The bird of paradise family
Strelitziaceae is one of the smallest families on this site, three genera and a handful of species, and every one of them is a large dramatic plant. It also contains a flower that works as a machine and a tree pollinated by lemurs.
three genera
around seven species
Southern Africa, Madagascar and northern South America
Everything in this guide that belongs to Strelitziaceae
The whole family comes to about seven species. One genus is southern African and holds the bird of paradise and the tree sized white one that turns up in every warm city as a landscape plant. One is confined to Madagascar. One is South American.
They are all built the same way, and it is a banana's way: no woody trunk, but a tall column made of the wrapped bases of enormous paddle shaped leaves, growing from the middle and pushing the older leaves outward. In wind the leaf blades tear along the veins into strips, which looks like damage and is not; the splitting lets the wind through instead of taking the whole plant over.
The flowers come out of a boat shaped bract held sideways on the stem, which is the family signature and the reason the thing reads as a head and a beak.
The arrow is the working part. Two of the three inner petals are fused along their edges into a narrow closed trough, and the pollen bearing anthers and the style are shut inside it, hidden and protected. Nothing can reach them by pushing at the flower from outside.
It opens by weight. A bird landing on the arrow to reach the nectar below presses the two halves apart along the seam, the anthers are exposed underneath its feet, and pollen is smeared onto the feet and legs. When the bird lifts off, the trough springs shut again and is ready for the next one, and a single flower can be worked over and over.
Pollen on the feet is unusual. Most bird pollinated flowers put it on the forehead or the bill, where the bird cannot easily preen it away. This family instead built a perch and turned the act of standing on it into the mechanism, which is why the arrow is stiff enough to hold a bird and why it sits exactly where it does.
The Madagascan member is one of the strangest trees anywhere. It grows its leaves in a single flat plane, so a mature plant is an enormous fan standing on a trunk, symmetrical from one side and nearly invisible edge on. It is not a palm and is not closely related to palms.
Its name comes from the cupped leaf bases, which collect and hold rainwater that can be tapped by cutting into them, an old piece of traveler's advice that works and produces water nobody would drink by choice.
The interesting part is who pollinates it. The flowers are large, tough, and hold a great deal of nectar behind bracts too stiff for an insect or a small bird to open. The black and white ruffed lemur forces them apart with its hands and its muzzle and drinks, carrying pollen on its face between trees. Pollination by a primate is known from very few plants in the world, and this is the clearest example of it.
The order this family belongs to is a good one to know, because its members share that habit of wrapping flowers in a colored bract. Bananas are in it, and so are the gingers, the cannas, the prayer plants and the heliconias. Anything with waxy paddle leaves and flowers emerging from a boat is likely to be somewhere in this group.
The family's oddest discovery is chemical. Bird of paradise seeds are black with a shock of brilliant orange fiber attached, and when that orange was analyzed it turned out to be bilirubin, the pigment that colors a healing bruise and, in excess, causes jaundice. It had been considered an animal pigment, produced when the body breaks down old blood. Finding a plant making it was genuinely unexpected, and it has since been looked for and found elsewhere.