Wildflowers offer beauty and medicinal properties,too

Roadsides are transformed from gravel wastelands to places of botanical beauty this month. The cream-colored bouquets Queen Anne’s lace sway in the wind. Complimenting the Queen are smaller blue flowered chicories.

These beautiful plants hail from two of the largest and most important plant families in our flora.

Recognizing these plant families and learning their importance in human culture takes you well on the way to understanding and appreciating our botanical riches.

Queen Anne’s lace, in its resplendent late-summer glory, typifies a plant family known as the umbels. The highbrow scientific name for the family is the apiaceae. We’ll use the word “umbel” as the nickname for the family, not only because it’s easier to say, but it also describes the unique flower arrangement in this family.

Looking at a Queen Anne’s lace plant closely, you’ll see that small individual flowers grow on stalks emanating from a single base, somewhat like a floral arrangement in a vase. Each bouquet of individual flowers is called an umbel.

Do you grow dill in your garden? Check out the flowers. You’ll see the same flower arrangement. How about fennel or cilantro? These are also umbels, with the same bouquet stemming from a common base.

These herbs are edible members the umbel family. Umbels include spices as well. Fennel, cumin, anise, caraway, and coriander are but a few. Another umbel, celery, is grown for its edible leaf stalk. Queen Anne’s lace, also known as wild carrot, is the origin of the domestic carrot.

Beware, for Queen Anne and her court are not always kind. The umbel family contains plants with some no-nonsense phytochemicals that can be lethal to humans. The notorious poison-hemlock did Socrates in. This Old World plant grows in Kane County and can easily be mistaken for Queen Anne’s Lace — so don’t chance it!

Wild parsnip, another umbel that grows rampant in fields, can cause severe dermatitis upon contact with skin.

Medicinally, umbels have contributed their fair share to pharmacology. In folk medicine, early Americans learned from American Indians about the healing qualities of a common umbel in the prairie known as “rattlesnake master.”

Authors Steven Foster and James Duke, in their field guide “Medicinal Plants and Herbs,” described the following medicinal qualities of rattlesnake master: “American Indians used root as poultice for snakebites, toothaches, bladder trouble; for coughs, neuralgia; also an emetic. Traditionally, root tincture was used as a diuretic; also for female reproductive disorders, gonorrhea, piles and rheumatism.”

Today, the umbel family is part of a rapidly growing field of research in modern medicinal plant biotechnology.

Now to that lovely blue chicory by the roadside. Chicory belongs to a different group of plants known as composites. This family is technically called the asteraceae and includes the familiar asters, daisies and sunflowers. Just as the nickname “umbel” refers to the family’s floral structure, the asteraceae’s nickname “composites” refers to its flower arrangement as well.

Composite flowers are easily recognized this time of year when sunflowers of all sizes are blooming. What most people view as a flower is actually a large collection of flowers. Take brown-eyed Susan as an example: the yellow “petals” around the brown center are really individual flowers, each with a long strap-like yellow petal.

The brown center itself is made of lots of small flowers, lacking petals altogether. The whole shebang — yellow flowers on the rim around a brown disk of flowers in the middle — is subtended by a common receptacle. Hence, this is called a composite of flowers.

The composite family is the largest family in the plant kingdom, comprising some 23,000 species and counting. Although there is a mind-boggling degree of variety in this huge group of plants worldwide, they share the common composite flower arrangement.

Get to know the look of a composite flower, and you will be able to identify many plants in field and forest.

The composite family is easily loved for the yellows and purples brightening summer fields, for the giant sunflowers nodding their big heavy heads in vegetable gardens, and for the weedy wildflowers like chicory gracing the ditches and roadsides.

Medicinally, the composite family contains enough pharmaceutical qualities to fill volumes of reference books. Indeed, many herbals (plant reference books) have been written over the ages with recommendations for medicinal applications of composite plants.

Echinacea is a well known composite with a history of healing properties. Indigenous people of North America have been using this plant for more than 400 years to treat a variety of ailments. Various parts of the plant were used to fight infections, syphilis, malaria, and diphtheria. Today, echinacea is a popular herbal supplement believed to ward off colds. Although there is considerable debate in the scientific community about the efficacy of echinacea in preventing or curing the common cold, research continues to focus on its potential medicinal benefits.

Countless composites are food sources around the world. Chicory, for example, has a root that can be ground and used as a coffee substitute (sans caffeine). Tea can be made from species of monarda, or Bee-balm, in our area.

Lettuce and artichokes are in the composite family, and, of course, there are the seeds from those giant sunflowers nodding from the weight of their nutrient-laden load.

Thus, these two families that rule the roadsides of summer are important for their role in culture and their place in the plant kingdom. No matter how botanically-challenged you may think you are, once you recognize flower characteristics you’re well on your way to identifying — and appreciating — the beauty of the local flora all around you.

Ÿ Valerie Blaine is a naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Kane County. She welcomes your comments, questions, and observations. You may reach her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.

Curious about wild plants?

Want to learn more? Check out these programs this week. Call (847) 741-8350 or email programs@kaneforest.com to register.

Put a Lotta Latin in Your Life: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9, Brewster Creek Lodge, 6N921 Route 25, St. Charles. Naturalists Valerie Blaine and Erica Lemon of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County will present the fun side of scientific names during this interactive class about Latin, Greek, and all the mumbo-jumbo of scientific nomenclature. Learn how and why these names are used in the scientific community and why they are important for the layperson as well. There is a $10 fee for this class.

Roadside Botany: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 10, LeRoy Oakes Forest Preserve, St. Charles. Curious about all those flowering plants on the side of the road? Naturalist Valerie Blaine of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County will lead this walk along the interior roads of LeRoy Oakes Forest Preserve.

Along the walk, participants will learn not only plant identification tips, but botanical lore as well. This program is free and open to the public.