Guyandotte Beauty
As I pursued a degree in biology, I slowly
grew out of the field guides that had defined my childhood.
Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers
had served me well, but I eventually reached the point where flipping
through the guide was not sufficient to identify my mystery
plants. As with any other coming of age ritual, I was filled with
both excitement and trepidation when I opened up my first technical
manual.
And I was right
to be scared. My eye was met by page after page of diagnostic
keys, each of which had so many technical terms that identifying a
plant became an hour-long chore of flipping from the key to the
glossary over and over and over. Worst of all, I often had no
idea where to start in this thousand-page manual where plants were
divided up by family rather than by color.
Soon, though, I
grew into my manual. I began to learn a few plant families that
are easy to identify without resorting to the glossary, and one of the
first of these easy families was the mint family. A quick twirl
of the plant’s stem between my thumb and forefinger and I knew without
a doubt that my mystery plant was a mint --- mints have stems that are
square in cross-section rather than round. I soon discovered that
most mint family members also have diagnostic flowers with long tubes
topped by irregularly shaped petals.
Guyandotte
Beauty is one of those plants that is not found in Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers.
It is simply too rare.
Very little is known about this uncommon flower except that it is
scattered very sparsely across the central Appalachian mountains and is
listed as rare in most of the states where it has been found. In
Virginia, the plant is known only from the Clinch and Powell
watersheds. Luckily, Guyandotte Beauty’s square stem and
distinctively shaped flowers show it up as a mint relative right
away. But the plant is not a run-of-the-mill mint --- its
huge, showy blooms match its name and make the plant stand out in the
late spring woods.
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