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Meadow sweet
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MEADOW-SWEET
Spiraea Ulmaria
Family ROSACEAE
Known also as Queen of the Meadows, it will be found in wet meadows, and by the sides of streams and rivers.
It has a short, perennial rootstock, with erect, rather stout, reddish stems, two or three feet high. The leaves are interruptedly pinnate, the terminal leaflet threelobed, the undersides being downy and white. The stem leaves are provided with broad-toothed stipules. The minute yellowish - white sweetly scented flowers are very numerous and are borne in large, dense cymes at the summit of the stems. The calyx has four or five lobes; the petals are four or five, the capsules vary from five to nine, curiously twisted, and surrounded by a large number of stamens.
In spite of their delicate fragrance, the flowers produce no nectar but attracted by their sweet odour, insects visit them in great numbers, and from the closeness of the flowers cannot help fertilizing them.
The flowering period extends from June to August.
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From the rootstock rise the much-branched Meadow sweet stems. They are downy, one growing nearly erect, from six inches to a foot long, others all round it are creeping. The trefoil leaflets are oval, the small and near sweet Meadow the base, the central one some little distance from the others. The flowers are pale yellow, thirty to fifty of them, gathered together in a loosely globular head, and are Meadow sweet supported on rather long stalks, springing from the axils of the leaves. In fading, the flowers become reflexed and the broad upper petal arching over the straight pod, tuming bright sweet Meadow brown, giving the head the appearance of a hop strobile.
The flowering-stems vary in height from one foot to two and a half feet high terminating in sweet Meadow the solitary globular yellow flower. Each flower is provided with from ten to fifteen sepals which are concave, their tips overlapping. There are a similar number of small strap-shaped sweet Meadow petals. Within their circle are numerous stamens surrounding the five or more carpels. Each petal has a glandular pit in which nectar is produced, simi1ar to the Buttercup.
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