{"id":3937,"date":"2023-04-17T14:03:18","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T22:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3937"},"modified":"2023-04-17T14:03:18","modified_gmt":"2023-04-17T22:03:18","slug":"known-and-unknown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/known-and-unknown\/","title":{"rendered":"Known and Unknown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Viola<\/a>The best time to see woodland and woodland-edge wildflowers is in spring, and the best place to find them is in undisturbed areas in the country, or on the edges of urban or suburban parks or botanical gardens.\u00a0 Wildlife reserves are good too, as are nature trails.<\/p>\n

On vacation last week I hiked on a nature trail that was bounded on one side by a river and the other by woodland.\u00a0 Without even venturing off the trail, I saw at least a dozen wildflower species and varieties in the space of about 90 minutes. \u00a0Among the most interesting were a relatively large species that I recognized right away and a smaller one that I am still at least a bit puzzled about.<\/p>\n

The easily recognizable wildflower was common mayapple or Podophyllum peltatum.\u00a0 \u201cPeltatum\u201d means \u201cumbrella-like\u201d, an apt description of the large, palmate leaves that sit atop 12-inch stalks.\u00a0 Once mayapple foliage has unfurled in the spring, a good-sized toad could happily sit in the shade of an average size mayapple leaf.<\/p>\n

Mayapples grow from fleshy underground roots or rhizomes and readily colonize the shady woodland edges they prefer.\u00a0 In the spring, those big leaves also hide something else\u2014lovely white flowers with six to nine petals each surrounding centers of clustered yellow anthers.\u00a0 The shy flowers tend to droop a bit and are hard to spot unless you look carefully.\u00a0 Still, they are charming, and the plants are distinctive. Once pollinated, the flowers eventually give way to oval-shaped “apples\u201d, which are, at least theoretically, edible.\u00a0 These days I suspect that with the exception of intrepid foragers, humans don\u2019t eat them.\u00a0 Box turtles apparently do. Not surprisingly I saw at least 20 turtles congregating nearby at the river\u2019s edge.\u00a0 Perhaps later in the summer those turtles will scrabble across the pedestrian path and feast on the \u201capples\u201d.<\/p>\n

While ogling the mayapples and searching for the elusive mayapple flowers, I saw groups of tiny flowers growing along the edges of the walking path.\u00a0 From above they looked like miniscule stars, but closer inspection revealed minute pansy=like faces, with the typical viola family petal array of \u201ctwo up, three down\u201d.\u00a0 I had not encountered anything like them in my wildflower travels closer to home.\u00a0 Perhaps I hadn\u2019t looked in the right places at the right time.\u00a0 At any rate, I took a host of pictures with my phone\u2019s camera to help my flower research.<\/p>\n

The mystery flowers, which grew on two to six-inch stems, were clearly members of the large violet family, but bore leaves that were closer in appearance to those of the small-flowered violas that I buy from garden centers in the spring than those of the common wild violet\u2014Viola soraria.\u00a0 Some gardeners love the sorarias and others hate them, but just about everyone can agree that they run rampant through country verges and suburban lawns at this time of the year.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Viola soraria leaves are heart-shaped, with the flower stalks springing from a basal foliage rosette.\u00a0 The mystery plant\u2019s leaves were elongated and appeared somewhat toothed.<\/p>\n

My curiosity was piqued, and as soon as I returned to my hotel room, I started researching the lovely little violas with the dime-sized, pale blue or blue purple flowers.\u00a0 Each flower also had a touch of yellow at the heart and a few \u201cwhiskers\u201d on the central lower petal.<\/p>\n

Viola research can be difficult because the genus is large and far-flung.\u00a0 Viola species growing in proximity to each other also tend to interbreed.\u00a0 Still, horticultural curiosity is a powerful thing, and I was determined to put a name to my new viola acquaintance.<\/p>\n

My first discovery was that while gallons of ink have been spilled in descriptions of Viola soraria, many fewer have been expended describing other violets.\u00a0 I looked at what seemed like hundreds of online images of violets from North America and elsewhere in the world.\u00a0 I saw lots of heart-shaped leaves.\u00a0 Finally, after tackling a formidable list of viola species I found one that looked like my mystery violet\u2014Viola arvensis, the \u201cEuropean field pansy.\u201d\u00a0 The fact that it looks more like what Americans call a \u201cviola\u201d and less like what Americans refer to as a \u201cpansy\u201d, is of no consequence.\u00a0 Viola arvensis is not native to these shores, but hails from Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.\u00a0 Clearly it jumped the fence from colonial-era gardens early on and made itself thoroughly at home.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the European field pansy is also called \u201cjohnny jump-up”, because it pops up in unexpected places.\u00a0 When I was growing up the violas that we called \u201cjohnny jump-up” were from another species, the dark purple and yellow Viola tricolor, another naturalized European that is an ancestor of the modern hybrid pansy.<\/p>\n

This is why common plant names are unreliable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best time to see woodland and woodland-edge wildflowers is in spring, and the best place to find them is in undisturbed areas in the country, or on the edges of urban or suburban parks or botanical gardens.\u00a0 Wildlife reserves are good too, as are nature trails. On vacation last week I hiked on a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,3],"tags":[2861,2857,448,2860,2858,2082,2859,2068,2304,147],"class_list":["post-3937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-european-field-pansy","tag-mayapple","tag-native-plants","tag-naturalized-plants","tag-polophyllum-peltatum","tag-spring-wildflowers","tag-viola-arvensis","tag-viola-family","tag-viola-soraria","tag-wildflowers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3939,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3937\/revisions\/3939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}