Flora Pittsburghensis

Author: Father Pitt

  • Garden Phlox (Phlox paniculata)

    Pittsburgh is in the native range of Phlox paniculata, but the flower is so popular in gardens, and persists and spreads for so many years after planting, that we always have to suspect any individual plant of being a garden escape. So this one may have been, but if so it made its escape long ago. It was growing well back in a thicket in a wooded area in Scott, where it was blooming in early July.

    Phlox is so much beloved in Pittsburgh that any plant with a vaguely similar inflorescence is likely to be called “Phlox,” Dame’s Rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and Soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) being two notable examples. This, however, is the real thing.

    The flowers come in a range of colors from white through pink to purple. In the Pittsburgh area at least, the species shows a remarkable affinity for the edges of old cemeteries, where perhaps it was once a popular planting.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    PHLOX L.

    Calyx somewhat prismatic, or plaited and angled. Corolla with a long tube. Stamens very unequally inserted in the tube of the corolla, included. Capsule ovoid, with sometimes 2 ovules but ripening only a single seed in each cell. — Perennials (except a few southern species), with opposite and sessile perfectly entire leaves, the floral often alternate. Flowers cymose, mostly bracted ; the open clusters terminal or crowded in the upper axils. (Phlox, flame, an ancient name of Lychnis, transferred to this North American genus.) Most of our species are cultivated in gardens.

    § 1. Herbaceous, with flat (broad or narrow) leaves.

    * Stem strictly erect; panicle pyramidal or ellipsoid, many-flowered; peduncles and pedicels very short; corolla-lobes entire.

    P paniculàta L. Stem stout, 0.5-1.5 m. high, smooth, or puberulent or villous above; leaves oblong-lanceolate and ovate-lanceolate, pointed, large, tapering or rounded, the upper often heart-shaped at the base; panicle ample, pyramidal-corymbed, calyx smooth or glandular-hispid, the teeth awn-pointed; corolla pink-purple varying to white. (Including P. acuminata Pursh, P. glandulosa Shuttlw., and P. amplifolia Britton.) — Open woods, Pa. to Ill., Kan., and southw.; escaped from cultivation northw. July-Sept. — Highly variable in outline of leaf, pubescence of leaves, stems, calyx, and corolla, hut without concomitant characters.

  • Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare)

    Cirsium vulgare

    This is the big, spiny thistle that always pops up just where you don’t want a thistle. On the other hand, goldfinches love the seeds so much that it’s hard to imagine how the birds survived before Europeans introduced the plant to this continent. Architecturally, the whole plant is very elegant, and the flower heads are superbly artistic, with a tuft of pure magenta erupting from a prickly urn. This plant grew at the edge of a park in Beechview, where it was blooming in the middle of July.

    Gray lists this as Cirsium lanceolatum:

    CÍRSIUM [Tourn.] Hill. COMMON or PLUMED THISTLE. Heads many-flowered; flowers all tubular, perfect and similar, rarely Imperfectly dioecious. Bracts of the ovoid or spherical involucre imbricated in many rows, tipped with a point or prickle. Receptacle thickly clothed with soft bristles or hairs. Achenes oblong, flattish, not ribbed; pappus of numerous bristles united into a ring at the base, plumose to the middle, deciduous. — Herbs, mostly biennial; the sessile alternate leaves often pinnatifld, prickly. Heads usually large, terminal. Flowers reddish-purple, rarely white or yellowish; in summer. (Name from kirsos, a swelled vein, for which the Thistle was a reputed remedy.) Cnicus of many auth., not L. By some recent Am. auth. included in Carduus.

    * Bracts of the involucre all tipped with spreading prickles.

    1. C. lanceolatum (L.) Hill. (COMMON or BULL THISTLE.) Leaves decurrent on the stem, forming prickly lobed wings, pinnatifid, rough and bristly above, woolly with deciduous webby hairs beneath, prickly; flowers purple. {Carduus L.;Cnicus Willd.) — Pastures and roadsides. July-Nov. (Nat. from Eu.)

    In Wild Flowers East of the Rockies (1910), Chester Albert Reed gives us a good description that turns into an apology for this elegant weed:

    COMMON or BULL THISTLE (Cirsium lanceolatum), although an introduced species has a larger range than the last (Cirsium pumilum). It is common in fields and pastures and along roadsides from Newfoundland to Ga. and west to Nebr. Its heads are only slightly smaller than those of the preceding; usually but one is found on a plant. The stout stem grows from 2 to 4 feet high. The leaves are rough and bristly above and woolly underneath.

    Although thistles may be foes to those following agricultural callings, they are staunch friends of birds and insects (except crawling ones). The plant fibres and down from the mature heads forms the principal part in the composition of nests of the Goldfinch.

    In Wild Flowers Worth Knowing, Neltje Blanchan gives us an apology for all species of thistles:

    Common or Plumed Thistle

    Cirsium

    Is land fulfilling the primal curse because it brings forth thistles? So thinks the farmer, no doubt, but not the goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the “painted lady,” which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the prickly cradle of leaves, the caterpillar of this thistle butterfly weaves a web around its main food store.

    When the Danes invaded Scotland, they stole a silent night march upon the Scottish camp by marching barefoot; but a Dane inadvertently stepped on a thistle, and his sudden, sharp cry, arousing the sleeping Scots, saved them and their country; hence the Scotch emblem.

    From July to November blooms the Common, Burr, Spear, Plume, Bank, Horse, Bull, Blue, Button, Bell, or RoadsideThistle (C. lanceolatum or Carduus lanceolatus), a native of Europe and Asia, now a most thoroughly naturalized American from Newfoundland to Georgia, westward to Nebraska. Its violet flower-heads, about an inch and a half across, and as high as wide, are mostly solitary at the ends of formidable branches, up which few crawling creatures venture. But in the deep tube of each floret there is nectar secreted for the flying visitor who can properly transfer pollen from flower to flower. Such a one suffers no inconvenience from the prickles, but, on the contrary, finds a larger feast saved for him because of them. Dense, matted, wool-like hairs, that cover the bristling stems of most thistles, make climbing mighty unpleasant for ants, which ever delight in pilfering sweets. Perhaps one has the temerity to start upward.

    “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,”
    “If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all,”

    might be the ant’s passionate outburst to the thistle, and the thistle’s reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping scales of the deep green cup hold the luscious flowers. Now his feet becoming entangled in the cottony fibres wound about the scaly armor, and a bristling bodyguard thrusting spears at him in his struggles to escape, death happily releases him. All this tragedy to insure the thistle’s cross-fertilized seed that, seated on the autumn winds, shall be blown far and wide in quest of happy conditions for the offspring!

  • Yellow Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis)

    Hard to tell from White Sweet Clover (M. alba) until they both bloom. When they do bloom, the yellow species reveals sloppier habits; the flower spikes are more ragged than the ones of M. alba, with withering flowers retained for a long time. Nevertheless, the delightful scent is enough to make us forget the slight slovenliness of the presentation. Yellow Sweet Clover grows plentifully along roadsides, and is often one of the first plants to colonize a recently disturbed site; this plant was growing in a park in Beechview where the earth had just been replaced after the building of a new playground. It was blooming in the middle of July.

    Gray describes the genus and the species (and has anyone in history other than Asa Gray ever used the English word “melilot”?)

    MELILÒTUS [Tourn.] Hill. MELILOT. SWEET CLOVER. Flowers much as in Trifolium, but in spike-like racemes, small. Corolla deciduous, free from the stamen-tube. Pod ovoid, coriaceous, wrinkled, longer than the calyx, scarcely dehiscent, 1-2-seeded. — Annual or biennial herbs, fragrant in drying, with pinnately 3-foliolate leaves. (Name from meli, honey, and lotos, some leguminous plant.)

    M. officinalis (L.) Lam. (YELLOW M.) Upright, usually tall; leaflets obovate-oblong, obtuse, closely serrate; petals yellow, of nearly equal length. 6-9 mm. long; pod 2.5-3.5 mm. long, glabrous or glabrate, prominently cross-ribbed. — Waste or cultivated ground, common. (Nat. from Eu.)

  • Purple-Leaved Willow-Herb (Epilobium coloratum)

    The genus Epilobium includes some spectacular flowers, like Fireweed (E. angustifolium). It also includes these little weeds that you pass right by without noticing. They’re worth a look, though: up close the flowers are beautiful, and the plants often have purple stems or even purple leaves (in spite of the English name, purple leaves are by no means guaranteed) that add to the decorative effect. They like moist areas, and seem to have a special affinity in the city for damp sidewalks. The plant at right grew in the angle between a stone retaining wall and the sidewalk along a street in Beechview. The one below grew directly out of a crack in that same wall.

    There are several similar species of Epilobium that have insignificant flowers like these, but this is the only one reported by Porter’s Flora of Pennsylvania and Shafer’s Preliminary List of the Vascular Flora of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, as occurring in Allegheny County. “At best,” says Mathews (Field Book of American Wild Flowers), “the Epilobiums are a difficult genus to separate distinctly, and are not a little puzzling to the botanist.”

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    EPILÒBIUM L. WILLOW-HERB. Calyx-tube scarcely or not at all prolonged beyond the ovary; limb 4-cleft or -divided. Petals 4, violet, magenta, pink, or white. Capsule slender, many-seeded. Seeds with a tuft of long hairs at the end. — Mostly perennial herbs with nearly sessile leaves. (Name from epi, on, and lobion, a little pod.)

    E. coloràtum Muhl. Stem erect, not stoloniferous (often developing in late autumn sessile or subsessile basal rosettes), 3-9 dm. high, usually muchbranched, glabrous below, canescent at least in lines above with incurved hairs; leaves elongate-lanceolate, 6-16 cm. long, 1-2 cm. broad, distinctly short-petioled, closely and irregularly serrulate; flowers abundant on the divergent branches; petals pink, 3-5 mm. long; pedicels short; seed 1.6 mm. long, abruptly rounded at tip, minutely papillate; mature coma cinnamon-colored. — Low ground, Me. to Neb., and southw. July-Sept.

    In The Species of Epilobium Occurring North of Mexico, William Trelease gives a fuller description, and points out the difficulty even botanists have in sorting out closely related species of Epilobium:

    E. coloratum, Muhl. — Glabrate below, the rather numerous panicled branches canescent with incurved hairs at least along the decurrent lines, and more or less glandular towards the end; leaves 50 to 150 mm. long, lanceolate to oblong-lanceolate, acute, deeply and irregularly serrulate, mostly gradually narrowed to conspicuous slender petioles, glabrous except the uppermost, dull, thin, rugose-veiny; flowers very numerous, more or less nodding; petals 3 to 5 mm. long, rosy; fruiting peduncles slender, mostly short; seeds obconical-fusiform, beakless, strongly papillate, .3 x 1.5 mm.; coma at length cinnamon-colored, at least at base. — Willd. Enum. i. (1809), 411; Haussknecht, Monogr. 258; Barbey & Cuisin, pl. 9.—Wet ground and meadows, Canada to South Carolina, west to Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Missouri. — Specimens examined from Ontario, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina (Ravenel), West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

    This species, the general type of which is reproduced in a number of others which here follow it essentially in the order of their leaf and habit resemblance, differs from all of its congeners in the degree of serration of its leaves and especially in its elongated seeds destitute of the usual apical beak, and from all with which it is likely to be confounded, in the nearly cinnamon-colored ripe coma (which, however, is white in immature capsules that have dehisced while drying). It is apparently everywhere associated with E. adenocaulon, which begins to flower and fruit about a fortnight earlier, and differs in its very shortstalked leaves, rounded at base and less sharply toothed, and in its shorter seeds abruptly contracted and hyaline-beaked above, and with pure white coma. West American specimens which have been called E. coloratum belong, for the most part, to forms of adenocaulon.

  • Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca)

    Easily distinguished from anything similar by the foamy appearance of the flowers, which have puffy tufts of hair on their upper lips. “Motherwort” is so named because it was used by herbalists for what have traditionally been called “female difficulties.” This plant was part of a large stand at the edge of a dense thicket in Beechview, whre it was blooming in the middle of July.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    LEONÙRUS L. MOTHERWORT. Calyx 5-nerved, with 5 nearly equal teeth. Upper lip of the corolla oblong and entire, somewhat arched; the lower spreading, 3-lobed, its middle lobe larger, narrowly oblong-obovate, entire, the lateral ones oblong. — Upright herbs, with cut-lobed leaves, and close whorls of flowers in their axils; in summer. (Name from leon, a lion, and oura, tail, i.e. Lion’s-tail.)

    L. cardìaca L. (COMMON M.) Tall perennial; leaves long-petioled, tbe lower rounded, palmately lobed, the floral wedge-shaped at base, subentire or 3-clefl, the lobes lanceolate; upper lip of the pale purple corolla bearded. — Waste places, around dwellings. (Nat. from Eu.)