Flora Pittsburghensis

Category: Papaveraceae

  • Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

    Sanguinaria-canadensis-2013-04-10-Fox-Chapel-03

    Sanguinaria-canadensis-2013-04-10-Fox-Chapel-02There is only one member of the genus Sanguinaria, and here it is. These cheery little flowers pop up at about the same time as the Coltsfoots; this patch was blooming in early April beside a back road in Fox Chapel. The flowers open before the leaves are fully unfurled, so each flower stem is elegantly wrapped in a shell-like green leaf. The English and Latin names both come from the fact that the root is full of red juice.

    Gray describes the genus and the species:

    SANGUINARIA [Dill.] L. BLOODROOT. Sepals 2. Petals 8-12, spatulate-oblong. Stamens about 24. Style short; stigma 2-grooved. Pod ellipsoid or fusiform, turgid, 1-celled, 2-valved. Seeds with a large crest. — Low perennial; its thick prostrate rootstocks (surcharged with red-orange acrid juice) sending up in earliest spring a palmate-lobed leaf and 1-flowered scape. Flower white, handsome, the bud erect, the petals not crumpled. (Name from the color of the juice.)

    S. canadensis L. — Open rich woods; common. Apr., May.

  • 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.