Friday Fabulous Flower - Here's all the anthers.

Midsummer is an interesting time for our gardens.  Lots of lilies of all sorts for color, but then several white flowered species.  But the queen of the shade gardens is this black snake root (lots of common names, but it is not a well-known plant here in the upper Midwest) (formerly Cimicifuga racemosa, now Actea racemosa just as good old Linnaeus proposed).  The tall (5'+) branched racemes of white flowers show up very nicely in the light shade it prefers.  The flowers have no sepals or petals, just a cluster of a hundred or so stamens surrounding a single pistil.  The odor is described as a sweet and fetid, to which TPP adds musky, and it attracts an array of pollen foraging insects: flies, gnats, beetles.  Although a bit hard to get established, the plants are tough and long-lived. This is a member of the buttercup family which has a number of species whose flowers only have anthers.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Black snake root

Black snake root (Actea (formerly Cimicifuga) simplex) is a great shade-loving, fall flowering plant. The bright white bottle brush inflorescences standing up 3-4' tall are quite striking in shady borders that don't have much else going on this time of year.  Another member of the buttercup family, you don't have to worry about them getting nibbled on.  The showiness of the flowers is primarily the function of the stamen filaments with a little bit of help from some petal like bracts. The flowers are very fragrant in a sweetish, musky, pheromone sort of fashion attracting quite an array of insects so no idea which are effective pollinators.  Many new varieties exist with bronze to purple vegetation of much dissected leaves.  These are terrific plants for shady border areas.

Friday Fabulous Flower - black cohosh & total flowering events for 2015

The waning days of October finally feel, and look, like fall having transitioned from summer like weather all in 30 days. Enough leaves have now fallen that the lawn is now hidden in many places, and in a couple of weeks we'll eagerly await the magic of leaf elves to clean them all up. TPP used to fight with a monstrous machine, a Billy Goat, to vacuum up leaves 8 cubic feet at a time, but all the lugging of the bags of leaves, not to mention the exertion of yanking on its pull starting motor a few dozen times, just got to be too much. Ah, well, the point here was to extol some spots of fall color, some fall flowering. The last flower standing this year, sort of a hellebore in seasonal reverse, was a black cohosh (or snakeroot) (Actea, formerly Cimicifuga, racemosa), funny family those buttercups. It was one genus when it was planted, now it's another and you would hardly notice any difference at all. This year it easily beat the wolfbane for last place not flowering until 20 October, and if our records are correct, and they always are, the addition of some new species combined with relatively few "did not flower" entries, helped our total number of perennial flowering events in the garden top out at 302, the first time the total was over 300. The Phactors are very pleased, but until the database if brought up to date, and the data entered for 2015, 2014, and 2013, it won't be official.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Black Cohosh

As the garden season winds down there are fewer choices for Friday's fabulous flower, but then a favorite plant decided to bloom, so here you go, the black cohosh, or black snakeroot, or black bugbane, none of which make this native of the north eastern North America sound very nice. In a bit of a twist, modern molecular studies have determined that this plant belongs in the genus Actea (A. racemosa), where good old Linnaeus placed it all those centuries ago based on pure morphology; for the past century it had been in the genus Cimicifuga. But no matter the name, it's the same plant, and a member of the buttercup family, which surprises people who aren't familiar with its diversity. What you actually see is an inflorescence where the floral display is largely composed of stamen filaments and a smallish single perianth whorl, a bit like mimosoid legumes. Small flowers arranged like this in either "bottle brushes" or "powder puffs" function as diverse pollinators move over the outside of the inflorescence. Once established, and this must be said, they are slow, these are great perennials under the shade of hardwood trees.