Tyler Smith#Bakeapple, male flower blooming in the shade of leather leaf and willow.
Photo Ewen 📷This is lovely! Thanks for sharing the link.
I had no idea these are called bakeapple. I've only travelled in the Scandinavian Arctic where they use "cloudberry" and "multe" instead.
And I've never seen them in flower, only in fruit. And I didn't know they were connected beneath the ground or that there were male and female plants.
Wonderful!
I wrote up a short update on my #bakeapple project in #Labrador. The primary audience is on Facebook, so my challenge now is to format it to make sense there. Somehow?
While I work on that, you can read it on the open web:
This shot gives a good sense of the scale of my world. The purple tinged leaves are #bakeapple. The black berries underneath are crowberries, locally called blackberries (Empetrum). The red berry is a cranberry (Vaccinium microcarpum).
The brown threads stretching up above everything else are moss sporophytes (probably Polytrichum?). They're the tallest thing here, and might get as high as 8cm.
Back in #Labrador to track #bakeapple production. This year's flowering started early and is so far extremely effusive!
A little concerned that I've arrived too early in #Labrador to collect the #bakeapple flowering data we need. But perhaps this is good news (for science): it could be we're experiencing an unusually bad berry year, and this *is* the peak bloom.
Which wouldn't be good for this year's harvest, but it would be great to capture an outlier like this for our analysis.
Really stretching for a silver lining :/
#bakeapple flower in June. I returned in August to collect fruit. When they're ripe, the sepals fold back revealing a delicious orange berry. This one is not quite ready - when it is the sepals will point down, not up, and the berry will have a deeper colour.
Here's a pair of #bakeapple flowers. Bakeapples have male and female plants, which makes them challenging to study, and difficult to cultivate.
