My three darling daughters took me to the Adirondacks last week for three days of birthday celebration. We planned to climb lots of mountains and possibly play a little tennis. Remembering the incredible collection of woodland wildflowers that grow beside the mountain trails, I assumed that on returning home I'd be able to write a great column about them, but the best laid plans…
The afternoon of our arrival, we thought we'd see whether tennis was a possibility. Tam hadn't played since she was twelve, and Trum had just taken it up again after twenty years. Bridget, on the other hand, is now good enough to beat the old lady. This was the first time all four of us had played together and our first set of doubles was such a delight that we ended up playing so much we had no energy left for mountain climbing.
My deadline for Weeds and Wisdom is looming so I guess we'll take a look at the field flowers beside the tennis court. This is the perfect time of year for wildflowers that grow out in the open. We were surrounded by the skyblue of chicory and lacy white of Queen Ann's Lace, but only a few goldenrod had begun showing off their dazzling yellow blooms.
The most prominent field flower in August, the purple loosestrife, grew beside the Ausable River, which we fell into each day to cool off after our tennis. A sea of lavender spires colored the edges of the river and all the marshy areas beside the road to our cottage.
The long willowy stems of Lythrum salicaria can reach four or five feet in height. If you look closely at the flowers of one plant, then those of another and yet another, you will discover that they come in three types. The botanists have given a fancy name to this unusual phenomenon, referring to species with such flowers as trimorphous.
On one plant the flowers will contain a short pistil but tall stamens, on another the stamens will be short, the pistil of medium height, on yet another, a tall pistil and short stamens. These three possibilities eventually equal 18 when all the combinations are accounted for, but not in a single one will the flower be able to pollinate itself.
The insects who transfer pollen from stamens to pistil can only do so from those that are euqal in length as the receptive stigma of a flower's pistil touches the same part of an insect's body as was touched previously by stamens of a similar length. When Charles Darwin discovered this wonderful mechanism for ensuring cross-pollination, he wrote to his friend Asa Gray "I'm almost stark staring mad over lythrum!" Through his patient study of these trimorphous flowers, Darwin proved much of his theory of the origin of species.
In England purple loosestrife is known as "long purples." Shakespeare's famous lines describing Ophelia - "With fantastic garlands did she come. Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples" does not, however, refer to the purple loosestrife. Most authorities believe that since the bard was unlikely to combine flowers having different seasons of bloom, he was referring instead to the purple fringed orchid.
Loosestrife, like so many of our field flowers, is not native to our country. It undoubtedly came over on the boat from Europe as ballast. It spread so fast that early American botanists assumed it had always grown here. Now it is so prolific that it has become a serious nuisance. Getting rid of the vast stands of purple has proved very difficult, as burning, mowing or flooding such areas does more harm than good.
Such methods are costly and require long-term maintenance, as well as often killing other far more desirable plant species. The Natural Resources Departments of various government and educational institutions and other organizations such as Ducks Unlimited are working hard to find biological solutions to keep the purple loosestrife from taking over the wetlands that have been invaded.
I found pictures on the Internet of the three ugly insects that have been let loose on the loosestrife, hairy root-mining weevils and snub-snouted leaf-eating beetles whose Latin names are so long they'd fill up the rest of this page.
It's true, purple loosestrife is a hazard to other marsh loving plants, but it certainly is decorative at this time of year.
