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

Hoary verbena is in the verbena family, Verbenaceae. The verbena family has distinctive compact five-petaled flower in shades from white to pink to purple to blue. The flowers often seem to climb a pole, opening in a ring moving upward. The small seed pods form along that tall spire. Once you have a sense of the characteristics of verbena family, they are pretty easy to recognize wherever you encounter them. Until then, they are hard to identify because they will not remind you of anything else. Across the world, the Verbenaceae has 32 genera and 775 species, temperate and tropical, Old World and especially in the New World, vines, trees, shrubs and herbs, so you are likely to encounter one in a lot of different places.

This is blue porterweed, Stachytarpheta,
 a tropical and weedy member of the verbena family

The genus Verbena has much the same distribution as the family. It contains 57 species or 150 species. I think that second number is from before taxonomists split the genus Glandularia out of Verbena. Twenty five of species of Verbena are native to the United States, as well as a number of named hybrids. 

Hoary vervain has a series of slender upright stems in a clump and purple (or blue) flowers. I have rarely seen them taller than 3', though online references say they can be twice that tall, perhaps in very moist growing conditions. The name hoary refers to coarse pale hairs all over the plant. It grows well in hot and dry conditions and in a variety of soils including sand. Often it invades lightly disturbed areas and vanishes as the community closes in. It is perennial but often does not live very long. 

hoary vervain, Verbena stricta
(the big round seed head is salsify, Tragopogon)

Insects from bees to butterflies to beetles and flies feed at and pollinate vervain flowers. It is the host plant of (food plant for) larvae of the common buckeye butterfly (Junonia coenia) and the verbena bud moth (Endothenia hebesana). It probably also supports the verbena moth (Crambodes talidiformis) an odd endemic American moth, but I cannot find a specific report. The foliage is somewhat bitter and not much eaten by mammals but the seeds are eagerly consumed by birds, small mammals and insects. 

hoary vervain

Europe has only one native verbena, Verbena officinalis, common vervain or common verbena, which, long ago, was spread across the continent from its origin in southern Europe because of its was used as a medicine. That tradition goes back at least to ancient Rome, where verbena was a general name for altar plants, and, although they called all the plants of religious ceremonies "verbena," the one they most often used was Verbena officinalis. Common vervain has a lot of European folklore, intermingled with medicinal uses, from Roman, Celtic and Christian traditions. Despite the associations of common common vervain and medicine, it barely appears in works on European herbal medicine. It contains a variety of compounds expected to be medically active but there has been very little study of efficacy. 

Hoary vervain probably has similar chemistry but I find no record of it being used as a medicinal plant. (The report in Moerman, Native American Ethnobotany, is actually a different species). 

The scientific name Verbena means approximately "sacred plant" because of the Roman uses of it in religious ceremonies. The species epithet stricta means erect. 

hoary vervain, growing in a very disturbed
site (big weeds) in western Nebraska

This is a distinctive and attractive native wildflower. 

Comments and corrections welcome.

References

Stevens, P. F. 2001 onwards. Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 14, July 2017 [and more or less continuously updated since]."  http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/research/APweb/.  Accessed 7/9/24. Source of number of species in Verbenaceae, Verbena.

Verbena stricta. Missouri Plant Finder link Accessed 7/9/24.

Its hard to reference the five or six herbal books I pulled out looking for vervains that did not include it. 

Kathy Keeler

A Wandering Botanist

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