Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Roman writers used its genus name for this very plant, and later grammarians tied the word to a verb meaning to cling or take hold. Its epithet is the Greek word for a spiral or coil, long read as a reference to the winding course its stems take over a support. Each tiny greenish flower carries five very short {sepals}, five fleshy {petals} and five {stamens} above an ovary already sunk beneath them, and the whole crowd radiates from one point into a rounded {umbel} 1.5 to 2 inches (4 to 5 cm) across. The fruit that follows is a soft black {drupe} about 0.25 inch (6 to 8 mm) across holding two or three separate hard one-seeded {pyrenes}, never a dry fruit that cleaves into halves. It runs two leaf forms at once: the sterile shoots bear blades cut into three to five triangular lobes, while the woody fertile shoots overhead bear plain diamond-shaped blades with no lobes at all, and only those upper shoots ever flower. Its climbing stems grip brick and bark with dense {adventitious} rootlets whose tips secrete an adhesive polymer and then shrink and curl as they dry, hauling the stem tight against the surface as it rises 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 m). A hand lens on a young shoot tip shows {stellate} {trichomes} 0.5 to 1.0 mm (about 0.02 to 0.04 inch) long, whitish, their rays fused only at the very base and standing out at an angle so the growth looks frosted. It opens its flowers from September to November when almost nothing else is blooming, and a solitary bee named after the plant times its entire flight season to that late {nectar}. Every part carries the polyacetylenes falcarinol and didehydrofalcarinol, potent enough at 0.03 percent to raise a rash on patch-tested skin, alongside {saponins} that make the berries unsafe to swallow even as birds strip them clean. Native from Europe through western Asia to North Africa, it tolerates deep shade so completely that Oregon and Washington now list it as a noxious weed and restrict its sale. European pharmacies sell its leaf extract, standardised on the {saponins} hederacoside C and alpha-hederin, as a syrup for loosening a chesty cough. Bacchus was crowned with a wreath of it, an English carol pairs it with the holly, and the old American colleges draped in it lent their athletic league its name.

Accepted Answer

Hedera helix

Name That Plant #074