The Sex Life and Folklore of Western New York Wildflowers D. Bruce Johnstone The Pundit Club March 9, 1981

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Some of you, I know, suspect that I have employed that cheap old trick of throwing "sex" into my title in a shameless attempt to lure young farm boys and old pundits into listening to a tedious academic tone that, in fact, hasn't a scintilla of salacity to it. Wrong! This is indeed about sex, at least in part. As you all know, the flower, botanically, is the reproductive organ of the angiosperm -- that astonishingly successful kingdom of plants that includes grasses, shrubs, trees, and practically everything cultivated for food and fiber -- as well as what we more popularly call flowers, those herbaceous angiosperms whose reproductive systems include lovely shapes, showy colors, attractive odors, and other devices all calculated to enlist unwitting members of the animal kingdom as participants in their acts of floral sex.

But I am just a bit ahead of my story. The sex act of a flower is actually quite boring, at least if you are used to mammals, or especially to people. Yet it is strikingly similar, if a whole lot slower and lacking altogether any to the organism. the sexual congress of the male and female gametes begins with the male reproductive cell -- a grain of pollen -- finding its way on to the stigma, the slightly sticky top of the female reproductive organ, at the bottom of which is the ovary, with several ovules, or young unfertilized seeds. The pollen then travels in a microscopic tube down the style from the stigma to the ovary, and enters an individual ovule through a microscopic hole called a micropyle, where, in the tiny interior of the ovule, the genetic union takes place and a seed begins to develop just like in people, with a bit of its mom and a bit of its dad.

What is remarkable, and terribly useful, about sexual reproduction of any life form -- snapdragon, fruitfly, rhesus monkey, or wheat -- is that it joins two gene pools, passing on, and often combining in wonderful new ways, the attributes of both parents. Sexual reproduction both creates and transmits variation, which is the essential stuff of evolution. The serendipitous variation that is better able to adapt to its environment survives and with luck passes on those special characteristics to its progeny who (or which) are statistically more likely to survive and to keep the new gene pool going. Unlucky mutations or no longer viable genetic material passes on to oblivion, while the tribes of the successful mutations increase and prosper.

As an aside, most angiosperms can also reproduce themselves, or be reproduced at the hand of man, asexually or vegetatively. Runners, bulbs, grafts, cuttings, layering, and other methods not involving seeds reproduce the parent plant as would a clone -- without variation in the genetic material of the parent. This may be commercially useful, assuming satisfaction with the basic gene pool, as it is generally faster and, of course, more "true" than sexual, or seed, reproduction. It may or may not be more enjoyable to the plant than sex. But evolutionarily speaking, vegetative reproduction is a bust.

Highly contrived variations such as commercial hybrids, which are done by meticulous hand pollination from the right boy flower part to the right girl flower part, have usually not evolved stable genetic material capable of exact, or even of close, reproduction. Sexual congress of male and female hybrids is likely to produce low-life throwbacks to some distant primitive cousin. Consequently, most hybrids require continuous arranged marriages of the proper gene pools -- in addition to appropriate prophylactic measures -- such as paper sacks over the corn silks -- to keep the wrong male pollen from getting into the female's you-know-whats.

What we call the flower -- the brightly colored, often sweet smelling part -- is nothing more nor less than equipment evolved over the last 110-130 million years to attract insects, birds, and bats and to enlist them in spreading their pollen. Almost all flowers have developed brightly colored petals (in some cases, sepals -- but the difference is here insignificant) to attract their pollinator. If the rest of the apparatus is designed for bees, for example, the color is likely to be toward the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, which the bee eye can best distinguish. If the pollinator is to be a bird or a bat, the color will likely be red, for the same reason. If the agent is nocturnal -- a night flying moth, for example -- the color will probably be white, or at least light.

Flowers that attract worker bees, who seek the pollen itself, need only to have the pollen visible and accessible. But male bees, flies, and many other insects as well as birds and bats, are attracted not by the pollen but by sugary nectar, which has a luring scent. They carry the pollen from one nectar bar to another only because they are messy and some of it is always sticking to their shoes, hat, or lapel. Some flowers have teamed up with carrion eating flies; their scent is disagreeable to us, like rotten meat, although apparently quite delectable to the proper fly. Some plants are able to produce biochemicals that are incorporated into the insect's sex attractants, thus drawing the same insect, opposite sex, into the flower, desirably dragging a bit of pollen with him or her.

Flowers are even arranged mechanically to fit the proper pollinator, so that the pollen from the daisy is not wasted by being dragged into the calex of the Lobelia. Thus, flowers that hide the nectar deep in a tube will be visited only by long-tongued bees and butterflies. Flowers that open only in the evening will be visited only by night flying insects. And so on. The results, to the flowers, are effective means of propagating their kind, with the assurance of sufficient genetic variations to maintain flexibility in the gene pools. To the rest of us, the results are lovely things growing wild in fields, vacant lots, woodlands, and roadsides, or cultivated in our gardens.

For most of recorded history, however, the loveliness of flowers was secondary to their real or imagined medicinal value. Almost all common wildflowers, at least of the Old World, had ascribed to them some such pharmaceutical properties. And many of our most common wildflowers -- like daisy, yarrow, Queen Anne's lace, campion, mullein, vervain, and many others -- are relatively recent immigrants, which spread to our roadsides from the gardens of early settlers or from the packing refuse of transatlantic shipments.

Often there were real pharmacological bases to at least some of the putative cures. Concoctions from roots, leaves, or flowers often had effects upon the body, sometimes quite profound, and the more violent the effect, even to the point of poison, the more attractive the herb. The herbals -- books of herb or wildflower medicine, extending to very recent years -- cited common wildflowers and their concoctions as:

• cathartic: stimulating intestinal secretions
• laxative: stimulating intestinal peristalsis
• diuretic: stimulating urination
• emetic: inducing vomiting
• emollient: softening tissue
• astringent: shrinking tissue
• expectorant: ejecting fluid from lungs
• hemostatic: promoting blood clotting
• eupeptic promoting good digestion
• emmenagogic: promoting menstruation
• antipyretic: reducing fever
• diaphoreticand sudorific: promoting sweating

Much herbal medicine reflects the early and understandable notion that being sick was "having bad stuff inside of one," and that almost any agent that helped to empty the body -- by defecation, urination, perspiration, regurgitation, or expectoration -- was probably a good thing. Many plants, as we have noted, made one vomit or defecate or sweat or shrivel; when the illness passed, as it generally did unless the patient died, which was not infrequent, the cure was naturally ascribed to the herbal remedy.

At times, of course, the herbal remedy was all it was claimed to be. The most famous of all is probably foxglove, or digitalis, a lovely tubular flower of mottled lavender that an old hag in England claimed to be a cure for dropsy -- a serious and painful condition of fluid retention. In the 1770's, an English physician and botanist, William Withering, heard of the foxglove's properties and performed what were probably the first scientific experiments upon a pharmaceutical agent. The drug digitalis, for which the foxglove is the only source, has a powerful effect on the heart, the failure of which was actually the cause of dropsy, and the stimulation of which was the explanation fro the cure Most other herbals are considerably less potent and less useful than digitalis, yet one can find a few useful herbs by the Western New York roadsides.

• The ubiquitous yarrow, or Achillea mille folium: so named because Achilles was said to have used it to stem the blood of his wounded troops at the siege of Troy. Also called woundwort and nosebleed plant, it does have a mild blood clotting property. An old world plant, its leaves were also chewed for stomachache and toothache, and a tea from its leaves treated chills, fever, gout, and afflictions of the hair and scalp. Young girls in some localities would pluck yarrow from the graveside of a young man and invoking Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, dream that night of their true love.

• Touch-me-not, or jewelweed, is still said to be an effective antidote for poison ivy. This is a wonderful flower in the fall, when the seed pods are ripe and a slight touch will explode the tiny spring within and send the seeds flying in all directions. It is pollinated, incidentally, largely by birds and long-tongued insects able to reach its deeply secreted nectar.

• Great Lobelia is an excellent example of a flower thought to have potent herbal properties because it has such a profound effect on the body. It is, in fact, quite poisonous. It was for a time very popular as a remedy for syphilis -- as evidenced by the scientific name Lobelia syphilitica -- ad exported from America to Europe for that purpose. In its time, it was also thought to be a cure for asthma, tonsillitis and bronchial disorders. Eventually, the public accepted the plain fact that no cure was worse than any of the disorders brought on by Lobelia syphilitica, and its use as an herb ceased.

• Chicory is another common Western New York wildflower, brought over from Europe to early gardens from which it escaped. It is still used as a flavoring in coffee and tea, but like so many popular herbs of old, its uses were thought myriad. One source writes:

• Bouncing bet, or soapwort -- also bruisewort, Fuller's herb, dogs clove, and other names -- is another common wildflower that escaped the colonists' gardens. Its leaves and stems make a lather when mixed and shaken, which has been recommended for poison ivy and other skin disorders. Its main use has been as a cleaning agent for china and glass is and delicate washables. It works, although cleaning china and old glass is not much more fun with Bouncing Bet than with soap.

• Mad dog skullcap, or Scutellaria lateriflora, was a very popular home medicine, with antispasmodic properties, used to treat convulsions, St. Vitus dance and rabies -- from whence, of course, comes its common name.

• Purple loosestrife, or Lythrum is a beautiful plant that grows in great colonies in ditches and other damp places. It has astringent properties, and was used for tanning as well as for treatment of chronic diarrhea and dysentery.

• Pokeweed, or inkberry, had an altogether different use. It was used as a dye to color cheap whiskey the color of port. One book cites laws passed in Portugal and France to destroy the flower because of that mischievous practice. The root also has laxative and narcotic properties, the latter thought useful in treating rheumatism. However, the roots, mature stem, and berries are quite poisonous.

• Although many herbal cures had at least a faint pharmacological base, many others were utterly fanciful. The most bizarre stemmed from the ancient Doctrine of Signatures, wherein it was presumed that a wise Providence provided visual clues to show mankind God's intended purpose for the plant. The three lobed shape of the lovely spring wildflower, Hepatica, for example, resembled the liver; hence its concoctions were prescribed for liver ailments.

• Bonset, or Eupatorium perfoliatum, is a large, common, coarse, weedy wildflower with a wooley white top and a curious leaf form in which a single leaf fully surrounds the stem, as though binding it together. This was surely a sign that the plant had the power to heal broken bones -- thus the name, and the practice of wrapping broken limbs in leaves. Like yarrow and other common wildflowers, bonset acquired a reputation for a vast number of additional powers, one of which, curiously was to cure flu, than called bonebreak or breakbone fever. A 1948 herbal said of bonset:

• Smartweed, or knotweed, or jointweed or Lady's thumb is a common wildflower in the buckwheat family, characterized by little knotted flowers and swollen, sheathed joints along the stem. This signature revealed a design by the Creator that it be used to treat arthritis, rheumatism, and gout -- although there was never, apparently, any basis whatsoever for these properties.

• Trillium, here the beautiful white trillium, or birthroot, which is fairly common in this region, was used as a uterine stimulant to aid in childbirth; the roots and water were said to ease the pain of sore nipples in nursing mothers. Its cousin, the red trillium, sometimes called stinking Benjamin, stinking Willie, or wet dog trillium, has the color and odor of rotten flesh. (Those of you who were awake for the start of my talk will know instantly that it is pollinated by carrion eating flies.) This signature revealed its role in the greater scheme of things as a treatment for gangrene.

• Vipers bugloss revealed its purpose by its purple mottling and snake's head-shaped seeds; it could either cure, or better still prevent, snake bite.

• Queen Anne's lace is one of the hardiest and most ubiquitous of our alien wildflowers. A disgusting little bit of folklore has it originating form the spot where Queen Anne, suffering from consumption (as was common with queens of that day), threw the lovely lace handkerchief into which she had just coughed. Another pretty bit of folklore about Queen Anne's lace says that the mother of whomever picks it and takes it into a house will die. ( I don't know when.) It is said to be a very distant relative of today's carrot, and it has edible roots, although they will generally jaundice the skin -- a signature that the potion must be good for ailments of the liver.

• Another wildflower reputed to cure about anything and yet having no pharmacological properties beyond a slight astringency, is heal all, or Prunella vulgaris. It has two far-fetched signatures: one, a slight resemblance to a mouth and throat, suggesting a cure for oral inflammation; the other, an even slighter resemblance to a carpenter's hook, suggesting a power to cure the many nicks and scratches of the carpenter's trade and giving rise to another name, carpenter weed . It is another European import, and flourishes in lawns.

• The ox eye daisy, or Chrysanthemum Ieucanthemum, is another European import, sometimes in England called poverty weed or poorland flower for its disastrous effects on pastures. The daisy, called a marguerite in medieval days, was a common symbol of beauty and love. An old Christian legend has St. Mary Magdalen shedding tears of repentance, each tear turning into a daisy upon touching the earth. According to Celtic legend, each daisy represents a stillborn baby whose spirit sends a daisy to cheer the saddened parents. If legends do not impress, the daisy was also thought good for bruises and the gout.

• The harebell is a blue bell on a slender stem. According to legend, the fairies were defeated in battle by the pixies. Three wounded fairies hid in the brush and were there rescued by a hare. The fairy queen rewarded the animal by planting the meadow with tiny bells to warn the hare of danger. The credibility of that otherwise quite plausible story of its origination is diminished by another explanation which accounts for the name, in this case spelled h-a-i-r, by the hair-like stems on which the little bells grow. So much for fairy stories.

• The Moth mullein has a very small place in folklore. Its leaves are woolly, like a moth, but only one source ascribed to it any useful property, that to repel cockroaches.

• Motherwort was a woman's herb, used to promote menstrual flow and to reduce pain of menstruation. It was also thought to extend life generally. It was said: "drink motherwort and live to be a source of continuing astonishment and grief to waiting heirs.

• Butter-and-eggs, once called toadflax, is another familiar roadside wildflower. Toads were said to find special comfort in its shade. Boiled in milk, it warded off flies. It seems also to have been a minor cure for dropsy and jaundice.

• Gentius, King of the ancient Adriatic kingdom of Illyria, was said to have discovered the medicinal value of the Gentian. The roots were used to make a drink called spring bitter, said to purify the blood. The bitter flavor was also used in rum and brandy, and is still used in some aperitifs. A rare autumn flower, the variety shown here has fringes which cause crawling insects to fall off, preserving the nectar for the flying insects that do the flower some good.

• Hawkweed is one of our few orange wildflowers. It ruins good pasture land, and was thus also called devil's paintbrush. (The word devil appears in dozens of old names for plants, Dirty Dick, and Grim the Collier.) Hawks were said to eat the plant for better eyesight, and herb doctors used a concoction to heal sore eyes.

• Centaury, or feverwort, as an infusion mixed in wine, was a popular herb for reducing fevers. Some observers, far more cynical than I, might attribute whatever nice effects were felt to the wine. Of uncertain etymology, the word centaury comes either form the Greek centaur, Chiron (the teacher of Jason, Achilles, and others), said to have discovered its medicinal properties, or from the Latin base centum, signifying its great value -- e.g., one hundred pieces of gold. Among the Irish, centaury was brought into the home for hood luck between Annunciation Day (March 25) and the Feast of the Assumption (August 15). On the Isle of Man (why only there I do not know), it was believed that centaury grew along Christ's way to Calvery.

• Cardinal Flower is one of the most spectacular native American wildflowers. Imagine the exquisite thrill of the 17th century botanist, searching New England swamps for new varieties of flowers, coming for the first time upon such a creation as the cardinal flower. Its principal agent of pollination, as all of you have doubtless guessed form its long tubular calex and red corolla, is the humming bird.

• Bittersweet nightshade is ubiquitous and poisonous. Shepherds hung it as a charm around the necks of animals thought to be troubled by an evil eye.

• Hairy Willow herb is found along streams. Its aroma has led to some use in fruit pies and, for some reason especially in Russia, as a flavoring in tea.

• Hairy Puccoon, taken daily for six months by an infusion of the roots, was thought by American Indians to bring on sterility -- sort of an early and quite impractical version of the still sought after male pill. Puccoon is an Indian name given to all kinds of dyes, this one a purple stain made from the roots.

• Yellow goat's beard blooms only before noon, becoming an indistinguishable green weed in the afternoon sun. Its other names are noonflower and Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. It is a very dull flower, and no one, that I know, ever told a legend about it or attributed to it any outlandish properties.

• Blue vervain or verbena hastata, has one of the richest lores of medieval and magical properties. According to an old American herbal, it is good "...for pain of the mother, wound, tumors, sores, fevers, falling hair, headache, sore throats, and toothache." The common name comes for the Celtic fer faen , meaning "to drive away stone," referring to its supposed ability to cure kidney stones. Placed in the shoe on All Hallow's Eve, it kept one from turning into a witch. By placing it in a shoe in Scotland, a young man or girl would next meet either his or her spouse-to-be -- or at least a kin of that spouse-to-be. Since most inhabitants of small Scottish towns were, in olden days, related in some way, the test might not have given all that much away. Still another legend -- with a familiar ring --has blue vervain stanching the wounds of Christ at Calvery.

• Evening Lychnis is a lovely and very common member of the pink family. It is supposed to bloom and scent in the evening, although I have generally seen it out, if not full, at all times. It attracts night flying moths. Surprisingly, for so interesting a flower, there appears to be virtually no folklore -- but this is a mark of many of the American native wildflowers. Almost all of those for which I have cited a rich, if fanciful and occasionally quite demented, folklore are of European origin, and their folklore grew up before the ages of enlightenment, reason, or skepticism.

• Bladder campion is a cousin of Evening Lychnis, although with smaller petals and a puffier sack. Children (old pundits, too, I suppose, if they wish) can pinch closed the blossom end of the tiny air sack and produce a nice pop. Other old English names for this flower are Billy-busters, cow rattle, fatbellies, kiss-me-quick, rattle-bags (referring, I believe, to the noise of the seeds rattling around in the dried sack at summer's end), spattling poppy, thunder-fold and white riding hood. Most of these manes make no sense whatsoever to me.

• Hedge bindweed first entered the United States, it is said, in packing crates from Europe being unloaded for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Bindweed, a morning glory, opens and closes with the sun, and was in Europe called shepherd's clock. It spreads profusely, and destructively, and was earlier known as devil's garter, Jack-run-in-the-country, hedge bells, ropebind, and cornbind. An infusion from the leaves has purgative properties, and so may have been used occasionally as a laxative.

• The asiatic dayflower grows at an enormous rate, especially in gardens. Notice the two well formed blue petals, with a tiny, nondescript white one below. With a playfulness quite uncharacteristic of an 18th century botanist, the great Swedish taronomist Linneaus named the genus commelina after a family which had three brothers -- two quite distinguished botanists and the third, evidently something of a failure. What a kidder was Linneaus, to have memorialized to perpetuity the fellow who didn't make it! The asiatic dayflower is also supposed to increase sexual potency in old age.

• The common evening primrose is a tall beautiful plant, rather common in these parts, with no particular folklore that I know. This may be in part to its native origins. Were it to have grown in Europe, with its stigma in the shape of a cross, medieval Christendom would have draped the poor thing in theological significance. As it is, it is a nice large wildflower that attracts night flying moths.

• Square-stemmed monkey flowers have a square stem, like members of the mint family, but is itself of the figwort family. The flower is said to have reminded early taxonomists of a monkey's face. When the flower is pinched, it grins, thus the scientific name mimulus, Latin for little buffoon.

• Fleabane is one of the commonest of wildflowers, blooming almost everywhere from early summer until the asters come in the fall. As its name suggests, it was dried and burned to rid homes of insects.

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This, I believe, is more than enough. There is really no end to the stories, and the ones I have brought you were selected primarily by the accidents of those of which I have taken pictures and not forgotten to set the ASA reading.

Wildflowers are beautiful, elusive, complex in their sexual behavior, rich in their history and folklore. Most of them are right here in the ditch, along the river, in vacant lots, and by the edge of your garden. Once you begin watching for them, the roadsides will never look the same.

Revised September 1997