Friday Fabulous Flower - What's in a name?

Lots of familiar spring flowers are getting their names changed, and sometimes it is very annoying.  And this is one of those cases and it's not just because TPP's brain  has been using some of these names for over 50 years and doesn't change gears as fast as it used to.  One of our earliest of woodland ephemeral perennials is called "liverleaf" because last year's persistent leaves have turned a dark, purple-brown (a color not unlike that of a liver) and they are 3-lobed (like a liver).  To the herbalist this was a sign that this plant could be used for liver ailments (probably not), but the name sort of said it all.  Now de Candolle certainly knew this when he named the plant Hepatica. 
Generally this plant grows on slopes in woodlands.  A member of the buttercup family, the flowers have a variable number of petals like part in a range of say 6-9, with three bracts beneath.  Their color is often white, but they can range to pink and purple.  In out gardens they seem to like be tucked away in little places between the roots of big trees.  The plants tend to be maybe 6-7" across.  Ours took quite some time and repeated starts to get established and now the reward is finding a seedling every now and again.  The first image shows the purplish color form (a seedling) and the second a mature plant in full bloom.
Some people have shifted this species to the genus Anemone. Some people don't think H. acutiloba is not a distinct species. And TPP wishes everyone could make up their minds.  But for now it will remain Hepatica in TPP's memory database.

Friday fabulous flower - yellow lawn edition

This isn't the first time TPP has blogged about this neighborhood side lawn, but it's just so damned cheerful to see this early every spring.  The Phactors have long had blue lawns (see links on above page) and the first harbingers of blue are poking up here and there before the entire lawn turns blue, but this hedgerow of yellow (Eranthis hyemalis - Winter aconite, buttercup family) has been here for more than half a century showing that if you just don't disturb things, plants can do well.  This little bulb (corm) is a bit hard to get going sometimes, and while the tree rats don't eat them, they do dig them up when newly planted.  And then they flower, fruit, and disperse their seed until eventually you have a bed of early spring golden-yellow.

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.

Native plant sort of

TPP is not a native plant purist because he is also a compulsive plant collector.  Hey, everything is native somewhere.  However in a rather gray area are cultivars of native plants where the species is native, but cultivars exist.  Generally these grow fine because the basic genome is adapted to your area.  Here's one of these problematic plants that is a quite handsome spring woodland ephemeral, rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides formerly Anemonella thalictroides - buttercup family)(Yes, another taxonomic change that is messing with 40+ years of memory).  The cultivar has pinky-purple foliage more or less retaining a juvenile character because young shoots are more pigmented than the mature foliage.  The cultivar also has some pigmentation in the flowers, which are more or less white in the wild.  And the flower is doubled, so stamens develop as petalloid sepals.  In the wild the flowers can have 5-10 petalloid sepals (It always bothered students when the number was 6 and they head the wrong way in the ID key) and the color is variable with naturally occurring pinky flowers not uncommon, but never seen a wild one doubled.  However this is not an unusual type of developmental aberration in the buttercup family. How can you not like this little plant? It's cute. Those flowers are not quite an inch in diameter and as you can determine both  from the date and the leaf litter, they flower early.

Friday Fabulous "Flower" - Winter aconite

Although our estate is home to a great variety of perennials, our former residence still had a few things still lacking. Mrs. Phactor is trying to remedy that situation. Here's one of her recent successes even with the diligent efforts of our sciurious wildlife to dig up everything planted. Winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) is one of those plants sometimes referred to as "wolfbanes" and maybe you shouldn't try determining the edibility through trial and error (it might be your last mistake though). How very cheerful that this plant flowers as early as any spring flower, and because it's a woodland native (in Europe), it will do quite nicely in lawn and/or under trees, so almost everyone has space for this plant. The flowers are about 2 cm across, and while not huge, in masses, in early spring, they can produce quite an attractive display against the leaf litter. In looking at these flowers you will see the hallmarks of the buttercup family displayed quite nicely.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Japanese Anemone

Another late fall bloomer, the Japanese Anemone (Anemone x hybrida 'Prince Henry') is still hanging on in the garden because there hasn't been enough of a frost to damage it yet. Anemones are another member of the Buttercup family, which favors either spring or fall flowering and all seem quite tolerant of cold. Like many other members of the family, there is only a single perianth whorl of many petalloid sepals, or for those of us who shy away from commitment, tepals, surrounging many stamens and a domed receptacle bearing many pistils. Yes, that should just scream, "I'm a member of the Ranunculaceae to all students of plant taxonomy." The name anemone comes from the Greek root for wind, and thus their common name windflower, but this gets confused with Pulsatilla, which uses the same common name. In both genera as well as Clematis, each pistil becomes an achene and each bears a persistent style that becomes a fluffy appendage to aid in wind dispersal. So either the radiating perianth or the "writhing" mass of styles were thought similar to the radiating arms of the sea anemone because why else name a sessile marine animal after the wind?

Friday Fabulous Flower - Wolfsbane

How appropriate that the fabulous flower featured close to Halloween should be wolfsbane (Aconitum uncinatum), also known as monkshood, a reference to the helmet-shaped upper perianth part (part of a petalloid calyx). These common names are applied generally to all the species, although some try to restrict wolfsbane to A. lycoctonum, a creamy flowered species of Europe. No question a plant as toxic as wolfsbane could keep werewolves at bay; this is not an edible plant, period. In terms of habit wolfsbane grows rather like a coarse larkspur, both being members of the buttercup family, but the wolfsbane prefers moist wooded areas, and so while the Phactor's estate has plenty of shade, things are a bit too dry for wolfsbane and it struggles in late summer. Nonetheless, wolfsbane/monkshood is a great addition to a perennial garden because its tough, generally trouble free, and best of all it flowers in October, the last of all our perennitals to bloom.