northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a White Snakeroot from last autumn. At least I'm pretty sure it's a White Snakeroot; it has a few similar-looking relatives in the area: The flowers are white, unlike the pink/purple Joe-Pye weeds  or the blue mistflowers . None of the leaves are lance-shaped like most of the bonesets/thoroughworts . I think if this was a Smaller White Snakeroot (AKA Lesser Snakeroot or Small-leaved White Snakeroot), the leaf stems would be shorter and the plant would look a bit sparser.  As I alluded to in this post , busy botanists have been reclassifying this plant and its relatives. Back in the naive 1970s the bonesets/thoroughworts, snakeroots, Joe-Pye weeds, and mistflowers were all one happy genus, but sometime over the last half century each has gotten its own genus (though there's no denying that all these plants are fairly closely related). White Snakeroot has a dark side. It's poisonous, and if cows or goats eat it, the poison gets into their milk, potentially ca...

Just to show you that Monarch Butterflies also like Joe Pye Weed , here's the evidence. The taxonomy of the Joe Pye Weeds has changed a bit in recent decades. My Newcomb's Wildflower Guide (generally considered a good book for keying out species of wildflowers) puts the Joe Pye Weeds in the same genus ( Eupatorium ) as the bonesets/thoroughworts. But it looks like these days the Joe Pye Weeds have been spun off into their own genus: Eutrochium . It's still recognized that these two genii of wildflowers are related though; they're still considered to be together in a monophyletic group . My book was copyrighted in 1977, so this classification change occurred sometime over the last 4 decades. August 18, 2020 at Duke Farms