Erythronium americanum

Yellow trout lily
Erythronium americanum
Radnor Lake, Tennessee
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Monocots
Order: Liliales
Family: Liliaceae
Genus: Erythronium
Species: E. americanum
Binomial name
Erythronium americanum
Ker-Gawl.
Synonyms[1]

Erythronium flavum Sm.

Erythronium americanum (trout lily, yellow trout lily, yellow dogtooth violet) is a species of perennial spring ephemeral flower native to North America and dwelling in woodland habitats. The common name "trout lily" refers to the appearance of its gray-green leaves mottled with brown or gray, which allegedly resemble the coloring of brook trout.[2][3]

The range is from Labrador south to Georgia, west to Mississippi, and north to Minnesota.[4][5]

Description

Trout lily blooms in early spring with nodding one-inch yellow flowers, the petals (3) and petal-like sepals (3) recurved upward. Each plant sends up a single flower stem with a pair of leaves, but for the first 7 years of the plants life it will not flower.[3][4][6] In North America E. americanum does not reproduce very effectively via sexual reproduction with only 10% of pollinated flowers developing seeds.[7]

In North America, trout lilies grow in colonies that may be up to 300 years old.[1][2] The individuals within a colony will often reproduce asexually via a "dropper" or from small corms budding off of the main corm. A dropper is a tubular fleshy stem that grows out from a parent corm, up toward the surface and then penetrates deep into the soil where another corm is formed from the tip of the dropper. Once the the daughter corm and the stem connecting the daughter and parent corm dies.[7]

Trout lily is a myrmecochore, meaning ants help to disperse the seeds and reduce predation of the seeds. To make the seeds more appealing to ants they have an elaiosome which is a structure which attracts the ants.[8]

Trout lily Erythronium americanum im
In Guelph, Ontario, Canada

References

  1. 1 2 Kew World Checklist of Selected Plant Families
  2. 1 2 Coulber, Sarah. "Trout Lily – Erythronium americanum". Canada Wildlife Federation. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
  3. 1 2 Blanchan, Neltje (2005). Wild Flowers Worth Knowing. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.
  4. 1 2 Thieret, John W. (2001). National Audubon Society Field Guide to Wildflowers, Eastern Region (revised ed.). Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
  5. ↑ Biota of North America Program 2014 county distribution map
  6. ↑ The plant grows from a corm, or underground bulb. The bulbs of E. americanum are buried very deeply compared to other lily family plants.Ker Gawler, John Bellenden. (1808). Botanical Magazine 28: pl. 1113
  7. 1 2 Bernhardt, Peter (2003). Wily violets & underground orchids : revelations of a botanist (University of Chicago Press ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226043661.
  8. ↑ Ruhren, Scott; Dudash, Michele (1996). "CONSEQUENCES OF THE TIMING OF SEED RELEASE OF ERYTHRONIUM AMERICANUM (LILIACEAE), A DECIDUOUS FOREST MYRMECOCHORE" (PDF). American Journal of Botany.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Erythronium americanum.


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, March 22, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.