Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Plant of the day is: Blephilia ciliata or Ohio horsemint

Plant of the day is: Blephilia ciliata or Ohio horsemint

I've seen these out hiking earlier this year at Valley View Glades and I saw a whole slew of bees on some Pycnanthemum a few times this year.  It always makes me think about just how much bees love the members of the mint family.  If you want bees, plant some Blephilia and Pycnanthemum.  They're pretty good looking plants too, and native.  All things in order.

So here is the catch.  Yet again, shockingly, no creative common images available.  One of these days I'm going to have a field day sharing mine.  I've got an email out to the webmaster of the missouriplants.com website in hopes of sharing those images in the future.  

Click here for a look and good description: http://www.missouriplants.com/Blueopp/Blephilia_ciliata_page.html



Definitely worth a look so check it out!

Taxonomy, etc.: A member of the Limiaceae family of the order Limales.  Basically a bit of a keystone for a very large group of plants.  Because of the families large size and cosmopolitan distribution there is a fair bit of shuffling of species and genera.  It contains upwards of 236 genera and anywhere from 6,900 to upwards of 7,200 species.  Commonly divided into about seven subfamilies.  It's not joking around, it is a large family.  More common Lamiaceae genera are: Salvia, Scutellaria (a future plant for sure), Stachys, Plectranthus, Teucrium, Thymus, Vitex, Nepeta, and the very showy Monarda.  Typically members of the genus have aromatic leaves (many are herbs), have opposite leaves and fairly distinct flowers with petals fushed into an upper lip and a lower lip.  Bilaterally symmetrical (just cuz that's fun to say), with 5 united petals and 5 united sepals.  

Description:  Blephilia is a very small perennial genus with only 3 members, which is probably why I haven't run into it much before.  All species are native to eastern North America and B. hirsuta and B. ciliata are threatened or endangered in some states.  The other species is B. subnuda endemic to northeastern Alabama.  B. ciliata has stems up to 1m tall with thin rhizomes (that can be used for divisions).  It has the characteristic 4-angled or square stems and is fragrant (along with the leaves).  Leaves are of course opposite with a short 1cm petiole.  Leaves are hirsute (hairy) and lanceolate with shallow serration (slightly crenate I suppose).  

Flowers occur in verticillasters...which is a new one for me.  Basically the flowers appear to be arranged in a whorl but are in fact made of clusters of opposite axillary cymes.  It's way easier in pictures...  Verticillasters.  They are white to lavender with some purple spotting on the individual flowers.

Habitat/range: Open woods, glades, bluffs, roadsides.  Tends to really show up on glade edges near the tree line but can be found scattered about in sunnier spots in the woods.  Exists in extreme east Kansas and Oklahoma and up into Iowa then takes off for the east hitting lower parts of Wisconsin and Michigan and onwards to New York.  A bit of distrubution down into Mississippi and Alabama but tapers off in Georgia and South Carolina.  Absent from Florida.  

Culture/prop:  Can take a fair bit of sun really as long as it is in a well drained mix but watered well.  Prefers a little bit of shade in it's diet for at least a few hours a day.  Not super picky about it's soil types but it's probably a good idea to stay away from really fertile loamy soils as I have a hunch they'll get a little floppy in flower.  For propagation, I stratified these seeds for two months at 5C and then placed on a mist bench with some bottom heat.  Germination was very good.  Very good indeed.

Fun random stuffs:  Originally named Monarda ciliata by Carl Linnaeus himself.  Used as a poultice for headaches by the Cherokee.  
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