Beautiful NOT-Thorns

Can thorns be beautiful? You bet! And, I'll show you some. Can we call things by their wrong name? You bet! And, I'll tell you what I mean.
We have all seen thorny, prickly, sharp thingies in our gardens and the gardens we visited. Those thingies, if we accidentally touch them, make us say 'Ouch' or 'Shoot' or something worse.

I, for example, have a thorny gooseberry:

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Don't praise me for growing such a producing plant. If not for this picture from 2006, I could forget how abundant it could be!

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Even some cucumbers have prickly little thingies. Those who don't like them may grow a Japanese cucumber with a smooth skin. But, the spikes will fall off upon plant maturity or can be rubbed off. By the way, a cucumber is a fruit, not a vegetable...

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Good thing is cucumber' sharpies are not as sharp as those on cacti!

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Do you think cacti has them to protect its beautiful flowers?

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This cream flower, above, I found in Arizona. The white one, below, is from Hawaii:

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The scary thing with small cute leaves is also from Hawaii:
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Its heart-shaped leaves are well protected!
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Some plants don't need additional protection. Their leaves and needles are sharp enough, like on this Monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana, native to Chile and Argentina) which grows in a pot in my garden:
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It's more painful to touch them than let's say these fir needles:
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Everything that was shown above was just an appetizer. Those were not the things which caused me to publish this post. The actual reason was the plant we often think of first when we hear the word 'thorns'. What are those plants? ... Correct! Roses!

Roses' thorns are not actually thorns. They are prickles!

There are three types of sharp structures on plants: thorns, spines and prickles. As our friend Wikipedia says, they have similar appearance and function, but arrived from different plant organs. All three are hard structures with sharp, pointy ends, which are generally used by plants for protection against herbivores. Let's add - for conserving the water in spines.

Thorns are modified branches or stems, spines are modified leaves, and prickles are needle-like extensions of the cortex and epidermis. (Cortex - outer layer of the stem or root of a plant. Epidermis is a single-layered group of cells that covers plants leaves, flowers, roots and stems).

The roses I want to show are not those from my garden, with 'normal' thorns... pardon me, prickles and big flowers:
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They are from the beautiful garden of Katie which we visited this summer. See the tall thick canes? They certainly add a vertical effect to a flower bed:

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A closer look reveals another attraction, bright red prickles:

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This is a Wingthorn rose - Rosa sericea pteracantha (introduced from W. China in 1890):

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I like its fine, disease-free foliage too. With the striking combination of huge blood-red prickles and gracious leaves, this plant attracts everyone's attention.

The flowers are single, white with only four petals (the image is from Wikipedia):

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An excellent article about this rose is here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/4325363/How-to-grow-winged-thorn-rose.html

The author, Val Bourne, recommends planting it where 'winter sun can slant through and backlight the stems'. She also names 'Heather Muir' as a hybrid which produces a long crop of single white flowers bossed with golden stems.
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So, roses have prickles, cucumbers have them too, cacti have spines... Who has thorns? Lemon, pomegranate, wood-apple... You can name more if you know...

Copyright 2010 TatyanaS