This pretty shrub borders the streams and swamps throughout the country. Its button-like flower-clusters appear in midsummer. It belongs to the family of which the delicate bluet and fragrant partridge vine are also members. Its flowers have a jasmine-like fragrance.
Mild Water-pepper.
Polygonum hydropiperoides. Buckwheat Family.
Stem.—One to three feet high, smooth, branching. Leaves.—Alternate, narrowly lance-shaped or oblong. Flowers.—White or flesh-color, small, growing in erect, slender spikes. Calyx.—Five-parted. Corolla.—None. Stamens.—Eight. Pistil.—One, usually with three styles.
These rather inconspicuous but very common flowers are found in moist places and shallow water.
The common knotweed, P. aviculare, which grows in such abundance in country dooryards and waste places, has slender, often prostrate, stems, and small greenish flowers, which are clustered in the axils of the leaves or spiked at the termination of the stems. This is perhaps the “hindering knotgrass” to which Shakespeare refers in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” so terming it, not on account of its knotted trailing stems, but because of the belief that it would hinder the growth of a child. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Coxcomb” the same superstition is indicated:
We want a boy
Kept under for a year with milk and knotgrass.
It is said that many birds are nourished by the seeds of this plant.
Climbing False Buckwheat.
Polygonum scandens. Buckwheat Family.
Stem.—Smooth, twining, and climbing over bushes, eight to twelve feet high. Leaves.—Heart or arrow-shaped, pointed, alternate. Flowers.—Greenish or pinkish, in racemes. Calyx.—Five-parted, with colored margins. Corolla.—None. Stamens.—Usually eight. Pistil.—One, with three stigmas. Seed-vessel.—Green, three-angled, winged, conspicuous in autumn.