A small patch of Virginia Waterleaf in Beechview, just up the hill from the large patch of Appendaged Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum) we have visited almost every year.
For a description of the species, see the Hydrophyllum virginianum reference page.
Almost every year we visit this patch of Appendaged Waterleaf in Beechview, which seems to be thriving. This year we brought three different cameras. It is an uncommon plant around here, but abundant in this location.
For a description of the species, see the Hydrophyllum appendiculatum reference page.
A few years ago, some botanical references folded the family Hydrophyllaceae into the family Boraginaceae. Others disagree. We’re waiting for the botanists to sort it out before we make our move.
Just up the hill from a large patch of Appendaged Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum) in Beechview, we found two plants of Virginia Waterleaf (H. virginianum). Although old Pa Pitt has visited that patch of Appendaged Waterleaf annually for years, he has never seen Virginia Waterleaf there before, though he has run into it elsewhere more than once. It is an odd coincidence. Below, we see the divided leaves that distinguish H. virginianum from its relatives in these parts.
For a fuller description, see the Hydrophyllum virginianum reference page.
Every year we return to this patch of Appendaged Waterleaf in Beechview. It’s an unusual plant around here, but this patch seems to be flourishing and spreading, though menaced by the constant advance of Japanese monster knotweeds nearby.
The bluish lavender of the flowers is hard to capture on the camera sensor, but Father Pitt has tried to adjust the colors to look as close to nature as possible. He used two different cameras with wildly different ideas of color balance, so there will be color differences.
For a full description, see the Hydrophyllum appendiculatum reference page.
We took more than a hundred pictures on May 16 and picked out a dozen to publish. To avoid weighing down the main page, we’ll put most of them behind a “more” link.
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Every year we return to this patch of Appendaged Waterleaf in Beechview, and so far, in spite of the menaces of nearby Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica), it survives and even flourishes. Here are four new pictures, and we repeat what we have said previously about this plant:
A somewhat uncommon plant in western Pennsylvania, but abundant here at the side of a wooded street in Beechview, where it was blooming in mid-May. To judge by the way it grew here, it likes moist soil at the edge of the woods. The family resemblance to the more common Virginia Waterleaf is obvious, but the flowers of Appendaged Waterleaf are a middle blue or blue-violet color, and the leaves are maple-shaped.
Gray describes the genus and the species:
HYDROPHYLLUM [Tourn.] L. WATERLEAF
Calyx 5-parted, sometimes with a small appendage in each sinus, early open in the bud. Corolla bell-shaped, 5-cleft; the lobes convolute in the bud: the tube furnished with 5 longitudinal linear appendages opposite the lobes, forming a nectariferous groove. Stamens and style mostly exserted; lilainents more or less bearded. Ovary bristly hairy (as is usual in the family); the placentae soon free from the walls except at the top and bottom. Capsule ripening 1-4 seeds, spherical.—Perennials, with petioled ample leaves, and wvhite or bluish-purple cymose-clustered flowers. (Name formed of hydor, water, and phyllon, leaf; of no obvious application.)
H. appendiculatum Michx. Hairy; stem-leaves palmately 5-lobed, rounded, the lobes toothed and pointed, the lowest pinnately divided; cymes rather loosely flowered; filiform pedicels and calyx bristly-hairy. Damp woods, N. Y. and Ont. to Minn., and southw. May, June.)
