Flora Pittsburghensis

Author: Father Pitt

  • Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)

    Also known as Cranesbill, because of the distinctive seedpods that look like the head of a long-billed bird. The “bill” is an ingenious spring-loaded mechanism that, when the pod dries, suddenly releases and flings the seeds into the air with amazing force.

    Wild Geranium is a popular garden perennial for shady yards; its close relatives, the florists’ geraniums (which have similar crane’s-bill seedpods), are placed in the genus Pelargonium by botanists. This plant was blooming in late April near the Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel.

    This pale rose color is most common, but a bluish lavender color sometimes appears.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    GERANIUM [Tourn.] L. CRANESBILL. Stamens 10 (rarely 6), all with perfect anthers, the 5 longer with glands at their base (alternate with the petals). Styles smooth inside in fruit when they separate from the axis. Stems forking. Peduncles 1-3-flowered. (An old Greek name, from geranos, a crane; the long fruit-bearing beak thought to resemble the bill of that bird.)

    G. maculatum L. (WILD G.) Erect, hairy; leaves about 5-parted, the wedge-shaped divisions lobed and cut at the end; sepals slender-pointed; pedicels and beak of fruit hairy but not glandular; petals entire, light purple, bearded on the claw. Open woods and fields, centr. Me. to Man., and southw. Apr.-July.

    –

    In Our Common Wild Flowers of Springtime and Autumn, Alice Mary Dowd gives us this copious description of the Wild Geranium and its habits:

    THE WILD GERANIUM

    In May and June the wild geranium blossoms in the open woods and by shady roadsides. Its flowers, pale purple or pink, measure an inch or more across. They are very delicate and wither soon when picked unless they are placed in water immediately. The leaves are deeply cut and usually have five lobes. The lower ones have long stems. The upper ones are opposite and a longstemmed flower-cluster rises from between them. At the base of each leaf-stalk are two small, narrow leaves called stipules. The plant is sometimes called spotted geranium, because its leaves are marked with white blotches.

    Not only the leaves and stems are hairy but the sepals too are edged with a row of hairs and the petals have little tufts of white hairs on each side at the base.

    Thus the whole plant presents ways beset with difficulties to crawling intruders, and the nectar at the base of each petal is guarded from insects and from moisture.

    There are ten stamens in two rows, and the outer five shed their pollen first. A magnifying glass shows us purple lines where the anthers split, and large, white, shining grains of pollen. Not until the pollen has all been scattered does the stigma open its. five fingers. Thus the flower is quite incapable of producing seed without the aid of the bees, who bring it pollen from a younger flower.

    What seems to be one pistil is a cluster of five pistils attached to a central axis, which increases in length after the petals have fallen. It is this long beak that gave the plant its name crane’s bill, and the same meaning is in the name geranium, which comes from the Greek word for crane.

    When the seeds are ripe the pistils split away from the base of the axis and coil upward; and the seeds, that were held within as if in the hollows of their hands, are thrown out to find a place for themselves in the world, away from the parent plant.

    In moist, rocky woods and ravines grows a smaller wild geranium called herb Robert. Its leaves are finely cut, and strong-scented when bruised. The odor is said to drive away bugs, and so the plant is sometime called bug-bane.

    Like herb Robert the cultivated geraniums have leaves with characteristic odors, as the fish geranium, the lemon geranium, and the rose geranium. No doubt these scents are useful to the plant in frightening away its enemies, for animals and insects have a keener sense of smell than we have. Often they dislike odors that we like, and are attracted by odors that repel us.

    The cultivated geraniums are properly called pelargoniums or stork-bills. They are cousins of the wild geranium and come from South Africa, where they cover the hillsides with brilliant bloom.

    More than a hundred years ago the study of a wild geranium led the German botanist, Sprengel, to discover the relations of flowers to insects. His studies convinced him that “the wise Author of nature has not created a hair in vain.”

  • Great White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)

    The Great White Trillium loves to grow in vast colonies. It’s not all that common, but when you do find a stand of them, it may cover acres, as it does here along the aptly named Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel, where these plants were all blooming at the end of April.

    Sometimes a flower takes on a pink flush as it ages, as you see in two of the examples here.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    TRÍLLIUM L. WAKE ROBIN. BIRTHROOT. Sepals 3, lanceolate, spreading, herbaceous, persistent. Petals 3, larger, withering in age. Stamens б; anthers linear, on short filaments, adnate. Styles awl-shaped or slender, spreading or recurved above, persistent, stigmatic down the inner side. Seeds ovate, horizontal, several in each cell. — Low perennial herbs, with a stout and simple stem rising from a short and praemorse tuber-like rootstock, bearing at the summit a whorl of 3 ample, commonly broadly ovate, more or less ribbed but netted-veined leaves, and a terminal large flower; in spring. (Name from tree, three; all the parts being in threes.) — Monstrosities are not rare with the calyx and sometimes petals changed to leaves, or the parts of the flower increased in number.

    T. grandiflorum (Michx.) Salisb. Leaves less broadly rhombic-ovate; pedicel erect or ascending; petals oblanceolate, often broadly so (4-6 cm. long), white turning rose-color or marked with green; stamens with stout filaments (persistently green about the fruit) and anthers, exceeding the very slender erect or suberect and somewhat coherent stigmas; fruit subglobose. Rich woods, w. Que. and w. Vt. to Minn., Mo., and N. C.

    –

    In Wild Flowers Every Child Should Know, Frederic William Stack gives us this description:

    LARGE FLOWERED WAKE-ROBIN

    Trillium grandiflbrum. Lily Family.

    The Trilliums rank among the foremost of our native woodland wild flowers, and they possess an individuality that compares favourably with the exclusive traits of the Arbutus, the Gentians, the Lobelias, and the Orchids. This beautiful, large, white-flowered species is one of the choicest and best known of its family. It is found during May and June, in damp, rich woods, and grows from eight to eighteen inches high. The single, smooth, stout, juicy stalk terminates with a whorl of three large, handsome, broadly egg-shaped, triple-ribbed leaves which taper suddenly at the apex and are narrowed to a stemless base. They are loose-textured, prominently veined, and toothless. The large, waxy-white, solitary flower is borne on a short stem that springs upright from the centre of the leaves. The three thin, broad, strongly veined, and long-pointed petals are larger and much longer than the three spreading, green, lanceshaped sepals, and they turn outward with a large graceful curve. They are scentless, and as they age they become pink. The single berry is nearly black when matured. This showy-flowered Trillium ranges from Canada to Florida, and west to Minnesota and Missouri.

  • Cleavers (Galium aparine)

    This bedstraw can be very abundant in some places, as it was in this neglected hillside cemetery in Beechview, where it was blooming in early May. The stems (as you can see in the picture) are covered with prickly hairs that point toward the root, so it’s rough going if you’re a caterpillar or something trying to climb up. The leaves come in whorls of eight, or sometimes six or seven; the stems are square; and the tiny white flowers have four pointed petals.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    GALIUM L. BEDSTRAW. CLEAVERS. Calyx-teeth obsolete. Corolla wheel-shaped, valvate in the bud. Stamens 4, rarely 3, short. Styles 2. Fruit dry or fleshy, globular, twin, separating when ripe into the 2 seed-like indehiscent 1-seeded carpels. — Slender herbs, with small cymose flowers (produced in summer), square stems, and whorled leaves, the roots often containing a red coloring matter. (Name from gala, milk, which some species are used to curdle.)

    G. Aparine L. (CLEAVERS, GOOSE GRASS.) Stem weak and reclining, bristle-prickly backward, hairy at the joints; leaves about 8 in a whorl, lanceolate, tapering to the base, short-pointed, rough on the margins and midrib, 2.5-7 cm. long; peduncles 1-3-flowered; flowers white; fruit bristly, 3-4 mm. in diameter. — Seashores, Que. to Fla., and in rich or shaded ground inland; perhaps sometimes introd. (Eurasia.)

  • Jack-in-the-Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum)

    Each Jack-in-the-Pulpit is unique: the variability of the colors and stripes seems infinite. At the end of April, these four plants were all blooming within a quarter mile of one another in the Squaw Run Valley in Fox Chapel.

    This is one of our oddest-looking spring flowers, a relative of the tropical Anthurium and the Calla so popular with funeral directors. Jack-in-the-Pulpit blooms in open woodlands in April and May. The leafy enclosure that forms the “pulpit” is called the “spathe,” and this is the most ornamental and variable part of the inflorescence. Later on, the spathe will disappear, and bright red berries will develop along the spadix.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    ARISAÈMA Martius. INDIAN TURNIP. DRAGON ARUM. Spathe convolute below and mostly arched above. Flowers monoecious or by abortion dioecious. Sterile flowers above the fertile, each of a cluster of almost sessile 2-4-celled anthers, opening by pores or chinks at the top. Fertile flowers a 1-celled ovary containing 5 or 6 erect orthotropous ovules; in fruit a 1-few-seeded scarlet berry. — Low perennial herbs, with a tuberous rootstock or corm, sending up a simple scape sheathed with the petioles of the simple or compound veiny leaves. (Name from aris, a kind of arum, and aima, blood, from the spotted leaves of some species.)

    A. triphýllum (L.) Schott. (INDIAN TURNIP, JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT.) Leaves mostly 2, divided into 3 elliptical-ovate pointed leaflets; spadix mostly dioecious, subcylindric or club-shaped, obtuse, much shorter than the spathe, which is smooth or corrugated in its tubular part and incurved-hooded at its flat ovate-lanceolate pointed summit. (A. pusillum Nash; A. Stewardsonii Britton.) Rich woods. May. Corm turnip-shaped, wrinkled, farinaceous, with an intensely acrid juice; spathe with the petioles and sheaths pale green, or often dark purple or variegated with dark purple and whitish stripes or spots.

    In her Wild Flowers: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors,Neltje Blanchan has an expansive (and sometimes cloyingly whimsical) article about the Jack-in-the-Pulpit:

    JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT; INDIAN TURNIP
    (Arisaema triphyllum) Arum family

    Flowers – Minute, greenish yellow, clustered on the lower part of a smooth, club-shaped, slender spadix within a green and maroon or whitish-striped spathe that curves in a broad-pointed flap above it. Leaves: 3-foliate, usually overtopping the spathe, their slender petioles 9 to 30 in. high, or as tall as the scape that rises from an acrid corm. Fruit: Smooth, shining red berries clustered on the thickened club. Preferred Habitat – Moist woodland and thickets. Flowering Season – April-June. Distribution – Nova Scotia westward to Minnesota, and southward to the Gulf States.

    A jolly looking preacher is Jack, standing erect in his particolored pulpit with a sounding-board over his head; but he is a gay deceiver, a wolf in sheep’s clothing,, literally a “brother to dragons,” an arrant upstart, an ingrate, a murderer of innocent benefactors! “Female botanizing classes pounce upon it as they would upon a pious young clergyman,” complains Mr. Ellwanger. A poor relation of the stately calla lily one knows Jack to be at a glance, her lovely white robe corresponding to his striped pulpit, her bright yellow spadix to his sleek reverence. In the damp woodlands where his pulpit is erected beneath leafy cathedral arches, minute flies or gnats, recently emerged from maggots in mushrooms, toadstools, or decaying logs, form the main part of his congregation.

    Now, to drop the clerical simile, let us peep within the sheathing spathe, or, better still, strip it off altogether. Dr. Torrey states that the dark-striped spathes are the fertile plants, those with green and whitish lines, sterile. Within are smooth, glossy columns, and near the base of each we shall find the true flowers, minute affairs, some staminate; others, on distinct plants, pistillate, the berry bearers; or rarely both male and female florets seated on the same club, as if Jack’s elaborate plan to prevent self-fertilization were not yet complete. Plants may be detected in process of evolution toward their ideals: just as nations and men are. Doubtless, when Jack’s mechanism is perfected, his guilt will disappear. A little way above the florets the club enlarges abruptly, forming a projecting ledge that effectually closes the avenue of escape for many a guileless victim. A fungus gnat, enticed perhaps by the striped house of refuge from cold spring winds, and with a prospect of food below, enters and slides down the inside walls or the slippery colored column: in either case descent is very easy; it is the return that is made so difficult, if not impossible, for the tiny visitors. Squeezing past the projecting ledge, the gnat finds himself in a roomy apartment whose floor – the bottom of the pulpit – is dusted over with fine pollen; that is, if he is among staminate flowers already mature. To get some of that pollen, with which the gnat presently covers himself, transferred to the minute pistillate florets waiting for it in a distant chamber is, of course, Jack’s whole aim in enticing visitors within his polished walls; but what means are provided for their escape? Their efforts to crawl upward over the slippery surface only land them weak and discouraged where they started. The projecting ledge overhead prevents them from using their wings; the passage between the ledge and the spathe is far too narrow to permit flight. Now, if a gnat be persevering, he will presently discover a gap in the flap where the spathe folds together in front, and through this tiny opening he makes his escape, only to enter another pulpit, like the trusted, but too trusting, messenger he is, and leave some of the vitalizing pollen on the fertile florets awaiting his coming.

    But suppose the fly, small as he is, is too large to work his way out through the flap, or too bewildered or stupid to find the opening, or too exhausted after his futile efforts to get out through the overhead route to persevere, or too weak with hunger in case of long detention in a pistillate trap where no pollen is, what then? Open a dozen of Jack’s pulpits, and in several, at least, dead victims will be found – pathetic little corpses sacrificed to the imperfection of his executive system. Had the flies entered mature spathes, whose walls had spread outward and away from the polished column, flight through the overhead route might have been possible. However glad we may be to make every due allowance for this sacrifice of the higher life to the lower, as only a temporary imperfection of mechanism incidental to the plant’s higher development, Jacks present cruelty shocks us no less. Or, it may be, he will become insectivorous like the pitcher plant in time. He comes from a rascally family, anyhow. (See cuckoo pint.)

    In June and July the thick-set club, studded over with bright berries, becomes conspicuous, to attract hungry woodland rovers in the hope that the seeds will be dropped far from the parent plant. The Indians used to boil the berries for food. The farinaceous root (corm) they likewise boiled or dried to extract the stinging, blistering juice, leaving an edible little “turnip,” however insipid and starchy.

  • Early Meadow Rue (Thalictrum dioicum)

    These airy little flowers look as though they ought to make a jingling sound in a gentle breeze. The dangling stamens identify this as a male plant. As the species name implies, this species has dioecious flowers (from Greek meaning “two houses”): that is, it bears male and female flowers on separate plants. The female flowers are little upright greenish clusters, but the male flowers are more common and more charming. In spite of the common name, Early Meadow Rue seems to prefer woods to meadows; this one was growing on a rocky hillside in the Squaw Run valley in Fox Chapel.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    THALÍCTRUM [Tourn.] L. MEADOW RUE. Sepals 4-5, petal-like or greenish, usually caducous. Petals none. Achenes 4-15, grooved or ribbed, or else inflated. Stigma unilateral. Seed suspended. — Perennials, with alternate 2-3-ternately compound leaves, the divisions and the leaflets stalked; petioles dilated at base. Flowers in corymbs or panicles, often polygamous or dioecious. (A Greek name of an unknown plant, mentioned by Dioscorides.)

    Flowers dioecious or polygamous.

    Achenes sessile or subsessile, thin-walled, the ribs often connected by transverse reticulations; leaves 3-4-ternate.

    Filaments capillary, soon drooping; petioles of the stem-leaves well developed; vernal.

    T. dioicum L. (EARLY M.) Smooth and pale or glaucous, 3-6 dm. high; leaves (2-3) all with general petioles; leaflets thin, light green, drooping, suborbicular, 3-7-lobed; flowers dioecious; sepals purplish or greenish white. — Rocky woods, etc., centr. Me., westw. and southw., common. Apr., May.

    –

    Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews gives us this description in his Field Book of American Wild Flowers:

    “A beautiful but not showy, slender meadow rue with the staminate and pistillate flowers on separate plants. The bluish olive green leaves lustreless, compound, and thinly spreading; the drooping staminate flowers with generally four small green sepals, and long stamens tipped with terracotta, and finally madder purple. The pistillate flowers inconspicuously pale green. An airy and graceful species, common in thin woodlands. 1-2 feet high. Me., south to Ala., and west to Mo., S. Dak., and Kan.

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    Ellen Miller and Margaret Christine Whiting give us this fuller description in Wild Flowers of the North-Eastern States (1895):

    “Found in rocky woods and hillsides during April and May.

    “The branching leafy stalk grows from 1 to 2 feet high; smooth, round, and fine of fibre though strong; in color, green.

    “The leaf is 3 or 4 times divided, terminating in groups of 3 leaflets on short slender stems; the leaflets are small, rounding, slightly heart-shaped at the base, and their margins are notched in rounded scallops; the texture is exceptionally fine and thin, the surface smooth; the color, a fine cool green.

    “The flower is small and composed of 3 or 4 or 5 little, petal-like, pale green calyx-parts. Different plants bear the pistils and stamens; the flowers of the former are inconspicuous and sparse in comparison with those of the stamen-bearing plant: from these the many stamens, pale green faintly touched with tawny at the tips, droop on slender threads like little tassels. The flowers grow in loose clusters, on branching stems that spring from the leaf-joints.

    “The Early Meadow Rue is unobtrusive in color and form, but most graceful in gesture, and fine in the texture and finish of all its parts; the leafage has a fern-like delicacy, and the flower tassels of the stamen-bearing plant are airily poised.”