|
Species of the Week
Number 38 --
April 30, 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.
 |
|
Hoary Puccoon
Lithospermum canescens
Orange is actually an unusual color for flowers.
Some sunflowers and goldenrods may shade towards orange-yellow.
Orange jewelweeds are truly
orange, as are some wild lilies. And hoary puccoon is a
brilliant yellow to yellow-orange. This seems odd to me, since
leaves turn readily orange in the fall, as well as other colors.
Perhaps orange is just not a very effective color for attracting
pollinators.
The yellow-orange flowers of hoary puccoon are
tubular, with five spreading lobes at the top of the tube. They
are each about half an inch wide and clustered together at the top
of the plant. The entire plant is low, only about a foot and
half tall or shorter. The leaves are long, narrow, upward
pointing, and rather thick. The leaves and stems are covered
with fine grayish hairs, easily seen in the picture below.
These hairs give it the hoary in its common name. The
plants of the Appalachians are less hairy than in other parts of its
range. |
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
Hoary puccoon likes dry, open woods and prairies. It
grows from southwest Ontario west to Saskatchewan,
south to Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, and in the
Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania to Alabama and
Georgia. A similar, related species, Carolina puccoon,
is found on the coastal plain from South Carolina to Florida
and Texas. |
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
There are only about 50 species of
Lithospermum in the world, about thirty-two of them in
North and South America. They are in the Boraginaceae,
or Borage Family, which includes forget-me-not, heliotrope,
and Virginia Bluebells, as well as the herbs comfrey and
borage. The genus name Lithospermum comes from the Greek
lithos, stone and sperma, seed, and refers to
the very hard seeds the plant produces. The
species name, canescens, means canescent, a botanical
term for having short white or gray hairs. The common
name puccoon is from the languages of the Algonquinian
tribes of Virginia and refers to any plant yielding a red or
yellow pigment. Another common name for the plant is
Indian paint, which presumably refers to its use in producing
pigments.
GGC |
| |
|
|
|
|
