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 Flowers And Plants - Natures Garden: Wild Bergamot Snake-head ; Turtle-head ; Balmony; Shellflower; Cod-head Large Purple Gerardia Twin-flower; Ground Vine Joe-Pye Weed ; Trumpet Weed ; Purple Thoroughwort; Gravel or Kidney-root; Tall or Purple Boneset Common Burdock; Cockle-bur; Beggar's Buttons; Clot-bur; Cuckoo Button Water Arum; Marsh Calla American White Hellebore; Indian Poke ; Star of Bethlehem ; Ten O'Clock Star-grass ; Colic-root Read More Articles On Flowers |
( Originally Published 1916 ) (Veratrum viride) Bunch-flower family Flowers—Dingy, pale yellowish or whitish green, growing greener with age, 1 in. or less across, very numerous, in stiff-branching, spike-like, dense-flowered panicles. Perianth of 6 oblong segments; 6 short curved stamens; 3 styles. Stem : Stout, leafy, 2 to 8 ft. tall. Leaves : Plaited, lower ones broadly oval, pointed, 6 to 12 in. long; parallel ribbed, sheathing the stem where they clasp it; upper leaves gradually narrowing; those among flowers small. Preferred Habitat—Swamps, wet woods, low meadows. Flowering Season—May—July. Distribution—British Possessions from ocean to ocean; southward in the United States to Georgia, Tennessee, and Minnesota.
" Borage and hellebore fill two scenes— Such are the antidotes for madness prescribed by Burton in his " Anatomie of Melancholy." But like most medicines, so the homoeopaths have taught us, the plant that heals may also poison; and the coarse, thick rootstock of this hellebore sometimes does deadly work. The shining plaited leaves, put forth so early in the spring they are especially tempting to grazing cattle on that account, are too well known by most animals, however, to be touched by them—precisely the end desired, of course, by the hellebore, night-shade, aconite, cyclamen, Jamestown weed, and a host of others that resort, for protection, to the low trick of mixing poisonous chemicals with their cellular juices. Pliny told how the horses, ,oxen, and swine of his day were killed by eating the foliage of the black hellebore. Flies, which visit the dirty, yellowish-green flowers in abundance, must cross-fertilize them, as the anthers mature before the stigmas are ready to receive pollen. Apparently the visitors suffer no ill effects from the nectar. We have just seen how the green arrow-arum bores a hole in the mud and plants its own seeds in autumn. The hellebore uses its auger in the spring, when we find the stout, shining, solid tool above ground with the early skunk-cabbage. |
