Species of the Week: Large-Flowered Bellwort

Species of the Week
Number 37 -- April 23, 2007

In the Species of the Week feature of the Wildwood Web we took a close look at one of the species that lives in Wildwood. To see the earlier featured species check the Species of the Week archives.

I wish to dedicate this week's Species of the Week to the memory of those who died in the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I am sure they had places they had loved as I love Wildwood Park.

Large-Flowered Bellwort

Uvularia grandiflora

Large-flowered bellwort is a pretty but untidy looking plant. The leaves are somewhat curled and look half-opened. The flowers dangle beneath the leaves, and look wilted. The plant stands up to about two and a half feet tall, with one to several stems arising from the underground parts. The stems are often branched. Each branch bears one to several dangling flowers, one to two inches long. The sepals and petals are both deep yellow and look alike; since they cannot be easily told apart they are called tepals.

Large-flowered bellwort is another spring ephemeral, doing its growing and blooming before the trees leaf out. It favors rich deciduous woods from Quebec west to Montana and south to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and then north in the Appalachian Mountains to New Hampshire. In Wildwood it is very common on the western slope of the park near where the dwarf larkspurs are blooming so extravagantly.

The very young shoots of bellworts, just emerging from the ground, are edible and can be cooked like asparagus. It is dangerous to try this, however, unless you can be absolutely certain of the plant's identity. The very young emerging shoots of many plants look alike, including those of species that may be poisonous.

The genus Uvularia is a small one, with only five species, all of them in eastern North America. A second species occurs in Wildwood, the perfoliate bellwort, U. perfoliata. Actually both species are perfoliate, meaning the stem grows right through the leaves. This can barely be made out in the pictures, especially in the upper part of the picture at left. Perfoliate bellwort differs from the large-flowered species, by being smaller, rarely branching, and having one smaller, paler flower per stem.

Bellworts used to be in the Liliaceae or Lily Family. This was one of the largest family of plants known as monocots from the single leaf in the embryo tucked into the seed. The other large families of monocots have specialized flowers that easily mark them as being related, the Grass Family, the Sedge Family, the Orchid Family, and so on. The Lily Family, however, has been the catch-all for those monocots with relatively basic flowers, 6 tepals surrounding the sexual parts. Think of the tulip that so many people study in elementary school as a typical monocot flower. Given that, it is probably not surprising that recent DNA evidence shows that the Lily Family has been evolving into a number of distinct lineages, even thought the flowers have not changed much. However, right now there is no agreement on just how the Lily Family should be divided up. Suggested families for the bellworts have been the Melanthiaceae or Bunch Flower Family, the Cochicaceae or Autumn Crocus Family, the Convallariaceae or Lily-of-the-Valley Family, and its own Bellwort Family, the Uvulariaceae. Perhaps it would be best to leave them in the Lily Family until botanists have come to an agreement on how best to split the lilies.

The genus name Uvularia comes from the Latin uvula, the name for the little organ that dangles in the back of your throat. Presumably the dangling flowers were thought to resemble uvulas. A Medieval philosophy called the Doctrine of Signatures claimed that God had given mankind clues to the medicinal uses of plants by shaping them to look like the organs they were useful in treating. For this reason bellworts were thought useful in treating sore or inflamed throats. However, they appear not to have been very effective as I can find no mention of them in more modern books of medicinal plants. The species name grandiflora comes from Latin and simply means "large flower." The English name bellwort is not at all mysterious; bell refers to the shape of the flower, and wort is an old English word for plant.

GGC