Nature's Stained Glass Windows

Looking like a stained glass window, this is the remains of the seed pod of one of last summer's garden flowers, Lunaria annua (commonly known as honesty, because the dry seed pods resemble silver coins), magnified around two hundred times and viewed using polarised light.

When honesty seed pods ripen they are flattened and composed of three components. Imagine three large 'coins' joined to each other all around their rims, with the central 'coin' attached to the plant via a stalk. Swelling seeds are attached to the rim of both faces of the central 'coin' via their own slender stalks, visible when sunlight shines through the whole structure.

When the pod dries out and ripens the tensions in the drying, contracting cells of the walls of the 'coins' tear them apart around their rims, so the two outer 'coins' detach and flutter away in the breeze, followed by the winged seeds, leaving the central 'coin' attached to the dead plant and surviving deep into winter.

These are the cells of that central, surviving 'coin' magnified about one hundred times and using ordinary white light....

      

... and these are the dazzling interference colours generated when polarised light is used.

          

At two hundred times magnification it's clear that the 'coin' is formed from two layers of cells, orientated at different angles, so that the tensions they develop when they dry will twist and distort the 'coin' and help to rip apart the sutures with the outer 'coins'.

       

 At four hundred times magnification you can clearly see the pores through the thick cell walls which were the plasmodesmata - the channels of communication between the cytoplasmic contents of one cell and the next, while the whole structure was still alive and the seeds were still developing.

The dry, dead cells form intricate patterns...

... whose colours change as they are rotated in the plane of the polarised light.

Getting a Grip

The colour of a flower is the result of a combination of the floral pigments contained in the petal cells and the optical characteristics of the cells themselves, which is why the colour of flowers in photographs doesn’t always correspond exactly with what the eye sees. The cells walls act like lenses, bending and scattering light rays, producing optical effects that combine with the floral pigment colours to produce unique hues, so even a brick red geranium flower shows a bluish tinge from certain angles (bottom picture). These photos show the cells on the surface of a geranium (Pelargonium) petal, which in surface view look like a patchwork blanket, with the patches stitched together (second picture from bottom x100). A side-on view reveals that each cell is actually shaped like a small hill, and that the ‘stitches’ are really pleats (third picture from bottom x100 and fourth picture from bottom x200). The conical cells are typical of many petal surfaces of flowers visited by insects. So why are they this shape? Their lens-like properties contribute to flower colours but their shape and surface texture seems to have evolved to give the claws of pollinating insects like bees (top picture x100) something to grip. By the clever use of mutant forms of snapdragon that have flat, smooth petal surface cells rather than conical ones, Dr. Beverley Glover at Cambridge University’s Department of Plant Sciences has shown that bees avoid smooth petal surfaces because it’s difficult for their claws to grip them and gain enough purchase to force their tongues into the flower. So ultimately it’s the necessity of giving insects a foothold that has produced petal cells with optical properties that add complexity and subtlety to flower colours. There's more about Dr. Glover's research in this web site http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8049954.stm