Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The five petals are joined into a shallow wheel that pulls away as a single piece, and the leaves run singly up the stem with no {stipules} where each stalk meets it. The genus name is an old Roman plant word whose derivation is still argued, most often traced to a Latin term for comfort or soothing after the sedative compounds running through its relatives. Flower stalks push out of the stem between or opposite the leaves rather than from the notch above a leaf, a by-product of the way the shoot keeps stepping sideways as it grows. Five stout yellow {anthers} lean together into a hollow cone around the {style} and release their {pollen} only through tiny holes at the tips, so a bumblebee has to grip and vibrate them. A hand lens turns the grey felt on young stems and leaf undersides into {stellate} hairs, each branching from a single point like a tiny star. Every green part is bitter with steroidal {glycoalkaloids} such as solasonine and solamargine, which is why the foliage is inedible although the ripe fruit is a staple across three continents. The species epithet entered botanical Latin in the sixteenth century from an Arabic name for the crop, a word that had already travelled west from Sanskrit through Persian. One plant carries flowers with long styles and flowers with short ones, a pattern called {heterostyly}, and only the long-styled flowers set fruit reliably while the shortest set none at all. The pale flesh is a foam of air-filled cells that collapses in a hot pan and drinks cooking oil, and a cut face browns within minutes of meeting the air. It sulks and drops its flowers unset when soil stays below about 70°F (21°C), so gardeners outside the warm parts of Asia where it was domesticated grow it as a high-summer annual. A Japanese tradition ranks the luckiest subjects of the year's first dream as Mount Fuji, then a hawk, then this plant's fruit. This Sicilian heirloom is the mild one: squat round to teardrop fruits 5 to 7 inches (13 to 18 cm) across, lavender skin washing to white at the blossom end, and dense creamy flesh with almost no seed.

Accepted Answer

Solanum melongena 'Rosa Bianca'

Name That Plant #106