A stroll down many forest trails, through shaded lengths where the trees form a bower that shields their saplings from heavy-handed invasions of botanical nursing grounds, is likely to bring one pass many a shrub with compound foliage consisting of seven long leaflets with a toothed margin. Modest stilts are often present at the base of large treelets, an adaptation that may give Leea indica a measure of support in swampy woods and the soft soils of back mangroves.
Named after James Lee, a horticultural collaborator of Carl Linnaeus, Leea is an Old World genus of slightly woody shrubs, small trees or erect herbs that thrive in secondary fringes or riparian forests. Four species are known from Singapore, but two are locally extinct while a tiny population of Leea angulata teeters on a coastal hill besieged by harbourfront developments. Imported sprigs of Leea rubra grow at Bukit Timah, their native conspecifics having long lost their foothills to the advances of a garden city, but Leea aequata, which provided the lectotype for the genus, has never returned to its former haunts in Ang Mo Kio and Pulau Blakang Mati. Only the bandicoot berry survives in reasonable numbers, a feat that could be attributed to its catholic taste in habitats as well as its rare appeal to a host of pollinators and seed dispersers.
Plants in bloom, which risk dismissal by shallow primates for their plain, greenish-white flowers, are magnets for creatures of greater discernment. The inflorescences, bursting from long peduncles on a broad, complicated cyme, consist of small heads with a bell-shaped calyx and a corolla with reflexed lobes. Within these tiny vases are receptacular tissues and glands that emit no discernible scent but must reek of ambrosia, for butterflies, bees, wasps, beetles, ants and true flies flock to these stations and indulge themselves at length, lowering their usual guard to the approach of curious bodies and risking, in their apparent intoxication, the snares of crab spiders, praying mantids, agile salticids and assassin bugs. Posies, boldly coloured hairstreaks in the genus Drupadia, abandon their restless fluttering to partake of extrafloral secretions, but most other butterflies – quakers, bluebottles, fluffy tits, yellow veined lancers, Malay lacewings, planes, snow flats, common grass yellows, chestnut bobs, ancyra blues, common four rings, starry bobs, chocolate grass yellows and Malayan five rings – simply land on the fleshy buds, unfurl their proboscises and drink in their fill. Hoverflies, blue-banded bees and potter wasps also join the feast, which continues late in the day and probably concludes only when the jugs run dry and commence their transformation into purplish black berries, which fit the gapes of bulbuls and fruit doves, returning, as it were, the favours of a community that's always on the wing but seldom, if ever, in concert.
Comments