I was running under powerlines and thought I spotted a black cohosh plant blooming–I’d recently begun to learn what it looks like. Back home, looking it up, I discovered this site.
My tendency is not to be overly thorough (sometimes, in fact, I am hasty) about such things as plant ID. I would not have made a great scientist for this reason. But I do love learning about things that are alive, and the “plant portrait” videos on this site are making me very happy.
Check out the video on bloodroot. It turns out that it shares a symbiosis of sorts with ants. Watch and learn what “eliasomes” are. OK, I’ll just tell you–they are the tiny white stems that attach the bloodroot’s seeds to the inside of its seed pods. And ants love to eat them. They carry them home, along with the seeds, eat the eliasomes, and discard the seeds.
So beautiful.
As for black cohosh, here are two things I learned–one, its flower has no petals; and two, its pollen is sometimes dislodged by bees using “sonication.” Basically, the bee buzzes to shake the pollen loose! And some flowers will only release their pollen when vibrated at a specific frequency!