A handsome plant, with a smooth, pale-green stem, from two to three feet tall, and fine large leaves, prettily cut, smooth and rather bright green, the lower ones sometimes eight inches across. The white flower clusters are large, very pretty, airy and feathery, consisting of numerous small flowers, with small petal-like sepals, usually four, and no petals, the numerous stamens, with white filaments, being the conspicuous part and forming a little pompon. The akenes are numerous, inflated and four-angled, and form a head. It is a pity that this attractive plant has such a horrid name. It grows in moist woods at Mt. Rainier and in similar places.
False Bugbane—Trautvetteria grandis.
Anemones grow in temperate and cold regions everywhere. They have no petals, but their sepals, numbering from four to twenty, resemble petals. The stem-leaves are in whorls, forming a kind of involucre below the flower. There are many kinds; some have nearly smooth, pointed akenes, some densely woolly ones, and in some the akenes have feathery tails. The name, pronounced anemòne in Latin and in English anémone, is appropriate to the fragile kinds, such as the eastern Wood Anemone, for it means "flower shaken by the wind."
Canyon Anemone
Anemòne sphenophýlla
White
Spring
Arizona
An attractive plant, eight inches to a foot tall, with pretty flowers and foliage. The flowers are white, tinged with pink, less than an inch across, often downy outside, and the head of fruit is oblong, sleek, and silky downy. This grows on dry, rocky slopes in the Grand Canyon, above the plateau. Around Tucson the flowers are less pretty, but the foliage handsomer.
Three-leaved Anemone
Anemòne deltoìdea
White
Summer
Wash., Oreg., Col.
Delicate, pale flowers, conspicuous in dark mountain woods, with slightly downy, purplish stems, from eight to ten inches tall, and pretty leaves, thin in texture, the involucre-leaves without leaf-stalks, rather light-green, dull on the upper side, paler and shiny on the under. The pretty flowers are an inch and a half to over two inches across, with five, pure-white sepals, usually two of them larger and longer than the others, and a light bright-yellow center. This is abundant at Mt. Rainier. A. quinquefòlia var. Gràyi, of the Coast Ranges, is similar, the flower often tinged with blue, the involucre-leaves with leaf-stalks.
Northern Anemone
Anemòne parviflòra
White
Summer
Northwest
A pretty little plant, with a rather hairy, reddish stem, from four to twelve inches tall, glossy, dark-green leaves, paler and downy on the under side, and flowers about half an inch across, cream-white, tinged with purple or blue on the outside; the akenes very woolly. This reaches an altitude of ten thousand five hundred feet, growing in the East and in Asia and is the smallest of the mountain Anemones.