Happy Mystery Day! Can you guess what is pictured in photo #1?
The answer to last week’s mystery is flowering spurge, Euphorbia corollata, pictured in photo #2.
The flowering spurge, Euphorbia corollata, is a hardy North American native perennial in the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. Growing to about 3′ tall, it has an upright, branching habit topped by airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
Those little white blossoms are not quite what they appear to be. The defining feature of the spurge family is a specialized structure called a cyathium, in which several extremely simplified flowers are grouped together to resemble a single flower. A tiny female flower sits in the center, surrounded by male flowers reduced to individual stamens, while nectar glands and white, petal-like appendages around the rim help advertise the whole structure to pollinators. The blooms can become so abundant that their weight causes the entire plant to lean to one side, and its long flowering season makes it a valuable source of nectar for many pollinating insects. Flowering spurge is monoecious, producing both male and female flowers on the same plant.
Like other spurges, flowering spurge contains a milky latex sap that makes it unpalatable to deer and other mammals, but the sap can also irritate human skin. Its deep taproot makes the plant remarkably drought-tolerant, while a whorl of smooth, bright green leaves surrounds the stem where the flowering branches emerge. After blooming, three-chambered capsules ripen and suddenly split apart, ejecting their seeds away from the parent plant. Birds may eat some of those seeds, giving this wildflower plenty of ecological muscle beneath its delicate appearance.
Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum.
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