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Lizard’s Tail

19 Oct
Strap Fern on a big stump (JB)

Strap Fern on a big stump (JB)

Lizards Tail

Saururus cernuus

Saururaceae

Yesterday John and George migrated south to the Fern Forest Nature Center in Pompano Beach to enjoy 250 acres of ferny, rocky, watery, beautiful jungle.  A well named haven for fern enthusiasts, occupied by umpteen different ferns ranging in appearance from the odd-foliaged Strap Fern (Campyloneurum phyllitidis) to the prehistoric-looking so-called Florida Tree-Fern (Ctenitis sloanei), which is the size of half a tree, and has enormous complex  fronds 3 or even 4 times compound.  Merely sorting out the species of Thelypteris ferns might keep a person busy.

Ctenium sloanei (JB)

Ctenitis sloanei (JB)

After greeting the ferns and pushing back into the watery swampy shadows a little off the beaten path, there’s another botanical treat:  Lizard’s Tail (Saururus cernuus).  No need to drive too far south for this species, as it extends northward all the way to Quebec.  But Florida is a great place to see this showy, rhizome-spreading, aquatic oddity with its white flower spikes nodding (cernuus) like the tail of a sauros, as in Tyrano-sauros.

Some folks are familiar one way or another with Kava Kava (Piper methysticum), a bioactive member of the Pepper Family with spicy-fragrant heart-shaped leaves and flowers in a narrow rat-tail spike.  Lizard’s Tail is a bioactive relative of the Pepper Family with spicy-fragrant heart-shaped leaves and tiny white flowers in a narrow but showy lizard-tail spike.

You know any plant with pungent bioactive oils has a medicinal history.  A question better than, “what has Lizard’s Tail been used for,” is “what hasn’t it been used for”?  A lot of the historical uses have to do with external applications to relieve pain.  There are even more uses in older China.

Wait a second.  In China?  Yes, the Chinese Lizard’s Tail is a similar sister species, a situation found over and again with plants of eastern North America and eastern Asia.  An ancient Asian practice is to extract the oils with hot water to derive treatments for ailments from  beriberi to urinary complaints.

The Chinese species brings up something more fascinating than poultices:  an apparent evolutionary series.  But do not think the series of photos below is meant to reflect sequential ancestry.  Rather, the photos merely represent present-day  cousin-species that could resemble stages in some ancient evolutionary progression involving ancestors no longer with us.  All of the photos represent Saururus or closely related plants in the Saururaceae Family.   Something else important to emphasize is that the showy floral spike in Saururus and its relatives is a mass of many tiny flowers along a stem. Even in the relatives that have what look like single flowers, those are in fact false flowers, as in some Spurge Family, where the “petals” are bracts (variously modified leaves), and the apparent “flower centers” are spikes with those tiny flowers.   With all that stipulated, let’s move forward.

American Lizard’s Tail has a bright white spike of many flowers, collectively attractive to insect pollinators:

American L.T. (JB)

American L.T. (JB)

Want to up the ante and make the spike more attractive?  In Chinese Lizard’s Tail the white spike is enhanced basally with a dash of white on a nearby leaf (or the entire leaf may be white).  The white leaf-splash is sort of a false petal:

Chinese Lizard's Tail with splash of white on leaf. (Tree of Life Project, permitted use)

Chinese Lizard’s Tail with splash of white on leaf. (Tree of Life Project, permitted use)

So why not go to a more convincing-looking “petal”?  In the related and very similar Asian Gymnotheca involucrata the leaves below the spike have become almost petal-like:

In Gymnotheca the bracts look like petals. The spike rising above them bears many flowers.

In Gymnotheca the bracts look like petals. The spike rising above them bears many flowers. (Credit in the photo)

And to go a step farther, in the genus Houttynia and its segregate Anemopsis, a wildflower in the Western U.S.,  the spike-bract combo looks convincingly like a single flower:

In Houyttonia the bract-spike combos look like flowers (from wildflowerfinder.org)

In Houyttonia the bract-spike combos look like flowers (from wildflowerfinder.org)

Anenopsis is a wildflower in the western U.S. The bract-spike combos look like Anemone flowers (Stephen Laymon BLM).

Anenopsis is a wildflower in the western U.S. The bract-spike combos look like Anemone flowers (Stephen Laymon BLM).

 
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Posted by on October 19, 2013 in Lizard's Tail

 

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Lizard’s Tail

09 Mar

Lizard Tail

Saururus cernuus

Saururuaceae

Think of a name having the letter “u” in it 5 times, uuuuuh, not so many.  Saururus cernuus translates as nodding lizard tail, and the arched tapering inflorescence fits the name.  Here’s another annoying question: what do Lizard Tails and alligators have in common?  Yes, they both live in the same habitat as Pogo, and more interestingly they both belong to a two-species genus where one species lives in Eastern North America and the other hangs its hat in eastern Asia.  Divorced couples like that have long fascinated biologists as “Eastern Asian-Eastern North American Disjuncts.”  They are separated relicts from the Miocene Epoch 23-5 million years ago when distributions were more or less contiguous across the Northern Hemisphere.  The primary connection was a Russian-Alaskan land bridge, now the Bering Strait.

Lizards Tail flower spike (by JB)

A colorful species related to Lizard’s Tail and familiar to gardeners is Chameleon Plant Houttuynia cordata. http://hcs.osu.edu/hcs/tmi/plantlist/ho_rdata.html

Readers familiar with Kava Kava may see or smell resemblance to LT in the plant form, leaf shape, inflorescence, and root beer-licorice fragrance upon being crushed.  They are vaguely related.  Kava Kava is a member of the Pepper Family, where Lizard’s Tail has been placed by some taxonomists.  A separate segregate family Saururaceae is the treatment in most contemporary references.  As with Kava Kava, Saururus has a substantial history in traditional medicine.  Not to bore you with a list of every way the plants have assuaged some disgusting ailment, what’s more interesting is applications to treat sores and wounds characterize the American and Chinese species alike.  And as with Kava Kava, Lizard’s Tail is reputed to be sedative.  Also noteworthy are applications to relieve pain, with modern research confirming neurological activity.

That showy white arched inflorescence has specialized insect-adaptations, including UV patterns invisible to mere mortals and floral fragrance.  Yet one study in Louisiana showed most of the pollination to be by wind, at least there and then.  How many species are adapted to insects and to wind?  The flowers are protogynous (= female, then male) and do not self-pollinate much, if at all.  When pollen from the same individual plant is transferred to the stigma, the pollen is recognized as “no good” and is murdered summarily.  The floral spikes are dragon-fly landing platforms, and the big bugs kick up a cloud of pollen.  That might be insect-assisted wind-pollination.

Flowering along the spike proceeds gradually like a burning sparkler, keeping pollination activity going for weeks.  As the spike matures into the fruiting stage, it straightens out and releases tiny “nutlets” resembling the small dry fruits of other aquatic plants, such as Alisma, Echinodorus, Sagittaria, and sedges.  Presumably such little achenes and nutlets cling to or pass through waterfowl.  Of course they float too and root, as do pieces of the extensive rhizome.

The spike straightens in fruit (by JB).

 
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Posted by on March 9, 2012 in Lizard's Tail

 

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