspx