Tag Archives: Apiaceae

Sweet Cicely and Aniseroot

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Once on a nature hike, when I was just getting into native plants, someone pointed out a medium height forb with airy, ferny foliage and clusters of little white flowers, and called it sweet cicely. For years I didn’t question that identification, until one day I came across a discussion about it on-line. Seems there’s another species that’s almost identical to sweet cicely, called aniseroot. The two are closely related and at first glance almost identical in appearance. Osmorhiza claytonii and Osmorhiza longistylis (Apiaceae): what had I been seeing all those years?

The only way to answer that question was to go back through my pictures and look for identifying details. Fortunately, there are three characteristics that are easy to see.

O. claytonii

sweet cicely

O. longistylis

aniseroot
stem hairy smooth
flowers per umbellet 4-10 9-18
length of styles shorter than petals longer than petals
scent faint or none anise

I’d love to illustrate this post with current photos, but I’m still avoiding the trails, so I had to go through old photos and re-process them to show these features.
below left: smooth stem                                below right: hairy stem

Always examine the whole plant in order to identify it. Sometimes sweet cicely will have more flowers, but overall it should have fewer than 10 per umbellet. Sometimes aniseroot will have fewer flowers, but overall it should have more than 10 per umbellet. Sometimes stems will be slightly hairy, and sometimes the styles will be just as long as the petals. Individual plants vary. But if you consider all these characteristics, it should be easy to tell which species you have.

What had I been seeing all these years? Ends up, I’d been seeing both. They grow in similar habitats.

The Spring Ephemerals, part 3

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Well, I’ve made the decision: no wildflower hunting for the foreseeable future. You can imagine how sad this makes me. But people just aren’t being careful about social distancing, and there isn’t enough open space for everyone who insists on going out.

In the meantime, I’ll follow the season by posting old pictures.

If I were being strictly chronological, harbinger-of spring (Erigenia bulbosa; Apiaceae) would have been the first plant in this series of posts.  It’s almost certainly done blooming by now.

These little plants bedevil me: they grow only a few inches tall, the individual flowers are tiny (notice the oak leaf in the picture below), and they’re so dainty that they’re always in motion, so they’re tricky to photograph. I do love trying, though.

 

 

Another one that’s never still is lyre-leaved rockcress (Arabidopsis lyrata; Brassicaceae). Growing right out of small depressions in rocks, these plants stand just a few inches taller than harbinger of spring. Look how slender those stems are compared to the pine needles lying nearby. I’ve seen stands of these blooming as late in the season as early June.

Here’s another diminutive plant that grows in moist, rocky areas: early saxifrage (Micranthes virginiensis, formerly Saxifraga virginiensis; Saxifragaceae). Its blooming period can start as early as late March and last through early May.

This is Not Giant Hogweed

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Rain ends drought. And rain brings mosquitoes. So many mosquitoes.

I was walking on a wet towpath. So many mosquitoes. Their little whining buzzing was continual, and too close to my ears. Their attacks were continual. It was so humid, I sweated off the first coat of Ben’s 100 in 20 minutes, and took to walking with the bottle in hand. I hate putting poison on my skin, I hate strong odors. Why was I doing this?

To find a plant, of course. Recent reports of a giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) sighting in northern Virginia has led to a bit of a media frenzy, which reminded me of the walk I took with a friend last April. She had pointed at some very large leaves and asked, “what’s that?”

I didn’t know, but figured it for something in the Apiaceae, so I took a few pictures and looked it up later. Turned out to be cow parsnip, Heracleum maximum, a close relative of the plant everyone’s been fussing about.

So there I was, enduring the mosquitoes. I found the plants, a nice stand of them, but sadly they were done blooming. Also they were largely guarded by walls of stinging nettles, so I’ll admit it: I didn’t even try to get good pictures. I got as close as I reasonably could, got a few shots, and then got the hell out of there.

I really can’t overstate just how thick the mosquitoes were.

At any rate, cow parsnip, which is listed S3/watchlist in Maryland, is easily confused with giant hogweed. There have been a few sightings of the latter in recent years, but I understand that those plants were reported to the authorities, who removed them.

I’d love to be able to post pictures of giant hogweed, but I’ve never seen it. I’ll consider that a good thing.

The principal difference between the two is size, although that doesn’t help early in the season, when plants are still small. Giant hogweed grows to five and a half meters (18 feet!) tall, with a stem diameter of 15 centimeters (six inches). Cow parsnip grows to three meters (ten feet), with a stem diameter of five centimeters (two inches). The leaves and umbels are correspondingly sized (much larger on giant hogweed). The largest cow parsnip plants pictured above were about seven feet tall.

A more useful way of telling them apart is to look at the lowest leaves. Both species have compound leaves. Cow parsnip leaves generally have three rather broad lobes, while giant hogweed’s are much narrower and often irregular.

Also, the stems are different. Here’s cow parsnip; notice that but for the hairs, it’s solidly green. Giant hogweed stems have purple splotches. Both species have that ring of hairs at the nodes.

I wrote about the poisonous aspects of these plants in this post.

Remember, plants in the parsley family look a lot alike to the untrained eye. I’ve seen people mistake poison hemlock for Queen Anne’s lace, for example. Some umbellifers are tasty; others are deadly poisonous. Don’t mess around with them.

ps – about one hour after scheduling this piece to post, I saw this:

Dear Friends –
Maryland Native Plant Society board members
Jil Swearingen and (possibly) Rod Simmons will be on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU between 12:30 and 1:00 on Tuesday June 26. The topic is invasive plants. It was inspired by recent reports of giant hogweed in Virginia.

Be sure to tune in!

https://wamu.org/show/the-kojo-nnamdi-show

(Jil is one of the founding directors of MNPS and Rod is a Past President.)

An Eastern Belly Flower

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It’s March 20, the vernal equinox, and I’m sitting by the woodstove, watching the snow fall. Four to eight inches are predicted by tomorrow night, possibly more, and I just got back from a trip to the Southwest and haven’t been out botanizing at home in about two weeks. Friends are posting pictures of bloodroot and Dutchman’s breeches that are blooming nearby, but it’ll be a few days before I can go out hunting.

look how tiny it is, next to that maple leaf!

Instead I’m looking at my pictures of Erigenia bulbosa, which, other than skunk cabbage, is the earliest blooming forb in the Maryland piedmont. This diminutive perennial plant grows only about 10 centimeters tall, barely poking above the leaves on the forest flower at bloom time. It’s a true ephemeral: after blooming, the finely divided compound leaves open a little further and the plant will grow a little taller, but it dies back before spring is over.

The inflorescence is a compound umbel (an umbel of umbels). The individual flowers are minute, comprising five white petals and five stamens, whose anthers start red but quickly turn black.

I found these blooming on February 28 this year, which is about as early as I’ve seen it. The blooming period lasts about a month. Look for it in rich, moist woodlands, especially near rivers.

Erigenia means “born early”; bulbosa is for the (edible) corm from which the plant emerges. Around here it’s called harbinger-of-spring, or sometimes pepper-and-salt (for the anthers and petals); older, less common names include turkey-pea, turkey-foot, and ground-nut1. The genus is monotypic (meaning, it only has one species), and this might be the smallest plant in its family (Apiaceae).

It’s uncommon in Maryland (listed S3). The Maryland Biodiversity Project has records for it in the counties of Harford, Montgomery, and Washington. There are a few other occurrences of it east of the Appalachians (from northern North Carolina to southern New York), but mostly it’s a plant of the Midwest, where it ranges from central Alabama to central Michigan, and westward into eastern Kansas. In Wisconsin and New York it’s listed as endangered; in Pennsylvania, it’s threatened.

1The History and Folklore of North American Wildflowers, Timothy Coffey

Newfoundland: A Few More Wildflowers

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And, back to Newfoundland, with a few more wildflowers I found in various locations,

Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea; Asteraceae) is found in Canada, New England, the northern Mid-Atlantic, the upper Mid-West, and the mountainous West; in Maryland it’s only in a few scattered locations.

 

Oyster plant (Mertensia maritima; Boraginaceae) is found on beaches in northern North America and parts of Europe. I found it in Iceland last summer and specifically went looking for it when driving past Birchy Cove. It’s closely related to our showy native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica).

Roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia; Droseraceae) is a carnivorous plant with circumboreal distribution; in the US it’s found in New England, the Appalachians, the upper Mid-West, scattered locations in the West, Canada and Greenland. In Maryland it’s found in Garret County and parts of the Coastal Plain. Look for it in sunny wetlands (bogs, fens, and so on).

Gall-of-the-earth (Prenanthes trifoliata, formerly Nabalus trifoliatus or N. trifoliolatus; Asteraceae) is found in a variety of dry habitats in eastern Canada, New England, and south through the Appalachians. It’s endangered in Ohio, and though not on the RTE list in Maryland, is only known in Talbot County. Apparently it (and/or other Prenanthes species) was used in folk medicine, and has an exceedingly bitter taste, hence the common name.

Scots lovage (Ligusticum scoticum; Apiaceae) grows in rocky areas along the coasts of northern North America and Europe. It’s endangered in Connecticut and New York and special concern in Rhode Island. Supposdely it’s edible, tasting like lovage, which is to say like really strong celery.

Striped or creeping toadflax (Linaria repens; Plantaginaceae) is an alien found in only a few spots in North America. It’s native to Europe, and closely related to the more commonly occurring alien weed known as butter-and-eggs (L. vulgaris).

 


I spotted this Myosotis species (Boraginaceae) and photographed it from a great distance; there was no way to get close enough for a better picture or identification. The forget-me-nots are notoriously difficult to identify, as are their close relatives the phacelias, about which I’ve complained many times in this blog. But that borage blue is a beacon.

Yellow pond lily (Nuphar variegata, sometimes N. lutea ssp. variegata; Nymphaeaceae) is widespread in ponds across the northern US and Canada; it’s endangered in Ohio. The USDA PLANTS Database shows it present in Maryland but the Maryland Biodiversity Project has no records for it. The closely related spatterdock (N. advena) is found all over Maryland, though, including water pockets in cliffs in the Potomac Gorge.

In the same family is fragrant water lily, Nymphaea odorata. As you can see from the picture, I found both species growing together in one of the inunmerable ponds in the center of the Bonavista peninsula. Frgrant water lily can be found in almost every state and province of the US and Canada.

American burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis; Rosaceae) is native to the eastern US and Canada as well as the Pacific Northwest; sadly, it’s threatened or endangered in nine states, including Maryland. It’s an eye-catching plant with its tall, fluffy spikes of flowers. Look for it growing in bogs and other wet areas (including roadsides).


Roseroot (Rhodioloa rosea, formerly Sedum rosea; Crassulaceae) is a subarctic plant found in a few parts of northern North America as well as in Iceland and Europe. I saw this one specimen flowering near Spillar’s Cove and am really kicking myself for not taking the time to get better pictures.