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Black Bugbane & The Blues: Interactions Between Our Wildflower Of The Year And The Insect World, W. John Hayden
Black Bugbane & The Blues: Interactions Between Our Wildflower Of The Year And The Insect World, W. John Hayden
Biology Faculty Publications
No, this article has nothing to do with American Roots music. Black Bugbane is one of several common names for the 2017 VNPS Wildflower of the Year, Actaea racemosa. And Blues refers to a subfamily of lycaenid butterflies, commonly referred to as Blues or Azures. The interactions between Black Bugbane, a.k.a., Black Cohosh, Appalachian Azure butterflies (Celastrina neglectamajor), and ants was recently summarized by VNPS charter member and past president Nicky Staunton (2015). In brief, Black Bugbane is the sole food source for caterpillars of Appalachian Azure butterflies, a situation that, superficially, might seem like any other caterpillar and host …
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 …
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, …
On The Complexity Of Simples, Pharmacognosy, And Actaea Racemosa, W. John Hayden
On The Complexity Of Simples, Pharmacognosy, And Actaea Racemosa, W. John Hayden
Biology Faculty Publications
Pharmacognosy, a discipline at the intersection of botany and medicine, deals with knowledge about medicines derived from plants (Youngken 1950). A central goal of pharmacognosy is the accurate and consistent taxonomic identification of medicinal plants and medicinal plant products. Unlike drugstore pill bottles, medicinal plants in nature do not come with labels. One aspect of pharmacognosy, then, is the identification of whole plants found in nature. Much as in field botany and plant systematics, this aspect of pharmacognosy involves learning to recognize species by overall appearance (gestalt), or by dichotomous keys, or both.