PLANTS | ANIMALS | ECOLOGY | FUNGI | GEOLOGY | GARDENING | TOOLS
MEXICAN PLANTS & ANIMALS HOME
Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
Entry from field notes dated September 2, 2023, taken in Los Mármoles National Park in the Eastern Sierra Madre mountains, Hidalgo state, MÉXICO; oak-pine forested mountain peak about 3km west of Puerto de Piedra, on road branched off the road between Trancas {on maps designated "Morelos (Trancas)"} and Nicolás Flores; limestone bedrock; elevation ~2,650m (~8,700ft); N20.816°, W99.214°
GREEN DEATHCAMAS
The above wildflower with grasslike leaves and a diffuse inflorescence of tiny white flowers might have been overlooked without being highlighted by the narrow beam of sunlight penetrating the canopy.
The plant's nodding flowers arose on long, down-curving pedicels, with each pedicel base subtended by a slender, leaflike bract. Noteworthy was the single inflorescence branch appearing in the picture's bottom, right corner. Without that branch, the inflorescence would have been a raceme but, with it, it's just barely a panicle, which during the identification process is an important detail.
The flowers consisted of six tepals, the term tepal used when there's no clear distinction between the calyx and corolla. The white tepals' green, violin-shaped centers were distinctive. Also noteworthy were the six stamens, each standing opposite a tepal base, and the stamens' filaments were not fused to one another.
The stamens extended well beyond the tepals, while the tepals themselves strongly curved backwards at their tips. On an older flower, seen at the right, the stamens' filaments curved outward at their tops. Is the flower's ovary inferior or superior. It's very slightly inferior, with its bottom embedded in green tissue, the hypanthium. Such ovaries are said to be perigynous.
At a distance the plant seemed to be stemless with leaves forming a basal rosette from which the inflorescence's peduncle arose. However, a stem arose among the leaves bearing a leaf whose base completely wrapped around the stem, forming a sheath.
The above features, particularly the six tepals and stamens, the barely branched inflorescence and slightly inferior ovary, along with the white tepal's green markings, led us to what's now called ANTICLEA VIRESCENS, in English known cuddlingly as the Green Deathcamas.
The species occurs in oak-pine forests and grassy areas. It's widely but spottily distributed in uplands from the south-central US south through Mexico into Guatemala. In Mexico it's officially considered rare, in accordance with the Norma Oficial Mexicana NOM-059-ECOL-2001. I find only one previous documentation of Anticlea virescens here in Hidalgo state.
English speakers can't get past the "death" in "deathcamas." In Spanish it's different, since along with other plants with similar leaves and flowers, and which arise from a bulb smelling oniony, it's called cebolleta, or "little onion." Our plant's "death" in its name distinguishes it from a group of very similar but not closely related plants formerly much eaten by indigenous people, known as camas plants, genus Camassia. Eating camas is OK, but eating deathcamases can kill you, though that seldom happens. The Flora of North America tells us that "Livestock (sheep and cattle) poisoning is a serious problem in some rangeland areas of the western United States."
However, what's toxic in some doses often is medicinal in others. Daniel Moerman's 1991 "The Medicinal Flora of Native North America" reports that indigenous Americans used Zigadenus species -- our Anticlea virescens earlier was a Zigadenus -- for their analgesic, antirheumatic and emetic effects, and for snake bites.
Identifying this plant was tricky, partly because in my young naturalist days it was solidly member of the great Lily Family, the Liliaceae. However, genetic studies have utterly exploded the Lily Family, shifting many species to other families, including this one, which ended up in the Bunchflower Family, the Melanthiaceae. Within the Melanthiaceae, the genera also have been much reconfigured. In recent years our plant was known as Zigadenus virescens, and all the literature I've seen still uses that name. However, Zigadenus also has been blasted apart, its earlier 20 or so species now reduced to a single one, with our plant, as seen, transferred to the genus Anticlea, while other species were shipped off to other genera.
Meanwhile, all along, as the scientific binomial waltzed from place to place, our plant has been known in English as Green Deathcamas. This is a rare instance when the common name may be more useful in looking up information than the scientific one.
By the way, this is yet another species introduced to the scientific world when collected by Humboldt and Bonpland during their Mexican exploration in 1803 and 1804. Their collection was shipped to the German botanist Kunth, who in 1816 named it Helonias virescens -- in yet a different genus.