Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Linnaeus simply kept the plain classical Latin noun that Roman farmers already used for this climbing plant, so its genus is an ancient field word promoted into botany unchanged. Every {tendril} and every young flower cluster erupts from the stem directly opposite a leaf rather than from the angle above it, because each one is a shoot that traded growing onward for gripping. Its minute five-parted flowers never open in the usual way: the {petals} stay welded at their tips and lift off together as a single green cap, the {calyptra}, leaving five {stamens} standing one before each fallen petal above a fleshy {nectary} ring. Cut an old stem lengthwise and the {pith} runs tan to brown, sealed off by a woody {diaphragm} at every {node}, while the bark of mature wood hangs away in long fibrous shreds. Its forked {tendrils} grip only by wrapping around something narrow, since their tips stay naked and never broaden into the adhesive pads that let close relatives haul themselves up bare brick. Along each season's shoot the {tendrils} keep a strict rhythm, two consecutive {nodes} bearing one and the third bearing none, where its North American cousins carry one at nearly every {node}. Its wild populations run from Iberia and the Mediterranean through central Europe to the Caucasus and the Caspian, hauling themselves 30 to 50 feet (9 to 15 m) into riverside trees. In the wild it is {dioecious}, with male and female flowers on separate plants, yet almost every cultivated selection bears perfect flowers that set fruit unaided, a change traced to a small sex-determining region of one chromosome and arguably the single event that made the crop possible. Its epithet is a two-word Latin compound meaning bearing wine, which states the plant's entire economic history in one breath. Its {berries} hang in heavy pendulous bunches, each fruit {glaucous} with a wax bloom that wipes away under a thumb and holding as many as four pear-shaped seeds in two chambers. After a root-feeding aphid from North America reached France in 1863 and destroyed close to half the country's plantings, growers rescued the crop by grafting European wood onto resistant American {rootstock}, still standard practice across the world. Thousands of named selections of this one species, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay and Sultana among them, supply very nearly all of the world's wine, raisins and dessert fruit.

Accepted Answer

Vitis vinifera

Name That Plant #035