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FrontRangeLiving.com -> Outdoors -> Lilies and Irises
 Monocots Revealed: Lilies and Irises
By Niki Hayden
Wild irises and lilies prefer their solitude—often only one or two blooms
pop up where there’s enough moisture. Each is so showy and perfect you’d
think the bright blossoms came directly from a florist’s shop. But these are
examples of just how spectacular nature can be without the tinkering of any
gardener. Iris missouriensis can be found along the foothills in spring,
usually located in a low spot that collects water. Lilium philadelphicum,
the rare and endangered Wood lily, is occasionally discovered in moist montane
meadows. Rocky Mountain National Park is home to a few.
Yellow glacier lilies, Erythronium
grandiflorum, show up on mountainsides in the Indian Peak Wilderness and the
mariposa lily, Calochortun gunnisonii, true to its name, can be found in
the Gunnison area. All share a few common characteristics: they are three-petaled
flowers, grow from a rhizome or bulb and belong to one of two major branches of
flowering plants—the monocotyledons.
 Over
100 million years ago, monocots and dicots separated. Or so botanists believe. A few
debate that the two groups never diverged neatly and point to water lilies
and other flowering plants that appear to have attributes of both groups. But
this is not much of a point to debate. There's plenty of evidence in our
gardens.
For example, monocots grow far differently than dicots. Monocots include onions and
asparagus, grasses and bulbs, palm trees and orchids. These are plants that grow
up rather than out and come with clearly parallel veins. Consider a palm tree,
which grows tall and slender, without real wood but a kind of overlapping of
tough scales. Compare that to an oak with its substantial girth and circular
trunk rings.
Dicots usually have leaves with branching veins, like a rose leaf. Yet these two
major groups of flowering plants are equally successful. Quite often in nature,
when plants or animals branch out, one branch succeeds while another fails. But
in this case, flowering plant families diverged and both flourished,
although they arrived later than other plants on the evolutionary stage. Flowering plants developed
later in botanical evolution than did conifers or ferns.
A flower is complex and linked to the evolution of pollinators like
hummingbirds and bees, too. Looking
closely at the two major branches of flowering plants, monocotyledons and
dicotyledons, is a new way to think about wildflowers and evolution.
Scientifically speaking, a monocot is a flowering plant that sends out one leaf
from its seed. A dicot sends out two. But it’s far easier to look at flowering
plants and recognize more obvious characteristics.
Today we plant tulip and daffodil bulbs, irises and garlic, without noticing
how closely their characteristics reveal an identical origin as monocots. Roses
and fruit trees, clover and cacti, sunflowers and grapevines--all have branching
leaves and many grow as wide as tall—all are dicots. And they often are
compatible in one form or another throughout the world. Yuccas, blue grama grass
and mariposa lily--all monocots, flourish alongside gambel oak, asters and wild
roses—all dicots.
 A few other obvious characteristics separate monocots from dicots. Monocot
flowers, like iris and lilies, come in petals of three. Dicots, like
wild roses, arrive with five. Other dicots may have combinations of four. Many
monocots have smooth leaves; dicots might have serrated or roughly edged leaves.
Monocots are herbaceous—green and rather tender. Dicots can be both
herbaceous, like a mint, but also woody, like a shrub. A dicot has one extensive
root, with branching roots, much like a branching tree. A monocot has a root
with equally branching rootlets and no single strong root, like a leek. It’s as if nature
gave both flowering groups a chance of survival with differing basic elements.
Both siblings not only survived, but also prospered.
 Next time you’re planting a daylily, eating a banana, harvesting corn or
considering anything made from bamboo, you are looking at the monocot family.
Or, if you are picking an apple, cooking with olive oil, reaching for maple
syrup, planting a daisy, enjoying an orange or grapefruit—you are among the
dicots. In the wild, it’s even easier to spot the two major branches because
the flowers and leaves will be obvious. In the Colorado foothills and mountains,
lilies and iris are the obvious monocots with their brightly colored petals of
three, grassy foliage and vertical growth. The stems are fleshy rather than
woody and their leaves have parallel veins and smooth edges. But that’s just
the beginning of closely inspecting wild plants. In no time, the differences
between these siblings become obvious. You’ll never be able to look at another
flowering plant and not recognize which group of plants it evolved from whether
you’re in the desert or tropics, high altitude or sea level, forest or plains.
The compatible siblings live together in harmony nearly everywhere around the
world.
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