Life is like the morning dew, and alas, the days gone by are so many

Fleeting Years

 Faye Wong

Faye Wong 

00:00/04:37

Purple Heart

Tradescantia pallida cv. purpurea

Aliases: purple spiderwort, purple mosaic plant

Commelinaceae, genus Tradescantia

Perennial herb

The Purple Heart's overall flowering period is very long, blooming from late spring all the way into late autumn, but a single small flower lasts only a few short hours from blooming to fading.

In its brief individual life, the Purple Heart displays an unforgettable beauty.

Three small pink petals, with six fuzzy stamens at the center of the flower, topped with golden-yellow anthers. Does it seem plain and unremarkable? Then you would be wrong. There is a great deal of cunning here, revealing the Purple Heart's evolutionary wisdom.

Take, for example, the golden-yellow anthers. At first I only noticed their peculiar shape, because they look very much like the Qing-dynasty liangbatou headdresses worn by the likes of Wei Yingluo. But why golden yellow?

In the Japanese horticulturist Sooshin Yanagimura's "Book of Weeds," speaking of the golden anthers of the Asiatic dayflower, he says, "It is said that insects are not sensitive to red and blue, but are easily attracted by white and yellow, so the stamens of red-series and blue-series flowers are usually white or yellow, or bear golden-yellow pollen. This is a means of attracting pollinating insects." It fits perfectly. Among the Purple Heart flowers, I have many times encountered hoverflies busily munching pollen.

Does it look like Wei Yingluo's Qing-dynasty liangbatou?

Successfully hooked

The way the Purple Heart's stamens are attached was also something I encountered for the first time: the six stamens are not evenly attached to the three petals, but rather one petal bears one stamen, one petal bears two stamens, and another petal bears three stamens. One would think that in a radially symmetrical flower like this, the stamens should also be arranged symmetrically. This trait left a deep impression on me.

On the upper-middle part of the Purple Heart's purple filaments, there are long white tufts of hair. When magnified, one can see their unique shape - joined section by section like prayer beads, which in botany is called "moniliform hairs," and this too was my first encounter with them. These hairs are like a fox-fur neck wrap, setting off the Purple Heart's face as especially delicate; they also have a practical function: catching the pollen that falls, increasing the chances of successful pollination.

The moniliform hairs on the filaments (seen magnified)

When it blooms, its stamens mature first

The stigma is initially located at the center of the flower, and later clearly shifts to one side

The Purple Heart flower, so commonplace, so winding and secluded, and so, fascinating.

This series of exquisite touches is enough to prove the effort the Purple Heart makes to increase the quantity and quality of its offspring's genes. And yet, strangely, I have never found its fruit. A report from the Chengdu Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences says that the Purple Heart's natural seed-setting rate is extremely low, and even hand pollination rarely produces fruit. Clearly, the Purple Heart is the DINK of the plant world, usually reproducing by division.

Plants never do useless work that wastes effort. Since it does not set fruit, then what are all these elaborate contrivances for?

Outside the petals there are three sepals, semi-transparent with a slight pale green tint

The flowers cluster at the tips of the upper stems and branches, wrapped by two leaf-like bracts, and usually only one opens at a time

The exact reason is still undetermined. One speculated cause may be variation after being introduced to the country. The Purple Heart is native to the Gulf coast region of eastern Mexico; in tropical and semi-tropical regions, it was for quite a long time a popular and lively houseplant, but today it is more often grown outdoors as a groundcover.

Leaves alternate, with bases expanded into a stem-clasping sheath tube; both the mouth of the tube and the leaf margins have a ring of long white thread-like hairs

Stems thick, fleshy and juicy

In this country, the Purple Heart is also often called purple spiderwort or purple mosaic plant. Many friends, including my mother, simply call it violet. The great name of the violet I have heard many times since childhood, suffused with an imagined Western-style romance, and it appears often in Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school novels. But I had never seen the botanical violet, so this time I made a special point of finding pictures to look at.

Stock (Matthiola incana), Brassicaceae, genus Matthiola, native to southern Europe. Image: wiki commons

In urban landscaping, several other Commelinaceae plants are also very common, such as inch plant, spiderwort, and white spiderwort. According to the latest classification, they are now all placed in the genus Tradescantia. The English name of the genus Tradescantia is also very interesting, called "wandering Jew." Probably because they all have sprawling, trailing stems, and the habit of rooting wherever a stem node touches the ground?

Inch plant

Spiderwort, note the anthers are also golden yellow

White spiderwort, photographed by Zhichi

Heaven takes pity on the hidden grass; there is spiderwort, and there is also "dew grass" - that is the name of the Asiatic dayflower in Japan. Their flowers are exquisite and delicate, opening in the morning and fading by noon, just like the sparkling dewdrops on leaves in the early morning, vanishing in an instant. This is the common fate of many plants in the Commelinaceae family, so beautiful and so brief, making one lament and feel sorrow.

A person's life is one generation, grass and trees are one autumn; before the great god of eternal time, life is like a white horse flashing past a crack. Several thousand years ago, the ambitious and brilliant Cao Mengde struck the beat and sighed long, singing over wine, how long is life, like the morning dew, the days gone by are so many.

In the garden downstairs, the Purple Heart's small flowers bloom day after day, year after year, as charming as when I first met it. Yet I am long no longer the me of those years, and I imagine you are no longer the you of then either. In between, who knows how many fleeting years have secretly slipped by.

Notes:

1 The Purple Heart was introduced from abroad, which has caused its scientific name in our country to be quite confused; in different botanical records, the scientific name adopted is often different, bringing a certain difficulty to identification. This article adopts the scientific name Tradescantia pallida cv. purpurea, with Setcreasea purpurea and Setcreasea pallida treated as synonyms.

2 The genus name Tradescantia is named after the 17th-century English botanist and gardener to Charles I, John Tradescant, father and son; the species epithet pallida means "pale," which I think probably refers to the color of the back of its petals, which is indeed pale with a slight light purple. The cultivar name 'Purpurea' (sometimes also called 'Purple Heart') indicates that this is a horticultural cultivar with violet-colored stems and leaves. This species once won the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.