August is here and the world of summer has reached its zenith. Early summer, from June 20 to July 20, is a time of increase. Plants are growing, birds are breeding and all manner of amazing events are taking place in the underbrush. Now, in the middle of summer, things have shifted.
The plants have are shifting into fruiting and those happenings in the underbrush are starting to get a little noisier.
One of the things I most look forward to in August is the blooming of a beautiful and somewhat unobtrusive plant known as boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum). I can’t recall exactly when I first became aware of this plant, but I do remember being somewhat confused about the pronunciation of its common name. My first inclination was to put equal emphasis on all of the vowels, resulting in a softening of the “o” as one might find in the word “bonnet.”
Thus, I came up with something like “bah-neh-set.” In fact, the word is pronounced with emphasis on only the first and third vowels: bone-set.
The long human tradition of using plants (specifically, the chemical compounds produced by plants) as medicines is well established and understood by almost everyone. Thus, it might be quite reasonable to assume that this plant was used to assist in some way with the mending of broken bones. Reasonable and accurate don’t always go hand-in-hand, however, and multiple sources in my personal library refer to the plant’s use (in the form of a tea) as a treatment for dengue fever.
Originally, this disease was known as breakbone fever because of the extreme pain that it caused in knees, elbows and other joints in the human body. You may have noticed that the name for this disease is decidedly non-English. In fact, dengue fever was originally a disease of Africa and South Asia, but was spread across tropical portions of the world during World War II.
This is a plant of places with soil that is damp and “squishy” throughout the growing season. One description of the ideal habitat was, “Low woods and wet meadows.” This is a perfect description of my own back yard. However, it has also been described as being so common along open shorelines that its absence is more conspicuous than its presence.
The plant can grow to be 3 to 4 feet tall and it is adorned with white flowers that occur as “florets.” This is a characteristic of the Composite Family, to which the boneset belongs, and it simply means that many small flowers are combined into a large mass that can be mistaken for a single flower. Small, white and rather unremarkable, the flowers are extremely valuable to insects because of the abundant nectar they produce.
This, in turn, means that the flowers are extremely valuable to other creatures that might prey upon the various pollinating insects that visit the flowers for food. As an example of this, I draw your attention to the photograph of the white crab spider that has hidden itself among the florets of a boneset plant and successfully captured a fly that is substantially larger than itself.
The spider’s coloration is an exquisite example of camouflage, with the tips of the legs being the same brown color as dead vegetation might look like.
For my money, the most remarkable characteristic of this plant is its leaves. Long and “lanceolate” (meaning longer than they are broad, like the tip of a lance) these leaves fuse at their bases to give the appearance that the stem actually pierces through them. This, incidentally, was the inspiration for the Latin name “perfoliatum,” which is a combination of the Latin word “foliatus,” meaning “leafy” and the Latin word “per,” meaning “through.”
Finding this plant should provide you with a lot of fun.
Jump into a canoe and explore the marshy shores of a river, lake or pond. If you don’t have a canoe, then just head out on foot to any area that is consistently damp throughout the year. This plant likes sun, so don’t expect to find it in the woods unless you are exploring the margins of a lake, a pond or a river running out in the open.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 22 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit www.speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.