From the Garden Web Glossary of Botanical Terms -
"Describes a leaf having the stem apparently passing through it."
And I just happen to have a few perfoliate plants out in my yard. The first one is Cup Plant - Silphium perfoliatum.
I LOVE this plant! First of all, it's HUGE! It's already over six feet tall, and my soil here is crummy. In good soil, it would probably get much larger. It's a native prairie plant, and I was told that it's the ultimate plant to attract birds to your yard. Of course two or three of these beauties would probably take up your entire yard, so you probably wouldn't need more than one. The birds eat the seeds, and can get a drink of water from its cupped, er, perfoliate leaves that capture rainwater.
Birds (and possibly other critters) could probably take cover in it too, because it's HUGE. But for all its hugeness, the flowers are proportionately very small. I love the flower buds. They remind me of teeny-tiny cabbages.
Another perfoliate plant is Boneset - Eupatorium perfoliatum. Mine hasn't quite bloomed yet, but has lots of buds.
Apparently it was called "boneset" because the joined leaves suggested that it would be good for mending broken bones. So the leaves were put in bandages around broken bones.
Hey, way back when, when access to X-rays and a competent ER hadn't even been dreamed of, I guess anything that sounded even remotely reassuring was helpful.
My last offering is Trumpet Honeysuckle - Lonicera sempervirens. Don't get this confused with Japanese honeysuckle - Lonicera japonica, which is an introduced species that is terribly invasive and chokes out native species.
This red variety is a native species that plays nice and doesn't get all invasive. Not all the leaves on this one are perfoliate though. Some of them are opposite. Mine starts blooming pretty early in the season, right around the time the hummingbirds are returning, so that makes it doubly nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment