Friday flowers…royal catchfly

These are from McDowell Forest Preserve in Naperville, Illinois. Not many new flowers around here right now, but these bring back some good memories. I don’t remember what these are called, but there were only one or two plants in the entire park. In fact, I was going to go the lazy woman’s route and just say I didn’t know what they were because it’s not always easy trying to identify a flower or tree online. But I decided to give it a try, looking up “wildflowers Illinois” via DuckDuckGo and lo and behold, I found a photo right on the first page! They’re Royal Catchfly, (Silene regia) the name probably deriving from the sticky hairs that catch insects. These plants have endangered status in Illinois, so I guess I was fortunate to see them!

Red is an uncommon color among prairie plants because many pollinating insects (e.g., bees) are insensitive to this range of the light spectrum. However, some butterflies perceive red, and for this reason are attracted to such flowers. The flowers of Royal Catchfly have a design that favors butterflies as pollinating agents: They have a proboscis that is sufficiently long to reach the nectar at the bottom of the long narrow tube that is formed by the calyx, while the flared petals provide a colorful landing platform for their legs. Illinois Wildflowers

Evidently they’re also pollinated by the ruby-throated hummingbird, according to Wikipedia. At any rate, they’re very attractive!

Had to laugh because evidently I looked them up before. When I typed the name into my tags, it popped up. 🙂 Just didn’t remember what I’d forgotten.

Friday flowers…royal beauty

During the walk where I found all the flowers featured in my recent blog posts, I also found one plant with beautiful red flowers. I’ve never seen one before and there was only this one (and maybe one other in another spot), so I was curious whether it was rare.

Not only is it rare, it’s royal. The US Wildflower site says:

Silene regia – Royal Catchfly. Royal Catchfly – Silene regia is a plant of rocky prairies, glades, and open woods with attractive scarlet red flowers. It appears similar to Fire Pink – Silene virginica – but Silene regia has a much smaller distribution – 12 states, and in 6 of those states it is protected due to its rarity, having Rare, Endangered, or Threatened status. It is possible that it has no longer survived in Knox County, the only county in Tennessee where it was found.

There’s no mention as to whether it really catches flies, but it certainly caught my eye.