Flowers of a Shady Woods

Well, if you live long enough, you gotta have some way to die. And I've lived a long time: 82 years plus a few weeks, so there's no doubt my old bod might be wearing out.  Ever since my car-accident injuries last December sent me to the hospital where I got scanned head to toe,  various doctors have found something suspicious concerning diverse innards: aneurisms in my brain, nodes on my adrenal glands, shadows in my lungs, abnormalities of the female organs.  So far, I'm told I have nothing really to fear, at least for the present, but even more tests may alter that optimism.  Fingers crossed!  Meanwhile, even though I'm completely asymptomatic, I've spent more time in Imaging Centers and specialists' offices this summer than walking the woods or paddling the river.  But I have popped over to nearby woods for brief walks, and here are a few of my finds.  Few big showy flowers bloom in the deep shade of the woods in June, but even the tiny ones are worth a look.

Actually, the flower clusters of Common Elder (Sambucus nigra ssp. canadensis) are quite big and showy, even if the individual florets are tiny.

And those tiny individual Elder florets are displayed to delightful advantage when shed to rest on a fern frond growing below. 

The plants of Tall Meadow Rue (Thalictrum pubescens) are indeed quite tall, some towering over my head.  But the florets themselves are dainty and wispy.  So brilliantly white, they almost seem to sparkle in the dense shade of the woods.

The tiny flowers of Virginia Stickseed (Hackelia virginiana) look so cute and innocent right now, one might never suspect that their prickly seedpods are one of the most difficult stickers to remove from clothing.

Enchanter's Nightshade (Circaea canadensis) has such wee wispy florets, it is very hard to force my camera to focus on them.  This shot was reasonably successful.  The botanical name, Circaea, comes from the Greek mythological enchantress Circe, who was known for her knowledge of herbs and potion-making skills. In the late 16th century, botanists believed Circe used the herb to charm Odysseus' companions, which led to the common name Enchanter's Nightshade.  However,  this plant is not in the Nightshade Family at all, but rather in the Evening Primrose Family (Onagraceae).

The florets of Lopseed (Phryma leptostachya) are just about as small as those of Enchanter's Nightshade, but their pretty pink color helps me discern them among all the greenery of the mid-summer shady woods.  I have found them only in calcareous woodlands or on limestone walls, and I do feel lucky to find them in bloom, when the florets stand out from the stalk.  When they go to seed, the pods will lie flat to the stalk, which is where the name "Lopseed" came from.






Here's another pink mid-summer woodland wildflower, Pointed-leaf Tick Trefoil (Hylodesmum glutinosum). The long slender flower stalk springs from the center of a whorl of pointed leaves.  There is a second wildflower, the Naked Tick Trefoil,  that has very similar flowers and which could be confused with this one, except that its flowers grow on a stalk that springs directly from the ground next to the leaves, instead of from the center of whorled leaves. The shape of the florets makes it obvious that this plant belongs to the Pea Family.

I was delighted to find this specimen of Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana), since it quite clearly displays the transition from floret to berry.  Earlier, the small spidery flowers dangle unseen below a top-tier of whorled leaves, but eventually stiffen their stems to stand above those whorled leaves as the greenish petals and three-parted rusty-brown stigmas drop off and the round berries take shape. The berries will ripen to a glossy blue-black, set among leaves that in autumn will be stained with a lovely red center.  As this plant's common name suggests, its root does indeed taste similar to cucumber, but it yields such a small bite per plant, it would be a waste of effort to dig it for food and thus destroy the plant.

And if you were to destroy the plant, you would never get to see how remarkably beautiful it would be come September:

I sure hope that by September, all these medical tests I've been taking will have signaled an "all clear" healthwise, or any conditions revealed have been successfully treated.