Stray Ecological Notes

1. Scarcity of fruit setting. In some Malesian plants from the rain-forest it is striking that fruit setting on the inflorescence is very late. Many flowers, sometimes hundreds, are produced without ever setting fruit and the entire inflorescence may finally bear but very few fruits situated at the end of a stalk which is often densely covered with bracts. This suggests a discrepancy of correlation between vegetative and reproductive growth which appears unbalanced. Such a balance can easily be upset artificially, by removing the ovaries of flowers after anthesis. I remember having this demonstrated in our private garden with a cultivated foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, which grew so long that I had to use a chair to stand on for reaching the top of the raceme which became thinner and thinner, but still went on producing flowers until the frost in end November put an end to the experiment. By then the raceme was about two metres long.