A New Flower Blooms for Bunny Mellon

A New Flower Blooms for Bunny Mellon

By Peter Crane

Research at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation has named a new flower in honor of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon on the tenth anniversary of her death.

Professor Else Marie Friis of Aarhus University, who participated in the project, placing a specimen for advanced X-ray imaging at the Swiss Light Source, a synchrotron facility in Switzerland.

Photograph Peter Crane

The flower, given the scientific name Racheliflora virginiensis, bloomed here in Virginia 110 million years ago. It was discovered in samples of ancient clays collected near Petersburg as part of project to learn what fossils can tell us about the origin of flowers.

Artist’s reconstruction of a flower of Racheliflora virginiensis. The flower is less than a sixteenth of an inch across. The structure is accurate but the color is imaginary.

Drawing by Pollyanna von Knorring

Less than 2mm across, the fossil flower is tiny compared to flowers of its living relatives but could be studied using advanced X-ray imaging at the Swiss Light Source, a synchrotron facility in Switzerland.

Although known from just three specimens, X-ray images reveal what the different parts of the flower looked like and make possible an accurate artists reconstruction, with only the color left to the imagination.

Research with Danish colleagues shows that the flower is related to modern day sweetshrub, and more distantly to pawpaw, magnolia, and sassafras.

Sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus) a near living relative of Racheliflora virginiensis. One of many horticultural varieties with a flower almost three inches across.

Photograph Peter Crane

Several sites on the Virginia coastal plain have rocks of the right kind and the right age to preserve ancient fossil flowers. Their study helps understand how plants with flowers have transformed the world over the past 130 million years.

We all depend on these plants and the energy that they harvest from the sun. Mrs. Mellon was a tireless advocate for the importance of plants and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation was her way to help ensure that they are never taken for granted.