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 - wild ramp

Today's FFF is often a surprise to people because they just don't expect it.  Wild ramps, Allium tricoccum, are a native woodland plant, an interesting spring ephemeral.  The distinctive broad, oniony leaves emerge in the early spring, and disappear again after just a few weeks.  Then in mid to late July flowering stalks appear bearing a rounded umbel of white flowers; pretty typical for an onion.  Considering how naked the florest floor can be in July, patches of these flowers can be quite a surprise.  And of course many wild flower enthusiasts won't see them because who goes out looking for woodland wild flowers in July?  The flowers are followed by a small dark berry.  Since the fruit and fruiting stalks tend to persist a bit many people are more familiar with the fruiting stage than the flowering stage.  

Pretty prairie perks

Conducting prairie research does have a few perks.  It's still pretty early out on the prairie, and not too much is going on in terms of flowering, but the prairie does have a few spring ephemerals, plants that sprout early and flower before the canopy closes over them. In this case the canopy is only about 2 meters, but if you only have a rosette of leaves, that's plenty tall. These shooting stars, Dodecatheon meadia (Primrose family), are among everyone's favorite plants because of their nifty looking flowers that can range across quite an range of colors from almost white to quite fuchsia. This is one of the densest patches TPP knows. 

Another plant that favors patches is the wild hyacinth, Camassia scilloides (lily family).  Many people never see these because they don't venture out into the prairie until much later in the year. If TPP doesn't get out there just after it has been burned, the permanent plots would never be found (and if truth be told, a few are still missing and that effort is waiting until the semester ends). 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bloodroot

Our persistently warm March weather has really pushed along the flowering.  Here's a wonderful spring ephemeral, bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, featured this week in our gardens.  It's a small, easy to grow, woodland wild flower in the poppy family, and like many members of the family, it has laticifers and oozes latex when injured, red-orange latex in this case thus both the common name and the generic name referencing blood.  In the days of "likes cure likes" medicinal botany, such likes were avidly sought and thought to be clues to the plant's usefulness. The plant multiplies vegetatively forming such patches in just a couple of years, and here and there seedlings will also appear.  But even a smallish woodland garden has room for lots of these. Each flower has a leaf  wrapped around its flower stalk, a leaf whose rounded apex has characteristic apical sinuses, although they can hardly be seen at flowering stage. 

A quiet, seldom-seen woodland wildflower in these parts - blue cohosh

In over 3 decades of botany here in the upper midwest, TPP has seen blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) in the wild exactly twice. As the specific epithet suggests, the thrice compound foliage looks quite like the leaves of the meadow rue (Thalictrum, in the buttercup family).  Blue coshosh might be a bit more common that suspected, but it tends to escape notice.  Appropriately enough one hides in our woodland behind a screen of bluebells.  One of the reasons it escapes notice is that it's purplish-blue hue tends to help it hide. What confuses quite a few people is that the flowers are 3-parted and the same greenish, bluish color as the foliage, however three-parted flowers are common enough among basal dicots.  It's a member of the Berberidaceae, and most of the members of the family with which people are familiar are shrubs rather than spring ephemerals.  Blue cohosh has quite a reputation as a medicinal plant and was widely used by native americans as an abortive agent atesting to its toxicity, which may explain why it's one thing the bun-buns don't eat.