Small Soapweed, Yucca glauca, repost

Here is another repost from 2013: Small Soapweed, Yucca glauca

Yucca glauca in flower

     Standing like candles in the prairie, flowering soapweed yuccas make a handsome display.

A young Yucca glauca.
You could cover all but the
outer tips of the leaves by
setting down a pop can. 

     Soapweed yucca, Yucca glauca  (asparagus family, Asparagaceae) is found from Canada to Mexico across the central U.S., in areas that before settlement were grasslands.

   Like other yuccas, Y. glauca has a rosette of leaves and can live many years. The plants start as tiny rosettes of short thin leaves and as the plant gets older, the leaves get more numerous and longer.

  The leaves are tough and fibrous, with a sharp point at the tip. Cattle generally avoid eating the leaves. Biologists generally avoid walking where the leaves will stab their legs. The evening volleyball game at Cedar Point Biological Station featured the phrase "stucka by a yucca" for players who ran heedlessly after a stray ball into the plants surrounding the improvised volleyball court.



   Fibrous leaves with stiff points on the end can be useful. Plains tribes and early settlers carefully peeled back the tip, keeping a long fiber attached, and had an instant needle and thread. The fiber is pretty tough and makes an effective little thread.

Yucca glauca flowers

   Although yucca leaves are strong and well-defended, Yucca glauca flowers are totally edible. Soft, pleasant and appealing, after washing to remove bugs, they can be eaten raw or cooked, boiled or fried. The deer, elk and pronghorn know that and frequently strip all the flowers off a flower stalk.

   Bumping a yucca in flower usually results in several small white moths flying away. Yucca glauca is like other yuccas in being pollinated by a moth who lays her eggs on the developing seeds. She is both a pollinator and a seed-eater. The relationship is long-standing so that the flowers and seeds of yuccas are modified to accomodate this moth. If she doesn't carry pollen between flowers, no seeds are produced because while plant requires pollen from another plant in order to develop seeds, it has no mechanism for getting that pollen unless a yucca moth specifically carries pollen between plants.  It has no rewards or attractions for other insects.

    The seeds develop in three neat columns. Generally a moth larva eats its way down one column, growing bigger all the time. The female moth may lay eggs on two of the columns of seeds, but never on all three. Obviously, there can be problems if two females target the same flower, but generally they leave scent marks to warn later arrivals to go elsewhere. Since this relationship depends on the plant getting some seeds while feeding the moth, avoidance mechanisms usually work and each yucca flower both feeds one or two moth larvae and develops a column of seeds.

Yucca glauca roots
Compare the drying leaves, 
top left, to the size of the roots!

   The name soapweed is applied to Yucca glauca because there are saponins, soapy compounds, in the roots. Native Americans and settlers used yucca roots as a source of soap. I have tried it. It doesn't make much lather but it does remove dirt and grease. Making soap from ashes and lye is a lot more work than gathering yucca roots.

   Like most plants of the prairie, soapweed yuccas are deeply rooted. The prairie is a grassland with relatively short plants in part because it is too dry for bigger plants to survive. One mechanism for surviving the periodic droughts of the prairies is having deep or widespread roots that seek water in a large volume of soil. Digging up plants is hard work but sometimes I spotted them at the bottom of eroding banks and road cuts. To the left a big old yucca, showing the massive roots that grow below a modest-sized plant.

dying yucca; to the right there's 
a pile of litter from
a yucca that died previously. 

     One last use for yucca that I have never tried: it is supposed to be your ready-made fire site. A dead plant, slowly rotting, has a lot of small fibers in the center which reportedly serve as tinder, and the sharp points of a group of leaves can be rubbed against a hard surface to create sparks. The one in the picture is slightly too green, I suspect, but at the lower right is a pile of pretty well decomposed yucca leaves, suitable for building a fire.

     Very few people are skilled enough to make fire with an awl these days, and generally prairies are too dry to light fires safely. But if you imagine yourself lost from the wagon train in, say October 1850, having chased the prairie chickens without paying  attention to landmarks, a yucca as a source of fuel to start a fire might be very welcome.  As I play out this scene in my head, I look around and think, "but, intrepid pioneer, you will also need to find something else to burn or your fire won't last an hour."

prairie scene

 Prairies are difficult in many ways, not the least the lack of firewood. Got  buffalo chips?

    A handsome, interesting and useful plant -- soapweed yucca.

Comments and corrections welcome.

Yucca glauca in flower

   

References: 
Dunmire, W.W. and G. D. Tierney. 1997. Wild plants and native peoples of the Four Corners. Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe.
Gilmore, M. R. 1919. Uses of plants by the indians of the Missouri River region. Online at Open Library http://archive.org/stream/usesofplantsbyin00gilm#page/n5/mode/2up
Harrington, H.D. 1967. Edible native plants of the Rocky Mountains. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Kathy Keeler

A Wandering Botanist

More at awanderingbotanist.com

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Why do Botanists Always Tell You the Plant Family? repost

Repost from 2013: Why Botanists Always Tell You the Plant Family

choke cherries, rose family, Rosaceae

People writing about plants are forever sticking the plant family into the discussion.

Not Always Just Plain Vanilla, repost

I am taking a break this month, reposting previously published blogs. This one is from February 2013, the first month of this blog. And, I could not resist som editing, especially giving credit to Edmond Albius for discovering vanilla needed to be cross-pollinated. 

     Good vanilla is one of my favorite flavors, and the idea of "plain vanilla," vanilla as the no-flavor flavor, has always been somehow annoying.  And it wasn't always the case.

The vanilla orchid is the plant in the middle, 
hanging down over the tree branch. (In the 
Conservatory at the Smithsonian in 
Washington D.C.)

   Vanilla is native to the Americas and although probably in use for millennia there, it only reached Europe after 1492. At that time it was a rare and highly desirable flavor.


   Vanilla comes from “beans,” long thin bean-like pods, but vanilla is not at all a bean (legume, plant family Fabaceae), but an orchid (plant family Orchidaceae). In fact, it is the only orchid used as a food, or used by commerce in any other way than as ornamentals (flowers) even though there are more species of orchids than species in any other plant family, legumes and grasses included.  

Butterfly Pollination, A Quick Overview

Long ago, when plants began exploiting animals to carry pollen between flowers, they encountered butterflies. Butterfly adults fed mainly on sugar water (nectar). Flowers adapted to this by offering little cups of nectar, positioned so that a feeding butterfly would get pollen on itself--on the proboscis or face or wings, depending on the flower--which then pollinated the next flower of the same species when the butterfly moved to find more nectar there. I said "exploit" but for most flowers and butterflies it is a reasonable trade, pollen movement for food, making butterflies a major group of pollinators.

swallowtail butterfly on mint flowers

We Called it Ditch Weed and Left it Alone (Cannabis sativa)

The New York Times (11/20/24) reported funding of research on whether cannabis extracts can effectively treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and commented that this is a first because as a Schedule 1 Narcotic, permission to study cannabis has been difficult to impossible. That set off a lot of memories for me. 

marijuana (Canabis sativa) amid weeds

Teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, Once an Important Tool

Teasels, Dipsacus fullonum and Dipsacus sativus,  in the teasel family, Dipsacaceae, for centuries were essential to the clothing industry. Today, in North America, they are noxious weeds.

teasel showing the seed heads

Quick Overview of Bee Pollination

Bees are numerous and are good pollinators, so many plant species have flowers tailored to bees.

Bumblebee (Bombus) pollinating golden banner (Thermopsis montana)

Plant Story--Artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, Edible Thistle

You do know that the artichoke is the immature flower head of a thistle, don't you? It is a strange vegetable, with layers of leaves you tear off to eat a bit of "meat" at the base, but that doesn't make most people think of thistles. Nevertheless, the artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, sunflower family Asteraceae, is the cultivated version of a big thistle from around the Mediterranean, the wild ones called cardoons or artichoke thistles.

artichoke (Cynara cardunculus) in grocery store

Photo Story--Beautiful, Stark Salta, Argentina

Just as in North America, the prevailing winds bring moisture from the Pacific that drops on the mountains, making a dry zone at their base in eastern Oregon and Washington and on the Colorado Front Range, so in South America, the winds from the Pacific leave their water on the west side of the Andes and at the base of the mountains, on the east, it is very dry. This effect is the most dramatic as you approach the tropics, in North America in Arizona and northern Mexico, in South America in northwestern Argentina's Jujuy and Salta Provinces.

 

Rocky landscape of Salta Province

 

Plant Story--Colorful Common Tansy, Tanacetum vulgare

Tansy is a small plant with bright yellow flowers and a spicy smell (scientific name, Tanacetum vulgare sunflower family, Asteraceae). It is native to western Asia but long ago became an herb and spice that was grown throughout Europe and then transported by Europeans all over the world. Today we know it more as a garden flower or roadside weed than as a flavoring or medicine, but it is all of those. 

common tansy, Tanacetum vulgare

Plants and Pollinators

 One of the ideas that attracted me to ecology as a student was pollination. In particular, the match between flowers and their visitors. Bees like open flowers like echinacea and bees can enter closed flowers like peas, but some flowers are too long and narrow for them to reach the nectar. This results in patterns in nature, plants that are mainly bee-pollinated, for example, and plants that are not pollinated by bees. And those bee-flowers share characteristics, so that you can recognize them, just as bees do. 

Bumblebee drinking nectar from golden banner (Thermopsis montana)

                                The pollen and stigma are hidden inside the lower lips of the flower,

                                   they bump into the bee's abdomen as it feeds, transferring pollen.

Plant Story--Handsome Ten-Petal Blazingstar, Mentzelia decapetala

The blazingstars, genus Mentzelia, are an American group, but especially western North American. Some species are found in the Caribbean, Central, and South America but 85 of the approximately 95 species are North American. If you live in the eastern half of the United States, you can be forgiven for never having heard of this group, because only three species have ranges east of the Mississippi. (Those are a Florida endemic and two found east to Illinois). Colorado has 25 species, almost all in the western half of the state, west of the Rocky Mountains; only four species grow on the eastern plains. They are in the small plant family Loasaceae, the blazingstar family.

ten-petal blazingstar, Mentzelia decapetala, at night

Plant Story--Hedge False Bindweed, Calystegia sepium

In the regions where I have lived in the last 50 years, Colorado, Nebraska, I knew only two bindweeds, the very common field bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis (blog), and the much rarer, hedge bindweed, perhaps better called hege false bindweed Calystegia sepium, both with white tubular flowers open in the mornings. Hedge false bindweed is much bigger--and so quite beautiful--and although I saw it climbing through roadside shrubs, it didn't seem particularly weedy. 

hedge false bindweed, Calystegia sepium

Reading about hedge false bindweed, though, I find it is immensely complicated.

Travel Story--The Burren, Limestone Outcrops in Ireland

In western Ireland, there is a region of limestone outcrops, called the Burren. Great expanses of limestone rock lie at the surface. You can see them as the hills in the distance in the photo. Plants grow in crevasses, but nothing grows on rock, so it has never been cropland.  

The Burren on the hills in the distance

Plant Story--The Beautiful Roselle, Hibiscus sabdariffa

The roselle is a small hibiscus, Hibiscus sabdariffa, (cotton family, Malvaceae) that is grown as food, but pretty enough to be grown as an ornamental. Also known as Jamaican sorrel, roselle is a tropical perennial which can be grown outside the tropics as an annual. The stems are red, the leaves green, the veins in the leaf red. The flowers are white or yellow with dark centers. Around each flower are a series of fleshy red sepals and another circle of red bracts that look very similar. The sepals are gathered and eaten, sometimes under the name "hibiscus flowers."

roselle, Hibiscus sabdariffa

Plant Story--Meadowsweet, Queen-of-the-Meadow, Filipendula ulmaria

Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, in the rose family, Rosaceae, is a lovely and conspicuous European wildflower, now naturalized in the eastern United States (known there as "queen-of-the-meadow"). 

meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria

Western Nebraskan Plants Easily Seen At Cedar Point Biological Station

Recently at the University of Nebraska's Biological Station, Cedar Point, at the Station's 50th anniversary, I failed to take very many photos of buildings and people. Here are a few of the photos of plants I took, instead.

buffalo burr, Solanum rostratum

For example, buffalo burr (Solanum rostratum, tomato family Solanaceae). Native to North America, it gets its name from its presence in areas denuded of other plants by bison, and since then, by cattle.This big-flowered plant has impressive spines (look next to uppermost flower in the photo above). The burs will stick to animal hair, dispersing it.  It is also rich in alkaloids that deter insects. It is one of the American plants that has gone around the world as a weed. Okay, it is hated around the world, but it is nevertheless a plant success story. Look and don't touch. 

Cedar Point Biological Station's 50th Anniversary (Ogallala, Nebraska)

The University of Nebraska's Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, Nebraska, is celebrating its 50th year. Opened in 1975, using the facilities of a former Girl Scout camp, Cedar Point has each year since then hosted summer biology courses, geology courses, art courses, and experiential learning by children of many ages. Researchers staying there have studied everything from soil mycorrhizae and beetle intestinal parasites to prairie grass genetics and barn swallow social behavior.

 

 

Goodall Lodge, Cedar Point Biological Station 1976

Gardens in Coastal British Columbia

In early August I took a garden tour with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to the cities of Vancouver and Victoria in southwestern British Columbia. Garden tours focus on plants; here are miscellaneous highlights.

a bed of coleus and marigolds

Roadside Wildflowers of Southern Ireland

I took a tour of southern Ireland in July (photo tour link). For me, though, every tour is a plant tour. Here are some of the plants I saw along paths and roads:

blue tufted vetches (Vicia cracca, called bird vetch in the U.S.)
and unknown white flower (fools parsley, Aethusa cynapium?)

Plant Story: Zinnias, American Wildflowers

Zinnias are common and familiar garden flowers, in the genus Zinnia, sunflower family, Asteraceae. They come at the end of the alphabet in lists of garden flowers and indexes. Neither edible nor much of a medicinal, zinnias get little comment beyond "easy to grow."

The more I read about zinnias, the clearer it was they are under-valued.

zinnias, genus Zinnia

A Glimpse of Ireland

  A tour took me across southern Ireland, west to east, in mid July. 

Coast of the Dingle Penninsula, Ireland

Here is a bit of how it looked.

Plant Story- Hoary Vervain, Verbena stricta

Hoary vervain, Verbena stricta, is a native perennial found across much of North America.  

hoary vervain, Verbena stricta, very close up

hoary vervain, Verbena stricta

After Fire, Rocky Mountain Wildflowers

burned forest, Rocky Mountain National Park

The hill ahead was burned. Look at those sad dead trees!

So you take the fork in the trail going away from them.

meadow by burned forest, Rocky Mountain National Park

If you are looking for wildflowers, though, walk through the burned forest. See all that green on the ground?

Polyploidy. Part 5: Patterns of Autopolyploidy

switchgrass, Panicum virgatum, famous autopolyploid

Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, uncommon in animals, but common in plant evolution, between living plant species and in individuals within plant species. (See previous blogs link). Although it is actually a continuum, botanists recognize allopolyploidy, when the genomes that duplicated come from two different species and autopolyploidy when a single genome doubles. This post is about autopolyploids.

Middle Elevations in Rocky Mountains in late June

Summer moves steadily up the mountains. As you rise up above the plains of Colorado into the Rocky Mountains, the plants that are done flowering at 5,000 feet elevation are in full bloom at 8,000 feet, but are still in bud at 11,000 feet. Of course not all the plants are able grow from 5000' to 11000' elevation, but many do. 

These photos were taken in a ramble around Lily Lake, at 8,931' elevation.

Lily Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Plant story-- Eriogonum alatum, winged wild buckwheat

This is a post about a plant almost nobody has ever seen, let alone noticed. Winged wild buckwheat, Eriogonum alatum (buckwheat family Polygonaceae) has its range at low elevations on both sides of the Rocky Mountains and into Utah. Lots of people live in that area, but nothing like the number who live on the East or West Coast, so the number of locals who could know it is limited.  

Winged wild buckwheat, Eriogonum alatum in flower
(yellowish, center)

Plant Story--Pussytoes, Antennaria

Pussytoes (Antennaria species, sunflower family, Asteraceae) are cute little plants, easy to recognize when flowering, inconspicuous when they are not. There are about 45 species of Antennaria, mostly in North America plus a few in Europe and South America. The U.S.D.A. plants database gives 36 species of Antennaria in North America, counting Alaska, all of them native. 

Antennaria pussytoes

When flowering, they send up clusters of round flowers, easily imagined as cat feet. (Catsfoot is another common name). The non-flowering plant is a cluster of quite small oval gray-green leaves on the ground, often below the grasses, and so quite inconspicuous. 

Pinks

 This flower is a pink. But it is clearly not very pink.

pinks, genus Dianthus

Pinks, the genus Dianthus, got their common name several hundred years ago in England. The word pink is not just the name of a color. Its older meaning is of a zig-zag edge. My mother had scissors that cut the edge of a piece of cloth in a zig-zag pattern so it would not ravel, called pinking shears. 

Periodical Cicadas--Cicada Tourism

I flew to St. Louis to see the periodical cicadas, brood XIX, 13-year periodical cicadas. Why? Because they are a wonder of the world. No other organism spends 12 or 16 years underground to emerge, mate and lay eggs in the 13th or 17th year, with all of the periodical cicadas in an area synchronized at these very long intervals. Nothing in the world comes even close to it. How could this evolve? They are found only in the eastern U.S. from just west the Missouri River east almost to the Atlantic Ocean, from Wisconsin and New York south to Louisiana, Alabama, northern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and nowhere else in the world. I somehow was never in the right place at the right time to see them emerge. 

periodical cicada, St. Louis, Missouri

Our Natives are Weeds

 "We have a marketing failure with natives," Doug Tallamy wrote in Nature's Best Hope. While I think the "grow natives" movement is helping correct that, the fact that many natives are called weeds does discourage loving them. 

fireweed, Chamerion

Lots of our native plants are weeds. That is, they have weed in their common name. Fireweed (Chamerion), milkweed (Asclepias), jewelweed (Impatiens), Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium), and ironweed (Vernonia) to name a few. 

Up the Snake River into Hell's Canyon

We took a motorized boat --jet boat--tour up the Snake River from Clarkston Washington to Hell's Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America (7.993 ft). The river was wonderfully reflective as we left Clarkston. 

Plant Story - Flixweed, Tansy Mustard, Herb Sophia, Descurainia sophia, Weedy Spring Mustard

 As a group, the plants in the mustard or cabbage family, Brassicaceae, are cool weather plants, growing well early in the spring, flowering as the temperatures warm, going to seed in the heat of summer. Familiar mustards are cabbage (Brassica oleracea), broccoli (Brassica oleracea), and mustard itself (mustards are species of Brassica, Rhamphospermum and Sinapsis). These edible mustard family plants were domesticated in Eurasia and they are a small selection of the more than 3,700 species worldwide. North America has 634 native species in the mustard family. It also has more than 100 exotic mustards. 

Flixweed, Descuriania sophia

the plant this blog is about 

Plants of Lewis and Clark

 My recent cruise down the Snake and Columbia Rivers retraced some of the steps of the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition. Also called the Corps of Discovery Expedition, they were sent to explore the area of the new Louisiana Purchase (link) and the region west of it to the Pacific Ocean. The Expedition has grabbed the imagination of people for two centuries now, as they imagine being in a small corps of men (and one woman) going into unknown regions. The Expedition walked, rode, and boated for over 8,000 miles in under three years, roundtrip.

Crow Butte, Washington

Looking in detail at the discoveries of the Expedition is a reminder of how much the United States didn't know in 1800. 

Polyploidy 4. Distribution of Autopolyploidy

Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, a genetic phenomenon which is widespread in plants and uncommon in animals. The ancestry of most if not all plants includes a doubling of all the chromosomes. In addition, many plant species were formed by crossing between two existing species, with subsequent doubling of the genome which made the hybrid fertile. (See previous blogs Intro to Polyploidy, Crop Plant Polyploidy, Speciation via Polyploidy).

 

Long known and still poorly understood is variation in polyploidy within a species. 

fireweed (Chamerion) has within-species polyploidy
 

Travel Story - Landscapes of a Cruise Down the Columbia River

I took a river cruise (with Lindblad/National Geographic) down the Snake River from Lewiston Idaho to the Columbia River to its mouth on the Pacific Ocean west of Portland, Oregon. Many interesting places went by while in the bus or on the ship. Here is a tour: the trip through the window. 

My husband and I flew to Spokane, Washington, so the trip actually started with a bus ride 100 miles south to Lewiston, Idaho. It was April 7, a cloudy early spring day in Spokane.  There is a spectacular city center I hope to walk through one day.

Spokane Washington

The Spokane River, Spokane, Washington

Growing Natives in Colorado

 There is a national push for homeowners in the U.S. to grow plants native to their area (see previous posts  part1; part 2; part 3; HNPwebsite). The number of birds and insects have been dropping over the last 50 years. Lack of food is blamed because we replaced native habitat with lawns and parking lots. Rewilding our neighborhoods is not a realistic solution; what is suggested is that we each grow regional natives on our properties, making our yards contribute to local habitat. 

Alpine clover Trifolium dasyphyllum, an alpine tundranative that won't survive
in Denver, though the distance is only 50-60 miles.

What to grow in Colorado is a challenge. First, Colorado has unique native wildflowers, so advice from the coasts is often misleading. Second, Colorado is complex, with natives changing as you go up in elevation, over the Continental Divide, or from north to south; getting really local information is difficult.