Plant of the Week for May 29th-June 5th, 2011: Sanguinaria canadensis
Note: You will note that this plant is "of" last week. I had the entry half-written by last Friday, but didn't complete it. Since I would still like to write up a particular plant for this week, I'm just preserving it as a late posting of last week's plant. To continue...
The beginning of summer always comes as something of a shock to me. Spring is generally slow in the birthing, emerging from winter in fits & starts that take months. But then, one week, I wake up and find that spring has just suddenly ended, summer has arrived, and all the world is green. This year, it's been this past one - notwithstanding the calendar's claims that summer doesn't arrive 'till the solstice, which the poet calls midsummer! Similarly, recently I've been rather suddenly surprised by a certain plant which wasn't quite what I thought it was. I'm afraid I missed out its spectacular spring flower-show, but it still is a strange and unique little plant that deserves a bit of attention even after its particular season is over. So let us devote our attention to an odd herb, the...
Canada Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis
Synonyms: Bloodwort, puccoon, tetterwort.
Range and Habitat: Bloodwort likes to grow in rich, fertile forest soil, well-drained but moist, well-shaded and hopefully a little hilly. Therefore, here in the northeast, it is the companion of such noble trees as sugar maple, northern red oak, and yellow birch. It is not by any means confined to the northeast, however. It is present throughout the eastern part of our continent, from Québec to Florida, and from Nebraska to Rhode Island. It is not necessarily to be encountered frequently within this range, as extensive lumbering and earthworm introductions have decreased the amount of appropriate habitat for this species to be found, and exploitation of the bloodroot itself for its medicinal and herbal properties (see below) have further limited its occurrence. It is by no means endangered, but still uncommon.
Native? Y/N: Y Indeed, it is the only member of its genus in all the world, an East-American endemic.
Plant ID: One would think that bloodroot's single large lily-pad leaf would be enough to ID it. And it is - if one is careful. But when I spoke of this plant having "surprised" me above, I meant that when I first saw the many Canada bloodroots that carpeted the floor of a certain grove of trees in central Maine I thought that they were something completely different! I thought that it was instead the mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum1, a plant well-known to me from walks in northern Illinois. But one may note that mayapple's leaf is much more deeply lobed than those of bloodroot, and that it has a more definite radial symmetry than bloodroot, whose leaf has a clear 'front' and 'back'. And while they are in flower, they are even easier to distinguish. They both flower around the same time - somewhere around April or May on the latitude of Chicago. Mayapple's white flower is dependent from the stem, underneath2 the already fully emergent leaves. But Canada bloodroot puts out its stunning white lotus-like flower3 above the still-emerging leaves. Just as diagnostic as these exoteric features of the plant is another, hidden one. For the stems and roots of Sanguinaria canadensis contain a sap whose powerfully red color is the source of the plant's common name.
Ecology: S. canadensis grows in woods where the maples are plumy with lungwort4 and the leaf litter lies in thick heaps upon the ground. Underneath and within that leaf litter, the bloodroot puts out underground rhizomes that store sap and allow the plant to reproduce itself vegetatively. Indeed, the plant photographed above was part of an extensive colony of bloodroots.
Wikipedia makes a very interesting claim regarding the reproduction of S. canadensis which I have been able to confirm from other scholarly sources5. Apparently, bloodroot is a myrmecochorous plant; that is, its seeds are dispersed by ants. According to the summary found in another article6, the seed of S. canadensis is attached to a fat-rich tissue called an elaiosome. The ants of the forest floor then proceed to carry the elaiosome and the seed back to their nest, where they feed the fatty elaiosome to their wee larvæ and discard the seed elsewhere - frequently amidst other rubbish from their colony, which form a nutrient-rich compost for the young plant7. In this way, the plant is able to spread itself widely without resorting to wind, which is generally absent from the forest floor.
If any of my paltry few readers find all this as interesting as I do, I've also found some remarkable pictures of some ants doing their "thing" with bloodroot seeds here. Really great stuff!
Uses and Horticulture: Bloodroot has been used as a medicine for centuries, if not millenia. However, as is the case with many herbal remedies, the literature regarding its use, effectiveness, and danger is extraordinarily mixed. It is known that the plant's red sap was used as a dye and a face/body-paint by a number of American Indian cultures. This seems a curious practice, considering that another thing known for certain about the sap of S. canadensis is that it is caustic and kills organic tissue8. These properties can be used to medical effect, of course, and has been used to treat various skin infections and parasites like ringworms8, and an extract called "Sanguinarine" is used in some toothpastes as an anti-plaque agent. But as even gardeners occasionally report "skin irritation" simply while transplanting bloodroot9, this author recommends that one is at the very least cautious.
Mentioning gardeners, though, brings me to my next point: cultivation. According to my sources, growing bloodroot from seed is rather easy, and the seeds are large enough that they may be harvested to be re-sown by merely human hands. It is a perennial, too, so it will keep on coming back year after year, and its rhizomes allow it to spread itself within a garden bed, so that one seed may have great dividends. I have not attempted to grow bloodroot myself, so I cannot comment with any particular authority on the veracity of these claims, but the always-helpful Plants For A Future's writeup on S. canadensis includes extensive & helpful details on how to grow bloodroot from seed, and its cultivation within a garden environment.
Taxonomy: As mentioned above, S. canadensis is the only species placed in Sanguinaria. It is, however, closely related to the east Asian species Eomecon chionantha, the "snow poppy" or "Chinese bloodroot". These two are, in turn, members of the Papaveraceæ, the poppy family, whose most famous member, Papaver somniferum, is the source of the dreams of the Victorian degenerate & the wealth of the Afghan tribesman.
The source of the dreams of Victorian degenerates since 1986,
--mark
1 Photograph & webpage courtesy of the Biology and Liberal Studies departments of the University of Southern Indiana and Rick Mark of storied New Harmony, Indiana.
2 Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
3 Image courtesy of the Connecticut Botanical Society. More pictures & information can be found here
4 Lobaria lichens, that is, not the herb of the same name.
5 Including a 1982 survey article in Nature that I'd really like to get my grubby little hands on. Sadly, UMaine doesn't appear to have a subscription to the online version of that magazine.
6 Heithaus, E. R., Liu, S. Y., & Heithaus, P. A. (2005). Satiation in collection of myrmecochorous diaspores by colonies of Aphaenogaster rudis (Formicidae: Myrmicinae) in Central Ohio, USA. Journal of insect behavior, 18(6), 827-846. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
7 This particular claim courtesy of the North Woods Wiki from Skidmore College, where it is unsourced. I have not found, in part because I have not bothered to look for, any definite proof that ant rubbish heaps are uniformly good seed beds.
8 See, for instance, Wildflowers of the Southeastern U.S.
9 Read the comment here by 'Ficurinia from Portland, OR'.
The beginning of summer always comes as something of a shock to me. Spring is generally slow in the birthing, emerging from winter in fits & starts that take months. But then, one week, I wake up and find that spring has just suddenly ended, summer has arrived, and all the world is green. This year, it's been this past one - notwithstanding the calendar's claims that summer doesn't arrive 'till the solstice, which the poet calls midsummer! Similarly, recently I've been rather suddenly surprised by a certain plant which wasn't quite what I thought it was. I'm afraid I missed out its spectacular spring flower-show, but it still is a strange and unique little plant that deserves a bit of attention even after its particular season is over. So let us devote our attention to an odd herb, the...
Canada Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis
Synonyms: Bloodwort, puccoon, tetterwort.
Range and Habitat: Bloodwort likes to grow in rich, fertile forest soil, well-drained but moist, well-shaded and hopefully a little hilly. Therefore, here in the northeast, it is the companion of such noble trees as sugar maple, northern red oak, and yellow birch. It is not by any means confined to the northeast, however. It is present throughout the eastern part of our continent, from Québec to Florida, and from Nebraska to Rhode Island. It is not necessarily to be encountered frequently within this range, as extensive lumbering and earthworm introductions have decreased the amount of appropriate habitat for this species to be found, and exploitation of the bloodroot itself for its medicinal and herbal properties (see below) have further limited its occurrence. It is by no means endangered, but still uncommon.
Native? Y/N: Y Indeed, it is the only member of its genus in all the world, an East-American endemic.
Plant ID: One would think that bloodroot's single large lily-pad leaf would be enough to ID it. And it is - if one is careful. But when I spoke of this plant having "surprised" me above, I meant that when I first saw the many Canada bloodroots that carpeted the floor of a certain grove of trees in central Maine I thought that they were something completely different! I thought that it was instead the mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum1, a plant well-known to me from walks in northern Illinois. But one may note that mayapple's leaf is much more deeply lobed than those of bloodroot, and that it has a more definite radial symmetry than bloodroot, whose leaf has a clear 'front' and 'back'. And while they are in flower, they are even easier to distinguish. They both flower around the same time - somewhere around April or May on the latitude of Chicago. Mayapple's white flower is dependent from the stem, underneath2 the already fully emergent leaves. But Canada bloodroot puts out its stunning white lotus-like flower3 above the still-emerging leaves. Just as diagnostic as these exoteric features of the plant is another, hidden one. For the stems and roots of Sanguinaria canadensis contain a sap whose powerfully red color is the source of the plant's common name.
Ecology: S. canadensis grows in woods where the maples are plumy with lungwort4 and the leaf litter lies in thick heaps upon the ground. Underneath and within that leaf litter, the bloodroot puts out underground rhizomes that store sap and allow the plant to reproduce itself vegetatively. Indeed, the plant photographed above was part of an extensive colony of bloodroots.
Wikipedia makes a very interesting claim regarding the reproduction of S. canadensis which I have been able to confirm from other scholarly sources5. Apparently, bloodroot is a myrmecochorous plant; that is, its seeds are dispersed by ants. According to the summary found in another article6, the seed of S. canadensis is attached to a fat-rich tissue called an elaiosome. The ants of the forest floor then proceed to carry the elaiosome and the seed back to their nest, where they feed the fatty elaiosome to their wee larvæ and discard the seed elsewhere - frequently amidst other rubbish from their colony, which form a nutrient-rich compost for the young plant7. In this way, the plant is able to spread itself widely without resorting to wind, which is generally absent from the forest floor.
If any of my paltry few readers find all this as interesting as I do, I've also found some remarkable pictures of some ants doing their "thing" with bloodroot seeds here. Really great stuff!
Uses and Horticulture: Bloodroot has been used as a medicine for centuries, if not millenia. However, as is the case with many herbal remedies, the literature regarding its use, effectiveness, and danger is extraordinarily mixed. It is known that the plant's red sap was used as a dye and a face/body-paint by a number of American Indian cultures. This seems a curious practice, considering that another thing known for certain about the sap of S. canadensis is that it is caustic and kills organic tissue8. These properties can be used to medical effect, of course, and has been used to treat various skin infections and parasites like ringworms8, and an extract called "Sanguinarine" is used in some toothpastes as an anti-plaque agent. But as even gardeners occasionally report "skin irritation" simply while transplanting bloodroot9, this author recommends that one is at the very least cautious.
Mentioning gardeners, though, brings me to my next point: cultivation. According to my sources, growing bloodroot from seed is rather easy, and the seeds are large enough that they may be harvested to be re-sown by merely human hands. It is a perennial, too, so it will keep on coming back year after year, and its rhizomes allow it to spread itself within a garden bed, so that one seed may have great dividends. I have not attempted to grow bloodroot myself, so I cannot comment with any particular authority on the veracity of these claims, but the always-helpful Plants For A Future's writeup on S. canadensis includes extensive & helpful details on how to grow bloodroot from seed, and its cultivation within a garden environment.
Taxonomy: As mentioned above, S. canadensis is the only species placed in Sanguinaria. It is, however, closely related to the east Asian species Eomecon chionantha, the "snow poppy" or "Chinese bloodroot". These two are, in turn, members of the Papaveraceæ, the poppy family, whose most famous member, Papaver somniferum, is the source of the dreams of the Victorian degenerate & the wealth of the Afghan tribesman.
The source of the dreams of Victorian degenerates since 1986,
--mark
1 Photograph & webpage courtesy of the Biology and Liberal Studies departments of the University of Southern Indiana and Rick Mark of storied New Harmony, Indiana.
2 Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
3 Image courtesy of the Connecticut Botanical Society. More pictures & information can be found here
4 Lobaria lichens, that is, not the herb of the same name.
5 Including a 1982 survey article in Nature that I'd really like to get my grubby little hands on. Sadly, UMaine doesn't appear to have a subscription to the online version of that magazine.
6 Heithaus, E. R., Liu, S. Y., & Heithaus, P. A. (2005). Satiation in collection of myrmecochorous diaspores by colonies of Aphaenogaster rudis (Formicidae: Myrmicinae) in Central Ohio, USA. Journal of insect behavior, 18(6), 827-846. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
7 This particular claim courtesy of the North Woods Wiki from Skidmore College, where it is unsourced. I have not found, in part because I have not bothered to look for, any definite proof that ant rubbish heaps are uniformly good seed beds.
8 See, for instance, Wildflowers of the Southeastern U.S.
9 Read the comment here by 'Ficurinia from Portland, OR'.