Flowering Spurge

What’s blooming in the area behind the walls and fences: Hybrid tea roses, buddleia, bird of paradise, silver lace vine, honeysuckle, trumpet creeper, Heavenly Blue morning glories, purple phlox, Sensation cosmos, zinnias; sweet corn for sale down the road.

Outside the fences: Tamarix, Apache plume, winterfat, whorled milkweed, leather-leaf globemallows, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white and yellow evening primroses, bindweed, datura, bush morning glory, pale trumpets, clammy weed, stickleaf, Dutch, white prairie, and white sweet clovers, buffalo gourd, goat’s head, alfilerillo, silver-leaf nightshade, pigweed, Russian thistle, goat’s beard, paper flower, spiny lettuce, horseweed, strap-leaf and golden hairy asters, áñil del muerto, native sunflowers, goldenrod, gumweed, Tahokia daisy, áñil del muerto seedlings; moss, mushrooms, crust active.

In my yard looking north: Miniature roses, blackberry lily, golden spur columbine, Hartweig evening primrose, squash, chocolate flower, blanket flower, coreopsis, Parker’s Gold yarrow, Mexican hat, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, orange coneflower.

Looking east: Hollyhock, winecup, sidalcea, coral bells, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaf soapwort, baby’s breath, pink evening primrose, Shirley poppy, reseeded morning glories, garlic chives, cut-leaf coneflower; buds on hosta, Autumn Joy sedum, hollyhock seedlings.

Looking south: Rugosa roses, rose of Sharon, Illinois bundle flower, sweet peas, tomatillos.

Looking west: Russian sage, caryopteris, catmint, lady bells, David phlox, flowering spurge, blue flax, sea lavender, perennial four o’clock, calamintha, purple ice flower, purple coneflower, Mönch aster.

Bedding plants: Moss rose, snapdragon, nicotiana, sweet alyssum, tomato, pepper.

Inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, goldfinch, geckos, ladybug on ragweed, cabbage and sulfur butterflies, bees, dragonfly on dead hollyhock stalk, striped and brown grasshoppers, black harvester and small red ants, mosquitoes.

Weather: Rain Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, early Saturday morning; 13:44 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Flowering spurge is an obvious choice for people trying to grow native wildflowers. This time of year, the blue green plants are covered with white daisy-like flowers in heads that resemble baby’s breath.

In my yard, the perennial emerges the end of May. In mid to late June, a whorl of narrow, rounded leaves appears with a tiny set of yellow flowers in the center surrounded by five white leaves that function as petals. The rounded central green female flower extends out on a fine stem with its yellow stigmas spread wide until it falls over on the petals. The tiny yellow anthers still surround the base.

The white petals fall to ground, and the flower combination is replaced by a thin stem that branches to carry more terminal flowers. Each flower set is then replaced by another fork marked by a pair of leaves, "on through four, five, or rarely six generations" that last until the end of August.

I ordered two plants in the fall of 1997 from Racine, Wisconsin’s Milaeger Gardens, who described it as a prairie native. One survived the winter. While the species can vary, mine happens to match the description of the ones seen by John Hilty in Illinois.

Although it is reported in every state and province from the western prairies east, Euphorbia corollata is most commonly mentioned as a component of the dry prairies, oak savannahs, oak openings and oak barrens in the great lakes states.

In Michigan, the underlying sandy or gravelly land was created by glaciers. The grasslands spread during a warm, dry period some 4,000 to 6,000 years ago. When the climate grew wetter, fire maintained the prairie in places where poorer soils made oaks, pines and sassafras more vulnerable.

Like other members of the spurge family, it would have been tested for its utility. The white sap would have been found to be irritating, and possibly worse. Still, the Cherokee used the juice for skin eruptions in children and sore nipples.

The long yellowish taproot was deemed more useful. The bark that forms as it ages was used as a physic before breakfast by the Meskwaki of Wisconsin and the Ojibwa of Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario. The northeastern Micmac used it an emetic. In 1828, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque reported it was used for "fevers and bowel complaints" by Indians in the south. By the 1870's, Robley Dunglison knew it as Indian physic.

Rafinesque thought it more reliable that the then common ipecac because "the action is always proportionate to the quantity taken." Three to tens grains purged; ten to twenty induced vomiting. More could cause a dangerous reaction.

When I read lists of medicinal plants and see so many used for elimination, it’s easy to conclude many plants cause allergic reactions because they weren’t meant to be eaten. Unfortunately, when people are dependent on gathered foods they’re more likely to eat something disagreeable and not all things can be expelled by the body.

It’s also easy to forget that, before Edison and Pasteur, before modern sanitation and storage techniques, running hot water, refrigeration and regulated stoves, there was always a risk that what one ate could be off in some way and had to be removed from one’s body as quickly as possible.

In pre-modern life, a knowledge and supply of purgatives was essential to survival.

Notes:
Cohen, J. G. "Natural Community Abstract for Oak-Pine Barrens," Michigan Natural Features Inventory, 2000, updated 2010.

_____. "Natural Community Abstract for Oak Openings," Michigan Natural Features Inventory, 2004.

Dunglison, Robley. A Dictionary of Medical Science, 1876.

Hilty, John. "Flowering Spurge," Illinois Wildflowers website

Lyon, Florence May. "A Contribution to the Life History of Euphorbia corollata," Botanical Gazette 25:418-426:1898; quotation on branching habit.

Milaeger Gardens. The Perennial Wishbook catalog, 1997 edition.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies.

Rafinesque, C. S. Medical Flora, or Manual of the Medical Botany of the United States of North America, 1828, republished by Henriette Kress on her Henriette’s Herbal website.

Photograph: Flowering spurge with elongating female flowers, 7 August 2010, after last Saturday morning’s rain.