Dahlia

by Roy Winkelman

I’m starting a new series with this photo post. I usually send photos back to the staff at the FCIT offices in Tampa, Florida, each week. Recently, one of the staff commented about how much she enjoyed receiving an interesting photo amidst all the work-related email that drops into her in-box each day. She suggested that we should end each newsletter with a photo just to enjoy. Or share with students.

This is a photo I took of a dahlia at the Munich-Nymphenburg Botanical Garden in Munich, Germany about five years ago. It’s on FCIT’s ClipPix ETC website where you can find over 200 other images of dalias and over 350 other photos from the Botanischer Garten Muenchen-Nymphenburg. Note that all photos on this site are available in three different sizes of JPEGS. You can also download the high-resolution TIFF image using the “original” link that appears in the top right corner of each page.

For those who want to make curriculum connections, you may want to consider:

1. Symmetry. Compare this photo with over 200 other examples of radial symmetry.

Or compare it to one of over 100 examples of rotational symmetry from the ClipArt ETC website.

2. Color. Compare the photo with a small group of others with a dominate yellow-orange color scheme.

3. Medium. Compare the full-color photo of the dahlia with black-and-white line drawings from the ClipArt ETC website. What information are color phots better at conveying? What information are line drawings better at conveying? What would be the reasons to use one instead of the other in certain circumstances?

Question of the Month. Looking at the gallery of dahlia photos there is such a diverse range of flower forms that many of them look unrelated to each other. What is the genetic reason that the dahlia family manifests such great diversity of form?