Spiderwort

Tradescantia ohiensis, Spiderwort, also Dayflower.  Native to the Americas.

Flowers open in the morning, close by evening, and the petals flower only one day.  This species has a bluish tint on thin leaves, lacks obvious hairs on the flowering stems, and is more spindly than the fatter-leaved virginiata.  It’s named after an English gardener to King Charles I, John Tradescant.  In my introductory biology classes, the students called it Turtox, the name of the biological company writ large on the microscope slides showing the stem cross sections of spiderwort illustrating the classic monocot pattern.  You remember, as opposed to dicots?  Corn kernels vs peanuts?  One vs two seedling-nourishing cotyledons?  If you’re a flowering plant, you are one of the two.  Monocots, like grasses, cereal grains, palm, banana, corn, onion, lilies, tulips, orchids and our spiderwort usually have long narrow leaves with parallel veins, a stem with scattered vascular bundles which do not contain a cambium between the xylem and phloem, one cotyledon, a fibrous root system and three-parted flowers (trimerous 3, 6, 9) vs dicots with tetra- and pentamerous flowers.

I was taught that the time to start collecting the spiderwort seed heads is when there is only one flower remaining in the clump.  We usually collect then and also a few days later.  (I’ve never seen a species whose individuals all ripen in the same day, nor would that be advantageous in the long run.)

I collected the heads shown at left on July 3.

The plants were more successful this year in

the prairies adjacent to the wetland.  The upland

areas are suffering from the June drought.  In

our unburned prairies, the Spiderwort hasn’t

been a stand-out in 2023.

Close-up of a clump

of seed pods after

flowering is done.

I love the rectangular

and intricately sculpted

seeds.  But you will see

that I love all seeds.