PHENOLOGICAL REPORT
The quince by the fence
Always the first to blossom
Has already begun to
Shed its festoons of pink paper
A single sweetpea out front
One bloom on the Joseph's Coat out back
Three calla lilies, purple, almost black
Freesias like little censers
The lilac and the redbud
About to explode in a riot of color
Hoping that this will be
My year to flower too
Blumenbeet (Flower Bed) -- Paul Klee
Charles Morren, the director of the Jardin botanique de l’Université de Liège, coined the term "phenology" (from the Greek "phaino" [to show, make to appear] and "logos" [study]) for a public lecture in 1849. Its first use in a scientific paper was in his “Souvenirs phénologiques de l’hiver 1852-1853” (“Phenological memories of the winter 1852-1853”), which described an exceptionally warm winter when plants exhibited unusual growth patterns. Phenology is the study of periodic life cycle events and how these are influenced by variations in climate and habitat factors (such as elevation) and the time frames for seasonal biological phenomena, including the dates of last appearance (e.g., the seasonal phenology of a species may be from April through September). Examples include the date leaves and flowers emerge, the first appearance of migratory birds, the first flight of butterflies, when deciduous trees turn color, the dates of bird egg-laying, and the timing of the developmental cycles of honey bee colonies. (In 1837 Morren himself had discovered that the vanilla flower is pollinated by the Melipone bee, which lived only in Mexico, and used that information to develop a method for artificial hand pollination, but the method was financially unworkable.In 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave on the French island of Île Bourbon (modern La Réunion) in the Indian Ocean, discovered how to use a thin stick or blade of grass to lift the rostellum, the flap that separates the male anther from the female stigma, and then use the thumbs to smear the sticky pollen from the anther over the stigma. Later, after slavery was abolished, Albius was sentenced to 10 years in prison for theft but was pardoned after 5 years due to his role in making Réunion the world's biggest supplier of vanilla.)
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