Not quite a native Ripley Countian - she attended only her last year of high school in Doniphan though she taught in the R-1 system for 32 years - Teresa (Pearson) Lee delights in surprising readers and herself with anecdotal observations of life in general. Maybe you can blame her St.Louis roots for a quirky humor and some slightly-askewed opinions, but never doubt she writes from the heart.

Nyct...Huh?

Posted Wednesday, June 24, 2020, at 3:45 PM

One of my favorite summertime views at the former Grapes of Held Winery here in Ripley County.

Nyctinasty. It isn’t fiction. It isn’t a figment of artificial intelligence. It’s creation... and news to me. I must have slept through that lesson in science because I think I would have remembered writing that word on a vocabulary list and learning to pronounce it. (nik-TIN-eh-stee in Lee phonetics - initial pronunciation attempts were heavy on the ‘nasty’ part)

It isn’t one of those words I scrounge around for; it has never been on the tip of my tongue. I threw out an “I wonder’ for the sake of chat on a road trip, never expecting an answer. I wonder about a lot of stuff, most rather insignificant. My fella Albert caught that ball and took off running. He fumbled with the exact word for the process, but hey! He knew there was a word for it. And he remembered the purpose of that process he couldn’t quite label. (College botany classes were a long time ago).

I wondered why some flowers draw their petals in at night. That random question was triggered by the magnificent sightings of the brilliant orange tiger daylilies adorning Ripley County highways and byways, stately gracing ditch banks and adorning manicured and carefree landscapes alike. It’s enchanting! They bloom a long time, they spread profusely, and they are easy to dig up and start a new patch on an otherwise unsightly slope. I know from experience because I eagerly watch the changes from summer to summer on a particular rocky bank that now sports a bit of orange transplanted from my tiger lily beds.

So why do some flowers close up at nighttime? For one, it keeps dew from making pollen too heavy for pollinators to transport. Draw up, stay dry, open back up in the sunlight, and Mother Nature can do her thing with greater ease. Scientists theorize it might also help the scents of the blossoms to last longer - another invitation to those VIP's - very important pollinators. Highly evolved flowers and plants that close at night might be helping nocturnal predators like owls see potentially harmful herbivores. There is more than meets the eye in those vibrant orange blossoms decorating Ripley County roadways! And I might now have an edge in a trivia contest since that nyctinasty is embedded in my gray matter.