|
Home - Antiques Digest |
|
 Wild Spikenard; False Solomon's Seal; Solomon's Zig-zag Hairy, or True, or Twin-flowered Solomon's Seal White and Greenish Nodding Ladies' Tresses or Traces Lesser Rattlesnake Plantain Lizard's Tail Spring Beauty; Claytonia Starry Campion Common Chickweed Sweet-scented White Water Lily; Pond Lily; Water Nymph; Water Cabbage Read More Articles On Flowers |
( Originally Published 1916 ) (Saururus cernuus) Lizard's-tail family Flowers—Fragrant, very small, white, lacking a perianth, bracted, densely crowded on peduncled, slender spikes 4 to 6 in. long and nodding at the tip. Stamens 6 to 8, the filaments white; carpels 3 or 4, united at base, dangling. Stem: 2 to 5 ft. high, jointed, sparingly branched, leafy. Leaves: Heart-shaped, palmately ribbed, dark green, thin, on stout petioles. Preferred Habitat—Swamps, shallow water. Flowering Season—June—August. Distribution—Southern New England to the Gulf, westward to Minnesota and Texas. The fragrance arising from these curious, drooping, taillike spikes of flowers, where they grow in numbers, must lure their in-sect friends as it does us, since no showy petals or sepals advertise their presence. Nevertheless they are what are known as perfect flowers, each possessing stamens and pistils, the only truly essential parts, however desirable a gayly colored perianth may be to blossoms attempting to woo such large land insects as the bumblebee and butterfly. Since flies, whose color sense is by no means so acute as their sense of smell, are by far the most abundant fertilizers of waterside plants, we can see a tendency in such to suppress their petals, for the flowers to become minute and massed in series that the little visitors may more readily transfer pollen from one to an-other, and to become fragrant just what the lizard's tail has done. |