Turbo Pudding
It’s Thursday, so here’s the real story behind one of the sleepiest spots in Lullalotl. In Snoozy Shallows, the sixth pond, two of the lilies take naps. Real flowers do that too, and some keep stranger hours than anything in Moonlit Hollow.
The picture at the top is Snoozy Shallows at night. Pip, the little green bunny with a leaf on its head, has dozed off on a night lily that is taking its nap, and a small “z” floats up above. Each night lily stays shut for two and a half seconds of every twelve, and a friend on a closed lily dozes and can’t sing. The hint: “This lily naps now and then. Wait for it!”
Plants that go to sleep
Botanists call it nyctinasty: a plant moving as darkness comes on, or, in plain words, a plant “sleeping.” Petals close at dusk, and the leaves of many plants in the pea family fold up for the night.
People noticed a long time ago. The earliest record goes back to 324 BC, when Androsthenes of Thasos, a companion of Alexander the Great, saw the leaves of a tamarind tree open by day and close by night. In 1729, Carl Linnaeus proposed that the plants were simply sleeping. Charles Darwin thought closing up at night helps a plant avoid freezing. Another idea is that it keeps pollen dry overnight, while most pollinating insects rest.
The blue lotus keeps office hours
The blue lotus of Egypt is a true water lily. Its flower opens in the middle of the morning and closes near dusk. The closing is done by the sepals, the four green, leaflike parts on the outside of the flower. Cut them off, and the flower can’t close anymore.
In ancient Egypt, the blue lotus stood for the sun and for rebirth, and it appears on the walls of the temple of Karnak. Its cousin, the white Egyptian lotus, keeps the opposite hours and blooms at night.
A giant that opens at sunset
In the Amazon basin grows the giant water lily, Victoria amazonica. Its leaves reach 10 feet across, and its flowers start to open as the sun goes down.
On the first evening, the flower is white and gives off a fruity smell, and scarab beetles fly in. At nightfall, it stops smelling and closes, with the beetles inside. They spend the next day shut in a little room lined with soft, starchy tissue they can eat, while the petals turn from white to reddish pink. On the evening of the second day, the flower opens enough to let the beetles out. They leave covered in pollen, off to the next flower.
The lotus that keeps itself warm
In Lullalotl, lotuses open where songs meet. From the second pond on, two ripples that meet make a Harmony Bloom: a lotus opens on the spot and sings like a friend, as long as one of the rings is yours. Each lotus stays for eight seconds, and up to six can bloom at once. The Lotus garden in the shop makes them last longer and lets more bloom together.
The real sacred lotus has a trick of its own. Its flowers keep themselves at 86 to 95 °F, even when the air is as cold as 50 °F. Researchers think the warmth may help draw in cold-blooded insects that pollinate it. Its leaves shed water so well that drops bead up and roll off, taking dirt with them. In 1994, a lotus seed about 1,300 years old, found in a dry lakebed in northeastern China, sprouted.
Dandelions keep hours too
Dandelion heads are usually open in sunlight or on warmer days and closed at night. Their seeds are built for travel. Each one hangs under a fluffy plume that spins the air into a little ring, which stays attached to the seed. Most seeds land a few meters away, but a tiny share, 0.014%, fly more than half a mile, and some go as far as 62 miles. That’s the farthest known flight of any plant that travels on the wind alone.
Lullalotl’s dandelion is Puff, a round little chick and dandelion in one. Puff’s special move is a sneeze: “Ah-choo! Three seeds fly off and start three new ripples.” In Dandelion Drift, the seventh pond, a current carries the rings and the seeds along.
A clock made of flowers
Linnaeus went one step further. In 1751, he described a horologium florae, a “flower clock”: a garden of plants that open or close at set times of day, so you could read the hour from the flower beds. He may never have planted one. Several botanical gardens tried it in the first decades of the 1800s, with mixed success, since weather and the seasons shift when flowers open.
Back in Moonlit Hollow
Lullalotl’s ponds keep a clock of their own: lilies nap and wake, lotuses open where two songs cross, and Puff sends seeds out on the current. The first two ponds are free to play in your browser at lullalotl.com, Harmony Bloom included. The full game, all ten ponds, is $4.99, paid once, with Snoozy Shallows and Dandelion Drift in it. More about the game is on its Lullalotl page.
