Melianthus major fruit

Pale, yellow-green Melianthus major fruit replace the erect raceme of dark flowers, covering their sturdy stalk densely. The stalked, pendulous fruits are inflated or balloon-like, four-lobed to four-winged or four-cornered. The leathery lobes are vertically ridged and hairless, gradually sloping to the recessed seams where they join in a samara structure. The lobes continue in elaborate curves at top and particularly the bottom, where the style may persist in the centre.

Some ripening fruit in picture are beginning to turn red. Ripe seeds are black and shiny, without arils.

The bluish grey leaves in picture seem to avoid being green in an opposite direction to which the fruits do it. The greener, the more chlorophyll and capacity to photosynthesise. The riper the fruit, the less their skins are also able to synthesise. The bluish leaves of M. major are not short of chlorophyll and photosynthesise normally, but mask their capacity under a powdery wax layer, some blue pigment present in the outer epidermis. The wax layer reduces transpiration.

Some leaves have microscopic surface structures that scatter the blue light in short wavelengths, therefore not pigment but physics, like the blue of a bird’s feather. Blue-grey leaves reflect more infrared and ultraviolet, reducing both overheating and light damage, a useful attribute in drought conditions. Bluish or glaucous leaves also deter herbivores from some memory of taste, toughness or bitterness. They should be ignorant of low nutrient value, even if that instinctive knowledge and behaviour came via evolution.

Nobody knows everything about what benefits him or her (Curtis-Scott, et al, 2020; Manning, 2007; Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; Bond and Goldblatt, 1984; iNaturalist; https://biologyinsights.com; https://gardenfrontier.com).