Flora Pittsburghensis

Author: Father Pitt

  • Blackberry (Rubus allegheniensis)

    Blackberry canes are full of thorns, but they give us blackberries, so who are we to complain? The flowers that precede the berries are like little white roses,as befits a member of the rose family—but curiously wrinkled and untidy roses, as if they had slept in their petals after a long night of exhausting revelry. These blackberries were blooming in early May by a wooden fence in Scott Township.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    RUBUS [Tourn.] L. BRAMBLE. Calyx 5 (3-7)-parted, without bractlets. Petals 5, deciduous. Stamens numerous. Achenes usually many, collected on a spongy or succulent receptacle, becoming small drupes; styles nearly terminal. Perennial herbs, or somewhat shrubby plants, with white (rarely reddish) flowers, and usually edible fruit. (The Roman name, kindred with ruber, red.)

    R. allegheniensis Porter. Shrubby, 1-2 m. tall; old canes purplish, armed with stout straightish prickles; leaflets appressed-villous above, velvety beneath; branchlets, pedicels (unarmed), etc., glandular-pubescent; flowers 2.5-3.5 cm. broad, racemose, only the lower leafy-bracted; petals narrowly obovate; fruit (rarely pale) generally subcylindric, of many rather small drupelets, of good flavor. (R. mllosus Man. ed. 6, in large part, not Ait.; R. nigrobaccus Bailey.) Dry open thickets and recent clearings, N. S. to Ont. and N. C., common.

  • Golden Ragwort (Senecio aureus)

    Golden Ragworts are attractive flowers, a bit like a yellow aster, that bloom in the middle spring, just after the tulips in your garden. The heart-shaped basal leaves and the pinnately lobed (rather fern-like) stem leaves are distinctive. They like a somewhat shady location; these were blooming in early May beside a wooded country lane west of Cranberry.

    Gray (with help from J. M. Greenman) describes the genus and the species:

    SENECIO [Tourn.] L. GROUNDSEL. RAGWORT. SQUAW-WEED. Revised Bt J. M. Greenman. Heads many-flowered; rays pistillate or none; involucre cylindrical to bellshaped, simple or with a few bractlets at the base, the bracts erect-connivent. Receptacle flat, naked. Pappus of numerous very soft and capillary bristles.— Ours herbs, with alternate leaves and solitary or eorymbed heads. Flowers chiefly yellow. (Name from senex, an old man, alluding to the hoariness of many species, or to the white hairs of the pappus.)

    S. aureus L. (GOLDEN R. ) Stems erect from rather slender rootstocks, 3-8 dm. high, at first often lightly floccose-tomentose, soon glabrate; lower leaves long-petioled, ovate-rotund to slightly oblong, 1.5-8 cm. long, two thirds as broad, crenate-dentate; stem-leaves lyrate to laciniate-pinnatifid; the uppermost sessile, amplexicaul, often bract-like; inflorescence cymose-corymbose; heads radiate; rays yellow; achenes glabrous. — In wet meadows, moist thickets, and swamps, Nfd., s. to Va., w. to Wisc., Mo., and Ark. May-Aug.

     

  • Bluets (Houstonia caerulea)

    Also known as Quaker Ladies, these tiny blue flowers form tidy clumps in shaded lawns and roadsides. Small as the delightful four-petaled flowers are, they rise from a plant that seems tiny out of all proportion to the flowers. These were blooming in early May beside a country lane west of Cranberry.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    HOUSTÔNIA L. Calyx 4-lobed, persistent; the lobes in fruit distant. Corolla usually much longer than the calyx-lobes, the lobes valvate in the bud. Anthers linear or oblong. Style 1; stigmas 2. Ovary 2-celled. Pod top-shaped, globular, or didymous, thin, its summit or upper half free from and projecting beyond the tube of the calyx, loculicidal across the top. Seeds 4-20 in each cell, pitted. — Small herbs, with short entire stipules connecting the petioles or narrowed bases of the leaves, and cymose or solitary and peduncled flowers; these dimorphous, in some individuals with exserted anthers and short included style; in others the anthers included and the style long, the stigmas therefore protruding. (Named for Dr. William Houston, an English botanist, who collected in tropical America.)

    Small and delicate, vernal-flowering; peduncles 1-flowered; corolla salverform; upper half of the broad and someirhat 2-lobed pod free; seeds globular, with a very deep round cavity occupyiny the inner face.

    Perennial by delicate filiform creeping rootstocks or creeping stems; peduncles filiform, 2-5 cm. long.

    H. caerulea L. (bluets, Innoce>xe.) Glabrous; stems erect, slender, sparingly branched from the base, 0.5-2 dm. high; lrares oblong-spatulate,6-9 mm. long; peduncle filiform, erect; corolla light blue, pale lilac or nearly white, with a yellowish eye, the straight slender long-exserted tube much longer than its lobes or than those of the calyx. — Moist and grassy places, N. S. to Ga., w. to Ont., Wise, and Ala.; producing from early spring to midsummer its delicate little flowers.

  • Redbud (Cercis canadensis)

    A common tree in the woods around Pittsburgh, and even more common in front yards, where it is a prized ornamental. The tree doesn’t get very tall, but in early spring it covers itself with magenta flowers that light up the forest. If you look at them closely, you can see that each flower is a perfect little pea blossom (although Gray calls it “imperfectly papilionaceous”), showing that this is an arboreal relative of our common beans or sweet peas.

    This tree was beginning to bloom in late March in Bird Park, Mount Lebanon.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    CÉRCIS L. REDBUD. JUDAS TREE. Calyx 6 toothed. Corolla imperfectly papilionaceous; standard smaller than tbe wings and inclosed by them in the bud; the keel petals larger and not united. Stamens 10, distinct, declined. Pod oblong, flat, many-seeded, the upper suture with a winged margin. Embryo straight.—Trees, with rounded heart-shaped simple leaves, caducous stipules, and red-purple flowers in umbel-like clusters along the branches of the last or preceding years, appearing before the leaves, acid to the taste. (The ancient name of the oriental Judas Tree.)

    C. canadensis L (REDBUD.) Leaves pointed; pods nearly sessile above the calyx.—Rich soil, N. Y.  and N. J. to Fla., w. to s. Ont., e. Neb., and Tex.—A small ornamental tree, often cultivated.

  • Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)

    These charming relatives of the Bleeding-Heart like a damp wooded hillside, more often a gentle slope than a steep incline. The flowers really do  look like old-fashioned pairs of breeches hung upside-down to dry. “Pretty, but odd” is Gray’s description. These plants were growing in Bird Park in Mount Lebanon, where they were blooming in late March (in a year when spring came very early).

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    DICÉNTRA Berah.Petals slightly cohering into a heart-shaped or 2-spurred corolla, either deciduous or withering-persistent. Stigma 2-crested and sometimes 2-horned. Filaments slightly united into two sets. Pod 10-20-seeded. Seeds crested. — Low stemless perennials (as to our wild species) with ternately compound and dissected leaves, and racemose nodding flowers. Pedicels 2-bracted. (Name from dis, twice, and kentron, a spur; —accidentally printed Diclytra in the first instance, which by an erroneous conjecture was changed afterwards into Dielytra.) Bikukulla Adans. Bicuculla Millsp.

    * Raceme simple, few-flowered.

    D. Cucullària (L.) Bernh. (Dutchman’s Breeches.) Scape and slender-petioled leaves from a sort of granulate bulb; lobes of leaves linear; corolla with 2 divergent spurs longer than the pedicel; crest of the inner petals minute. (Bicuculla Millsp.) — Rich woods, N. S. to L. Huron and Minn., s. to N. C. and Mo. — A very delicate plant, sending up in early spring, from the cluster of grain-like tubers crowded together in the form of a scaly bulb, the finely cut leaves and the slender scape, bearing 4-10 pretty, but odd, white flowers tipped with cream-color.