Botany Detective

Well, Ratty has a yellow mystery over at The Everyday Adventurer today. He challenged anyone to figure out what his "Alien Fire Flower" is. You know I couldn't resist. You will have to go over there to see the whole post, but I've grabbed some pieces of images for our "game."

Here is a closeup of one of the flowers. Ratty is just learning to notice plants, so the only information he gave is that this is beside a pathway. So I began with five yellow petals and a mass of stamens. Bill, at Wild Ramblings, suggested something in the Hypericum genus. That would be a St. Johhswort.



Well... I sort of concurred... but I couldn't come up with any match for the species that grow in our area. (the Great Lakes). For one BIG thing, the leaves are too narrow. For another thing, the two most common St. Johnswort here have black dots on the blossoms. See them around the edge of the petals? This picture is Hypericum perforatum. This one is blooming in my field.

We also have no information about the height of the plant, or about the leaves. I had one other Hypericum suspect, one that I've never seen, but that grows on the lakeshores. It is Hypericum kalmianum. But I found some pictures on line and the petals are even more round...

I also had a real problem with this string of buds. This doesn't look anything like a St. Johnswort. Now what? So I backed off and just thought about what it looked like.

Well, the blossom looks like a Sedum.



Here's a sedum from my flower bed. Now, can we find some leaves?

Look what I found hiding in the corner of one of Ratty's pictures! See that succulent leaf? That clinches it! This is a sedum. My best guess is some variety of Sedum kamtschaticum.

By contrast, below are the leaves of the Hypericum perforatum. Not the same at all.



Betchai of The Joys of Simple Life said... "looks like very similar to my succulents here at home." She was right!