Dioscorea villosa; Dioscoreaceae (yam family)

The wildflower show is slowing down now, so I’m going back a month or so to find subjects for Flower of the Day.  You’ll have to click on the picture in order to see the flowers. This plant was blooming about 3 weeks ago.  Wild yamroot is a dioecious plant, meaning that each plant produces either male or female flowers, but not both.  The one pictured above is female; you can tell by the number of flowers on the raceme.  You can also tell by looking at the individual flowers: both male and female flowers have 6 tepals and 6 stamens, but the stamens of the female are infertile.  I’m no botanist, so I have no idea how to tell the difference between fertile and infertile stamens.  More information at this wonderful site:

http://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/savanna/plants/wild_yam.html.

This plant is related to the edible yam (genus Dioscorea) that is grown in West Africa, but it is not even closely related to the “yam” with which most Americans are familiar, which is actually sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas).

This is why horticulturalists like to use binomial nomenclature rather than common names, by the way.