(Amphicarpa a monoica of Gray)
FlowersNumerous small, showy ones, borne in drooping clusters from axils of upper leaves; lilac, pale purplish, or rarely white, butterfly-shaped, consisting of standard petal partly enfolding wings and keel. Calyx tubular, 4 or 5 toothed; 10 stamens (9 and I); 1 pistil. (Also solitary fertile flowers, lacking petals, on thread-like, creeping branches from lower axils or underground). Stem : Twining wiry brownish-hairy, 1 to 8 ft. long. Leaves : Compounded of 3 thin leaflets, egg-shaped at base, acutely pointed at tip. Fruit Hairy pod 1 in. long. Also 1-seeded, pale, rounded, underground peanut.
Preferred HabitatMoist thickets, shady roadsides.
DistributionNew Brunswick westward to Nebraska, south to Gulf of Mexico.
Amphicarpoea (“seed at both ends”), the Greek name by which this graceful vine was formerly known, emphasizes its most interesting feature, that, nevertheless, seems to many a foolish duplication of energy on Nature’s part. Why should the same plant bear two kinds of blossoms and seeds ? Among the foliage of low shrubbery and plants in shady lanes and woodside thickets, we see the delicate, drooping clusters of lilac blossoms hanging where bees can readily discover them and, in pilfering their sweets, transfer their pollen from flower to flower. But in case of failure to intercross these blossoms that are dependent upon insect help to set fertile seed, what then ? Must the plant run the risk of extinction ? Self-fertilization may be an evil, but failure to produce seed at all is surely the greatest one. To guard against such a calamity, insignificant looking flowers that have no petals to open for the enticing of insects, but which fertilize themselves with their own pollen, produce abundant seed close to the ground or under it. Then what need of the showy blossoms hanging in the thicket above ? Close inbreeding in the vegetable world, as in the animal, ultimately produces degenerate offspring; and although the showy lilac blossoms of the wild peanut yield comparatively few cross-fertilized seeds, these are quite sufficient to enable the vine to maintain those desired features which are the inheritance from ancestors that struggled in their day and generation after perfection. No plant dares depend upon its cleistogamous or blind flowers alone for offspring; and in the sixty or more genera containing these curious growths, that usually look like buds arrested in development, every plant that bears them bears also showy flowers dependent upon cross-pollination by insect aid.
The boy who
” Drives home the cows from the pasture Up through the long shady lane ”
knows how reluctantly they leave the feast afforded by the wild peanut. Hogs, rooting about in the moist soil where it grows, unearth the hairy pods that should produce next year’s vines; hence the poor excuse for branding a charming plant with a repellent folk-name. Apios americanaHog PeanutAmerican Hog Peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata)