Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its genus name is the Greek word for the crested lark, a bird whose unusually long hind claw the backward-pointing {spur} of the flower was thought to resemble. Two small pale {sepals} fall away as each bud opens, leaving four {petals} in two facing pairs, the outer pair shaped quite unlike the inner. Only one of those four petals is drawn backward into a long hollow {spur}, so every bloom has a distinct top and bottom rather than two mirror halves. Its {stamens} number just two, yet each is split three ways, so six anthers sit in a pair of bundles pressed against the joined tips of the inner petals. Its species epithet honours a Scottish naturalist and ship surgeon who sailed to the Columbia River in 1824 alongside David Douglas and botanised the coast the following summer. It grows wild in moist coniferous forest, on shaded stream banks and in wet ravines, from southern British Columbia through Washington to western Oregon. It dwarfs almost every relative in cultivation, throwing up erect hollow stems 2 to 4 feet (60 to 120 cm) tall from thick creeping {rhizomes} that build slow colonies. Rose-pink flowers tipped with purple, each trailing a slender curved spur about half an inch (1.3 cm) long, crowd dense terminal {racemes} of fifteen to thirty-five blooms through May and June. Its leaves are cut three or four times over, but the final segments stay big for the group at 1 to 3 inches (2 to 8 cm) long, so the mound reads as coarse and ferny rather than mossy. Deer walk past it because every part is bitter with isoquinoline {alkaloids}, the chemical class that made several of its Asian relatives staples of traditional medicine. Where summers turn hot and dry the whole plant collapses to the ground by midsummer and stays underground until the following spring, leaving a bare gap for six to nine months of the year. It is the giant of its genus west of the Cascades, the one waist-high species of wet coastal rainforest, and it carries the name of that Scottish collector in both its scientific name and its common one.

Accepted Answer

Corydalis scouleri

Name That Plant #118