Mystery shrub no more

The mystery shrub at reference 1 turns out to be a koelreuteria paniculata, a small tree from east Asia. It comes with various names, one of which is Indian rain tree and another is golden rain tree.

I tried quite hard to get this identification from either google or bing, using a variety of search terms including either or both of lantern or pinnate. I even tried the google image search facility using the illustration at reference 1 - which did quite a good job of turning up all kinds of strange and wonderful plants - but not the one in question.

While taking a detail from the middle of the illustration, just a few seed pods and leaves, turned up the cry baby tree. Red flowers rather than red seed pods, but quite a good attempt. Especially when one considers that this image search knows nothing - at least I assume it knows nothing - of botany.

That apart, the best I could do was that maybe it was some kind of sumac, with the leaves being roughly right but the flowers being all wrong. Sumacs usually have distinctive red inflorescences, but no sign of lanterns. Would I have done better had I realised the red lanterns were seed pods rather than flowers?

It remains a puzzle that no-one has seen fit to build a decent plant identification application - something which would make a nice project for a computer minded botanist, a species which one might have thought was reasonably common these days. Something which could maybe leverage the google image search engine. Maybe leverage the wikipedia approach to the crowd building of knowledge. And if one had stomach for the long game, there must be lots of computerised catalogues of one sort of another which one could draw on. Maybe I shall have some brain waves and have a go myself; do enough to get some proper people like Kew or Wisley interested.

But then, the bird identification application offered by that very rich charity, the RSPB, is pretty useless, despite there being a lot fewer species of birds than there are of plants. So maybe there is some catch that I have not thought of.

With thanks to the staff of the Old Moat Garden Centre for this identification.

PS: when I feed the google search engine the picture included above, from wikipedia, it comes up with the right answer straight away. As it does if I just clip a bit out of the middle of the picture and give it that. Maybe they do a special job on all the images to be found in wikipedia.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/mystery-shrub.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koelreuteria_paniculata.