Ericaceae (er-i-KAY-see-ee)
Iconic Features
- Usually shrubs or trees
- Peeling bark
- Leathery, simple leaves
- Urn- or bell-shaped flowers
Description (Jepson)
- Eudicotyledons (eudicots) – a major lineage of flowering plants including most plants traditionally described as dicots and generally characterized by
- 2 seed leaves (dicotyledon)
- Netted (reticulate) leaf venation
- Flower parts in fours and fives
- Pollen grains with 3 pores (tricolpate)
- Vascular bundles in stem arranged in a ring
- Taproot system
- Herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and trees
- Bark often with distinctive peeling
- Leaves
- Simple (not divided into leaflets)
- Alternate (1 leaf at each junction with stem) or opposite (2 leaves at each junction with stem)
- Evergreen or deciduous; often leathery
- Flowers
- Inflorescence (flower arrangement) in many forms
- Generally bisexual and radially symmetrical flowers, often bell- or urn-shaped
- Anthers open by pores or slits
- Ovary superior (above the attachment of other flower parts) or inferior (below the attachment of other flower parts)
- Fruit is a berry (a usually multi-seeded fruit with a fleshy ovary wall), a drupe (a fleshy fruit with usually 1 seed in a hard inner shell — a stone fruit), or capsule (a dry, multi-chambered fruit that splits open at maturity)
Notes
- Approximately 3,000 species worldwide
- Includes blueberries, rhododendrons, azaleas, heathers, and manzanitas
- Adapted to grow on acidic, nutrient-poor, sandy soils
- Many plants in this family (e.g. manzanitas and madrones) are pollinated most effectively by sonication or “buzz pollination”
- Flowers have specialized “poricidal,” tube-shaped anthers containing firmly-attached pollen and having, unlike most anthers, small openings, like a salt shaker, which regulate the dispersal of pollen
- Only bumblebees, along with a few other native bees, can release this pollen by grasping the flower with their legs or mouthparts and vibrating their flight muscles without moving their wings (See video Buzz Pollination)
- Vibrating bees may generate forces 50 times that of gravity–that’s 5 times what fighter jet pilots experience (U. of Stirling 2020)–causing pollen to “blast out” of the anthers (Zimmer 2013)
- Buzz-pollinating bees make a distinctive, middle-C “raspberry” sound, which is higher pitched than the buzz of flight (Rosenthal 2008)
- Only about 9% of the world’s flowers are buzz pollinated (Buchmann 1985)
- A number of important agricultural crops, such as tomatoes and potatoes, require buzz pollination
- Poricidal anthers have evolved several times in disparate plant families, an example of convergent evolution (de Luca and Vellejo-Marin 2013)
- Scientific name from the included genus Erica, from the Latin for “heath”
- Also known as the Blueberry family
- Represented by 4 species at Edgewood
Specific References
Buchmann, S.L. 1985. Bees use vibration to aid pollen collection from non-poricidal flowers. Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society 58: 517-525. JSTOR.
de Luca, P.A. and M. Vellejo-Marin. 2013. What’s the “buzz” about? The ecology and evolutionary significance of buzz pollination. Current Opinion in Plant Biology 16: 429-435.
University of Stirling. 2020, Jul. 29. Bees’ buzz is more powerful for pollination, than for defense or flight. ScienceDaily.
Zimmer, C. 2013, Jul. 11. Unraveling the pollinating secrets of a bee’s buzz. New York Times.
Browse Some Edgewood Plants in this Family
