Echium vulgare Identification - Summer 2016

Echium vulgare Identification - Summer 2016

I saw a taller, blue flowered ‘spiked’ herb on the side of the road. It looked too nice to be native in such density. I looked it up with an internet search at first “Pennsylvania blue flower,” and with later success with “blue flower spike.” I clicked the image, found a Latin name, and then consulted identification guides and further internet searches.

Echium vulgare, common name blue-weed (Gleason & Cronquest 2014), blueweed or viper’s bugloss (Wikipedia 2016), or common viper’s bugloss (USDA-NRCS 2016) is in the Boraginaceae or forget-me-not family. I thought to call it a spike as others (Wikipedia 2016), but the literature identifies it as helicoid, bracteates cymes (Gleason & Cronquest 2014), but others argue they are scorpioid (Buys & Hilger 2003). This exotic is native to south Europe, but now common in waste places, meadows, and as I found it in roadsides (Gleason & Cronquest 2014). It is found throughout much of the northeast U.S. down to Virginia, with some records throughout the U.S., with a single county record of Cook County in Georgia (Kartesz 2016 and USDA-NRCS 2016).

Identification was made by looking at pictures online. Then I went to Gleason & Cronquest (2014) keying the plant out as herbaceous, dicotyledons with perfect flowers [stamens (male) and carpels (female) in the same flower], with both calyx (sepals – sub petal-like structures often protects the flower bud) and corolla (petals, often the colored part) present, with two or more ovaries in each flower (seed developing compartments, best explanation I could do), and all this leads us to Section 12. From there 1 style for each flower, ovaries 4 and corolla gamopetalous (petals are joined together) with 2-5 stamens; then leaves are alternate, stamens 5, and corolla usually regular (but not in this case) we go the family Boraginaceae. Ovary deeply 4-parted, the style from between the lobes; corolla with a well-developed tube; then corolla irregular with uneven lobes; finally with stamens exsert (out of the corolla) that takes us to the genus Echium. Within this genus, there is only one choice, Echium vulgare. Some features mentioned for this species: 4 filaments long-exsert, the 5^th not so much (male parts); style hairy (female parts); an erect tap rooted biennial 30-80 cm tall with bright blue flowers.

Although pictures were less complicated, the filaments of 4 long + 1 short, blue flowers, very hairy almost thistle-like but not as harmful, with a stem that had brown speckles helped to confirm the plants were the same. Also they mentioned the plant has blue pollen (Radenmaker and De Jong et al. 1997)! I never thought of pollen other than yellow, maybe even orange or white looking, but blue. Page 401 with an image of the plant in Holmgren (1998) also helped.

 

  

I returned to the plants to view blue pollen. It appears later in the season, these plants become highly infested with an insect, thus losing their pleasant appearance. The pollen was not readily seen with the naked eye, or a loupe of 10x magnification, or it was too late in the season. It would be interesting to investigate later.

 

 

Buys, M. H. and H. H. Hilger (2003). "Boraginaceae cymes are exclusively scorpioid and not helicoid." Taxon 52(4): 719-724.

Gleason, H. A. and A. Cronquist (2014). Manual of vascular plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada. Bronx, NY, The New York Botanical Garden Press.

Holmgren, N. H. (1998). Illustrated companion to Gleason and Cronquist's manual Illustrations of the vascular plant of Northeastern United States and adjacent Canada, The New York Botanical Garden.

Kartesz, J. T. (2015). The biota of North America program (BONAP), Chapel Hill, NC.

Rademaker, M. C. J., T. J. DeJong, et al. (1997). "Pollen dynamics of bumble-bee visitation on Echium vulgare." Functional Ecology 11(5): 554-563.

USDA-NRCS (2016). The PLANTS Database, United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Wikipedia. 2016. Echium vulgare. Wikipedia. Retrieved June 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echium_vulgare