Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post in July on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.
Winged Loosestrife (Lythrum alatum) is a slender waif. It grows up surrounded by bigger, taller plants. I didn’t discover it until we had been neighbors for almost twenty years.
I found it in a natural opening in the woods at the bottom of a hill. It’s near an intermittent creek, surrounded by trees. I named that spot the Pocket Prairie. To explore it, I mowed a trail through it.
The ground is often wet there. That may be why trees haven’t invaded. It is home to wildflowers that I don’t find up top, where the ground is drier. It’s a magical feeling to enter. This Pocket Prairie is where I discovered a native Iowa wildflower named Winged Loosestrife.
FACETS OF A FOUND GEM
Only a few blooms open at a time on each stem. Winged Loosestrife’s flowers are so small you could hold a bouquet in your fingertips.
Each blossom has six crinkled petals, with a dark central vein. The blossoms always look wrinkled, as if made from super-thin tissue paper.
From the center of a flower, there emerges a long column, called the style, with a whitish cap at the end, called the stigma. The stigma looks moist. A microscope view resolves the style into a mass of transparent, gelatinous droplets. Slightly sticky, they catch and keep any grains of pollen that touch them.
Magnified view of the flower’s style, which catches pollen grains:
WHERE ARE THE WINGS?
The plant is named not for its flowers but for its stem, which has four membranous flanges, evenly spaced around the stem. They give this plant the first part of its name, Winged Loosestrife.
Magnified view of a section of a stem, with thin, longitudinal “wings.”
The flanges are so narrow that it seems a stretch to call them “wings.” They would hardly support flight. They are hard even to see without a microscope. Yet botanists have doubled down on the idea. The scientific name of the plant, Lythrum alatum, also invokes the stem (alatum = wings) as well as the petals (lythrum = reddish).
WHY IS IT CALLED LOOSESTRIFE?
An account by first-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder said that loosestrife placed on oxen yokes would calm the animals and make them stop fighting—hence “loosen strife.”
COMING CLOSER
The plant is inconspicuous when buried in prairie. When I first found it in the Pocket Prairie, I figured it might be hard to find it again when the seeds ripened. So I marked some plants with fluorescent tape.
The vase-like base holds the flower:
When the bloom is done, it becomes a pod.
From the seeds I collected, a few plants joined my garden last year. Every morning this summer, I watered them with whatever was left in the jug after I refilled the birdbath. I made sure they have wet feet. They like that.
Only a few flowers open each day on a stem.
They seem happy in their new home, where I can see them every day. A crab spider likes them, too and finds a home in the flowers. In this last photo, a tiny crab spider waits for its breakfast.
