Dodecatheon
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| Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture |
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Dodecatheon (Greek, twelve gods, old name of no application here). Primulaceae. Shooting-star. American Cowslip. Small perennial herbs with cyclamen-shaped flowers on scapes, sometimes grown in wild or hardy gardens. Glabrous, with a tuft of ovate or oblong entire or dentate Ivs. at the base, and a slender single naked scape: fls. few or many in an umbel, nodding, white, rose or purple; corolla-lobes (5) and calyx reflexed; stamens 5, attached in the throat of the short corolla- tube, the short filaments more or less conjoined at base and the long slender anthers connivent into a cone: fr. an oblong or somewhat cylindrical 5- or 6-valved caps. —Dodecatheon is a puzzling genus to systematic botanists. It is found from Maine to Texas and from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and along the Pacific slope, from the islands of Lower Calif. to those of Bering Strait. In this vast region, it varies immensely. It is also found in Asia, especially northeastward. This wonderful distribution and variability is all the more remarkable if, as Gray once thought, it is all one species, because monotypic genera are considered, as a rule, to be comparatively inflexible or invariable. Pax & Knuth, on the other hand (Engler's Pflanzenreich, hft. 22, 1905), recognize 30 species. There is singular lack of agreement in the characterization of accepted species. Dodecatheon belongs to the same family with Primula and Cyclamen, but in a different tribe from the former, while its reflexed corolla-lobes distinguish it from most genera of its family. Many species and varieties may be expected to appear in the lists of dealers in native plants. Shooting-star is an appropriate name. The flowers have been compared to a diminutive cyclamen, for they are pendulous and seem to be full of motion (see Fig. 1338). The stamens in D. Meadia and all eastern species come to a sharp point and seem to be shooting ahead, while the petals fall behind like the tail of a comet. The flowers represent every shade from pure white, through lilac and rose, to purple, and they all have a yellow circle in the middle, i.e., at the mouth of the corolla. After the flowers are gone the pedicels become erect. Some forms have all their parts in fours. There are a number of good horticultural forms offered abroad. They require an open well-drained soil, not too dry, and moderately rich, and a shady or partially shady position. They are propagated by division or by seeds, the latter method being rather slow.
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References
- Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, by L. H. Bailey, MacMillan Co., 1963
External links
- w:Dodecatheon. Some of the material on this page may be from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons license.
- Dodecatheon QR Code (Size 50, 100, 200, 500)
