Anemone virginiana

Anemone virginiana
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
Order:	Ranunculales
Family:	Ranunculaceae
Genus:	Anemone
Species:	A. virginiana
Binomial name
Anemone virginiana L.

Anemone virginiana is an upright growing herbaceous plant species in the genus Anemone and family Ranunculaceae. Plants grow 30–80 centimetres (12–31 in) tall, flowering early summer but often found flowering till late summer, the flowers are white or greenish-white. After flowering the fruits are produced in a dense rounded thimble shaped spikes 15–35 millimetres (0.59–1.38 in) long and 12 millimetres (0.47 in) wide. When the fruits, called achenes, are ripe they have gray-white colored, densely woolly styles, that allow them to blow away in the wind. Native from Eastern North America, where it is found growing in dry or open woods.^[1]

Common names include tall anemone, thimble-weed^[2] and tumble-weed.^[2] Note that several other plant species are known as Thimbleweed.

Although this plant sometimes is called a tumbleweed, it lacks the characteristic tumbleweed habit. The fruit resembles a tumbleweed in that it is wind-dispersed and tumbles, an unusual mechanism of seed dispersal (see Diaspore (botany)).

References

1. Flora of North America Vol 3, Magnoliophyta:Magnoliidae and Hamamelidae. Flora of North America Editorial Committee. Oxford University Press. 1997. pp. 139–158. ISBN 0-19-511246-6.
2. Nathaniel Lord Britton, Addison Brown (1913). An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions: From Newfoundland to the Parallel of the Southern Boundary of Virginia, and from the Atlantic Ocean Westward to the 102d Meridian 2. C. Scribner's sons. page 99