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The other day in the medieval garden of the Pedralbes monastery in Barcelona I contemplated these beautiful jopo de las beans flowers, which I have photographed for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos.
Their shape and colors make them attractive, as can be seen in the images, but what has caught my attention the most is that they cannot live on their own. They need the solidarity of other plants, but in reality it is not such, since it is parasitic.
This can end up being a problem for orchards, since the bean jopo is a plant that parasitizes other plants. They grow year after year in the same place and on the same plants.
How does the bean jopo work? Well, it is a plant that does not have roots, that connects to the plant on which it is parasitic through a germ tube and, from that moment on, it will depend on this other plant in order to survive. But, of course, at the cost of infecting its host.
The seed of the broad bean jopo can last up to 15 years in the ground. And to give us an idea, each plant produces 500,000 seeds or more each time the cycle ends.
