Species of the Week: Pale Indian Plantain

Species of the Week
Number 7 -- July 17, 2006

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.

Pale Indian Plantain

Arnoglossum atriplicifolia

Pale Indian Plantain is an unusual plant in Wildwood. It's a perennial, but there are only a few plants in the park. This year I've only been able to find two. Unfortunately, one of them was knocked down by the mowers mowing along the bike path, but it survived. Both plants can be seen along the bike path, across from the outdoor classroom and just past the junction where the bike path and Wildwood Drive merge, .

This plant is in the Asteraceae or sunflower family. As we saw with our first species of the week, prairie ragwort, in this family, what most people call a flower is really a cluster of flowers. Botanist call this cluster a head. Daisies, sunflowers, and prairie ragwort have two kinds of flowers in this head, disc flowers, which are tiny tubular flowers in a cluster in the center, and ray flowers, which are tubular with an extended petal, surrounding the center disc. Pale Indian plantain has only disc flowers, five of them in each head, and no ray flowers. The flowers are white. There are many heads in a flattish cluster. Other members of the genus Arnoglossum have similar flowers. This species is easily distinguished by its large lobed leaves, easily seen at left, somewhat resembling a maple or sycamore leaf, which are green above and white below. The white on the lower part of the leaves gives it the pale designation in its common name.

Pale Indian plantain is found from New Jersey to Michigan and Minnesota, south to Oklahoma, Alabama and Georgia. It prefers woodlands and open areas ranging from moist to somewhat dry. In Wildwood it seems to prefer the bikeway and Wildwood Drive, growing under the trees along these pathways.

In many guidebooks pale Indian plantain is called Cacalia atriplicifolia, but botanists have recently decided that the name Cacalia cannot be correctly used for this plant, so it has been changed to Arnoglossum. The name Arnoglossum comes from the Greek arnos, "lamb," and glossum, "tongue." This is an alternate name for a true plantain, a plant in the genus Plantago. The species name atriplicifolium (or atriplicifolia) comes from the genus name Atriplex plus Latin folium meaning leaf. Thus it means "with leaves like an Atriplex." The most commonly cultivated Atriplex is the orache, A hortensis, which was formerly, and sometimes still is, grown as a vegetable, and is also a common forage plant in the west. Not surprisingly, the leaves of orache are somewhat similar to the leaves of pale Indian plantain.

GGC