Question

Which plant is described by these clues? A thin papery tube sheathes the stem just above each swollen joint, splitting and shredding as the shoot expands. Its tiny flowers have a single ring of small dry greenish segments, with no division at all between sepals and petals. The ripe fruit is a hard one-seeded nut, sharply three-angled in cross-section and about 0.1 inch (2 to 3 mm) long. Six of those flower segments stand in two rings of three, and after flowering the inner three enlarge into papery flaps that wrap the ripening fruit, each usually swollen with a wart-like lump. It drives a stout forking {taproot} with a startling yellow-orange core, under a heavy basal {rosette}. Its flowers hang in dense rings tiered one above another up a tall branched {panicle}, greenish at first and rusting to a deep red-brown that stands through winter. Those papery flaps around each fruit have smooth unbroken edges, never a row of sharp hooked teeth down each side. Its basal blades are 6 to 14 inches (15 to 35 cm) long and narrow, tapering into the stalk, with margins strongly waved and crimped along their whole length. The epithet means curled, for exactly that ruffled leaf edge. Its seed coat floats and catches in wool and fur, and buried seed has stayed viable in soil for decades, which is why a pasture infestation outlives the animals that started it. It is the leaf children are told to rub on a nettle sting, and its yellow root is the one Western herbalists have long taken for sluggish digestion, on the strength of anthraquinones that act as a mild laxative.

Accepted Answer

Rumex crispus

Name That Plant #031