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Sepals And Petals And Stamens—Oh, My! Or, A Brief Discourse On Putative Homologies Of Perianth Elements Of Common Black Cohosh, W. John Hayden
Sepals And Petals And Stamens—Oh, My! Or, A Brief Discourse On Putative Homologies Of Perianth Elements Of Common Black Cohosh, W. John Hayden
Biology Faculty Publications
I encountered some contradictory information while preparing to write the 2017 Wildflower of the Year brochure: some sources describe flowers of Actaea racemosa, Common Black Cohosh, as having petals, while others say petals are absent. How can that be? How could there be such uncertainty about this common plant, one known to science since before the time of Linnaeus? After a little research, I decided to describe Black Cohosh flowers as having a series of organs interpretable either as staminodes (nonfunctional stamens) or as petals located between its sepals and stamens (Figure 1). Frankly, I waffled on the petal issue, …
Actaea Racemosa: The Slender Wands Of Flowering Common Black Cohosh Beckon Us To Explore Woodlands, W. John Hayden
Actaea Racemosa: The Slender Wands Of Flowering Common Black Cohosh Beckon Us To Explore Woodlands, W. John Hayden
Biology Faculty Publications
Common Black Cohosh is a perennial rhizomatous forest herb. Its horizontal rhizomes bear numerous adventitious roots on the underside and aerial stems of annual duration on the upper side, along with knobby scars left from aerial stems of previous years. Leaves are alternate, twice or thrice compound in ternate or pinnate patterns, and large—up to 1 m long. Individual leaflet size and shape vary with position in the large compound leaves, with position of a leaf on the stem, and from population to population. Most often leaflets are coarsely serrate, lobed to deeply incised, with a truncate to cuneate base …