Re: bulbous drosera?

Barry Meyers-Rice (barry@as.arizona.edu)
Thu, 4 Nov 93 23:14:07 MST

I'm afraid that in this argument, I'm going to throw my voice in with
Michael "I-Hate-Sarracenia" Chamberland. My morphology reference notes the
presence of the leaf sheaves in a bulb, and classifies bulbs as primarily
a modified arrangement of leaves. Meanwhile, tubers are modified roots.
Tubers have root caps (at least when young) and do not have a regular
sequence of scale leaves subtending buds. While I cannot comment usefully
on the first part, I have observed many _Drosera_ "tubers" with these
scale leaves.

I have cut a few tubers apart in my day, both accidentally and purposefully.
The tissue seems devoid of structure, so I don't think they're bulbs. The
scale leaves argue against tubers. So this leaves me with corms or possibly
something else called a "stem tuber" which is just a thickened underground
stem, and sometimes similar to a rhizome. But a corm seems to be more
appropriate.

I just looked at a few other reference sources, and one (a basic botany
text) classes the "tubers" of a potato as a tuber, even though it clearly
bears buds in spiral arrangement and would seem to be more like a corm.
My prime morphology reference I mentioned in paragraphs 1,2 classifies
the potatoe as a stem tuber.

B