Winged Loosestrife

Wet feet and a purple face...

Winged Loosestrife is a slender waif. It grows up surrounded by bigger, taller plants. I didn’t discover it until we had been neighbors for almost twenty years.

Winged Loosestrife, Lythrum alatum

I found it in a natural opening in the woods at the bottom of a hill. It’s near an intermittent creek, surrounded by trees. I named that spot the Pocket Prairie. To explore it, I mowed a trail through it.

The ground is often wet there. That may be why trees haven’t invaded. It is home to wildflowers that I don’t find up top, where the ground is drier. It’s a magical feeling to enter. This Pocket Prairie is where I discovered a native Iowa wildflower named Winged Loosestrife.

Facets of a found gem

Each blossom has six crinkled petals, with a dark central vein.

Only a few blooms open at a time on each stem. Winged Loosestrife’s flowers are so small you could hold a bouquet in your fingertips. The blossoms always look wrinkled, as if made from super-thin tissue paper.

Magnified view of the flower’s style, which catches pollen grains.

From the center of a flower, there emerges a long column, called the style, with a whitish cap at the end, called the stigma. The stigma looks moist. A microscope view resolves the style into a mass of transparent, gelatinous droplets. Slightly sticky, they catch and keep any grains of pollen that touch them.

Where are the wings?

The plant is named not for its flowers but for its stem, which has four membranous flanges, evenly spaced around the stem. They give this plant the first part of its name, Winged Loosestrife.

Magnified view of a section of a stem, with thin, longitudinal “wings.”

The flanges are so narrow that it seems a stretch to call them “wings.” They would hardly support flight. They are hard even to see without a microscope. Yet botanists have doubled down on the idea. The scientific name of the plant, Lythrum alatum, also invokes the stem (alatum = wings) as well as the petals (lythrum = reddish).

Why is it called Loosestrife?

An account by first-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder said that loosestrife placed on oxen yokes would calm the animals and make them stop fighting — hence “loosen strife.”

Coming closer

The plant is inconspicuous when buried in prairie. When I first found it in the Pocket Prairie, I figured it might be hard to find it again when the seeds ripened. So I marked some plants with fluorescent tape.

The vase-like base holds the flower. When the bloom is done, it becomes a pod.

From the seeds I collected, a few plants joined my garden last year. Every morning, I water them with whatever is left in the jug after I refill the birdbath. I make sure they have wet feet. They like that.

Only a few flowers open each day on a stem.

They seem happy in their new home, where I can see them every day. A crab spider likes them, too and finds a home in the flowers.

A tiny crab spider waits for its breakfast.

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