CAROLINA GRASS OF PARNASSUS
(Parnassia Caroliniana) Saxifrage family
Flowers - Creamy white, delicately veined with greenish,
solitary, 1 in. broad or over, at the end of a scape 8 in. to 2
ft. high, 1 ovate leaf clasping it. Calyx deeply 5-lobed; corolla
of 5 spreading, parallel
veined petals; 5 fertile stamens
alternating with them, and 3 stout imperfect stamens clustered at
base of each petal; 1 very short pistil with 4 stigmas. Leaves:
>From the root, on long petioles, broadly oval or rounded,
heart-shaped at base, rather thick.
Preferred Habitat - Wet ground, low meadows, swamps.
Flowering Season - July-September.
Distribution - New Brunswick to Virginia, west to Iowa.
What's in a name? Certainly our common grass of Parnassus, which
is no grass at all, never starred the meadows round about the
home of the Muses, nor sought the steaming savannas of the
Carolinas. The European counterpart (P. palustris), fabled to
have sprung up on Mount Parnassus, is at home here only in the
Canadian border States and northward.
At first analysis one is puzzled by the clusters of filaments at
the base of each petal. Of what use are they? We have seen in the
case of the beard-tongue and the turtle-head that even imperfect
stamens sometimes serve useful ends, or they would doubtless have
been abolished. A fly or bee mistaking, as he well may, the
abortive anthers for beads of nectar on this flower, alights on
one of the white petals, a convenient, spreading landing place;
but finding his mistake, and guided by the greenish lines, the
pathfinders to the true nectaries situated on the other side of
the curious fringy structures, he must, because of their
troublesome presence, climb over them into the center of the
flower to suck its sweets from the point where he will dust
himself with pollen in young blossoms. Of course he will carry
some of their vitalizing powder to the late maturing stigmas of
older ones. Without the fringe of imperfect stamens, that serves
as a harmless trellis easily climbed over, the visitor might
stand on the petals and sip nectar without rendering any
assistance in cross-fertilizing his entertainers.
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