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Hypericum mutilum

(Hypericum means “above image” in reference to placing St. Johnsworts above religious icons to deter evil. Mutilum means mutilated, and I have no idea what Linnaeus thought was mutilated about this species. He gives no clue in his 1753 original description.)

Clusiaceae

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Like every individual person, each individual species has its own wondrous remarkability.   With Dwarf St. Johnswort, its whereabouts and why are remarkable. There’s no way to pinpoint exactly its origins, or to know when or how it got everywhere it is.    The species probably originated in eastern North America, where it occurs from chilly Canada to sunny South Florida.  Old, perhaps ancient, populations are in Europe and South America, so old that Brazilian botanists regard it as native.

Botanists speculate that the tiny seeds of this wetland species migrate stuck to the legs of migratory waterfowl.  Any better ideas? Could the seeds survive transcontinental floating?  (Doubt it.)  

It sure trots the globe, from Hawaiian hogs

to

Belarus bogs

And what is it doing in the Azores, Japan, and New Zealand?

Adding to the puzzle, Dwarf St.  Johnswort is unlikely to be moved about by humans either on purpose or inadvertently.  It has no horticultural or agricultural involvement,  has no value to induce settlers to take it along, and lives in specialized wet habitats, most notably seasonally inundated mudflats where people don’t go all that often.

Mudflats are remarkable habitats. You see species there you don’t often see in other places, and mudflat species tend to have a special ability:  to lie dormant for years or decades (or centuries?) under wet mud and water, to germinate someday they surface on a sunny Memorial Day in Riverbend Park.   Ecologist Carol Baskin and collaborators took a sample of mudflat soil and patiently tested it for several years thereafter for seed germinations.    Hypericum mutilum kept coming up from the 1990 sample until 2003, that is, it can sleep in the mud at least 13 years.

Now then, we’re all wondering…if a species can establish from a seed transported in mud stuck to a bird’s leg, what pollinates a lone waif on an island in the middle of the Pacific, or middle of the Atlantic?  A close look at the flower late in the days gives the secret away.   When the day is done, the petals are withered, and maybe no pollinator brought pollen, the flower has  pollination insurance.  It pollinates itself.  In the picture below one or two pollen-making anthers (on the left) were caught on candid camera dabbing pollen onto the pollen-receiving stigma of the same flower (arching on the right to contact the anthers).