flowers

Germander has started to bloom. Its delicate and somewhat exotic pink flowers sprout from a spike that emerges from a low cluster of pointy, smoky, lightly notched green leaves that sprout from moist soil just back of the marsh in an open area at the edge of the woods. Germander, also known as Wood Sage (the scientific name is Teucrium canadense) is in the mint family and like other members of the family, has a rather striking little flower with projecting stamens from where the upper lip ought to be and a broad extended lower lip which perhaps offers a landing pad for fertilizing insects. This is the narrow-leafed variety known as littorale; it is certainly one of our more unusual wildflowers.

Another strange wildflower currently in bloom is easily overlooked as it is an unpossessing green plant with only the tiniest of tiny white flowers. But it has a whopper of a name -- Enchanter's Nightshade -- that gives this modest-looking botanical specimen more than a touch of mystery. To add to the strangeness, it's not a nightshade at all and the enchantment is elusive. The tiny white flowers are on longish stalks or racemes and each petal has two tiny little lobes (which makes it appear -- if you look through a magnifying glass -- as though each flower has four petals). and long stamens. The seedpods are tiny little flat paddles with a curious fringe on each paddle; apparently these pods will stick to clothes or fur. This plant is in the Evening Primrose family although it looks nothing like the familiar Evening Primrose. Its Latin name, Circaea, obviously refers to the fabled enchantress Circe. But why is this plant associated with magic? What magic? How did Circe get a hold of a presumably New World plant many centuries before Columbus? Apparently Circe seduced sailors like Odysseus into sticking with her just like the seed pods of her magic plant which she magically obtained from far-off America.

Another striking local plant currently in bloom is Spotted Wintergreen which, with its two-toned leaves, looks like a hot-house plant recently removed from the rain forest. The flower is a nodding, white, waxy affair that look positively unreal. Spotted Wintergreen grows in the mixed duff of pine and oak trees in sandy, pine-barrens soils. The fact that it grows in our woods tells me that these woods are an extension of, not the rainforest, but the pine barrens.

Other flowers of early summer: Yucca, Queen Anne's Lace, Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia), Rambler Rose (on its last legs) and the oddly named, blue-flowered Sheep's Bit (try saying that name several times quickly). Most of these are flowers of open areas and to find them I have to go to the edges of the property. The open area in front of the house is now too reduced by the encroaching woodland and too shaded during much of the day for most of these open-field plants to flourish.

Eric Salzman