The brightly-colored butter-and-eggs loves late September and early October weather. This beautiful wildflower is around all summer, but seems to get a second life in mid-September.
Butter-and-eggs, as its common name suggests, is a buttery yellow flower with a large orange spot, about the color of an egg yolk, in the center. This snapdragon-like flower’s reproductive parts are completely hidden by the closed upper and lower petals.
The orange spot may add beauty, but it also has a practical purpose. It serves as a target for large bees, such as bumble bees, which are the major pollinators of butter-and-eggs. When a bee lands on the orange spot, the lower petal bends downward, exposing the nectar to the hungry bee. The bee picks up pollen when crawling in to sip the sweet juice and then spreads the reproductive dust (pollen) to the stigma of the next flower, thus facilitating cross-pollination.
Butter-and-eggs is covered with many narrow, stalkless flax-like leaves. The one-half to three-inch-long leaves are pointed at both ends. When viewed from a distance, its foliage has a bluish or silvery tint. This perennial usually grows one to two feet tall and has dense flower clusters at the tops of its stems. The flowers make an attractive addition to arrangements, and they last a long time in a vase.
Butter-and-eggs’ genus name, Linaria, refers to flax, and its species name, vulgaris, means common. It is also known as common toadflax. Some people think that the flower looks like a frog or toad’s mouth opening when you squeeze it.
Roadsides, railroad right-of-ways, field edges and streamsides are the most common habitat for butter-and-eggs. It prefers sandy or gravelly well-drained soil of a neutral pH. Dry substrate limits competition, but if its environment gets too dry, the foliage will die back to the ground, only to sprout back following a soaking rain.
Northern Asia and parts of Europe are the original homes for butter-and-eggs, but it soon was cultivated throughout Europe for its beauty and believed medicinal properties.
In Germany, the flowers were also used as a source of yellow dye. Colonists, as early as 320 years ago, brought it to North America for medicinal purposes. It now grows wild in all lower 48 states and throughout Pennsylvania. It is non-native and can sometimes be invasive. Colorado and New Mexico list toadflax as a “noxious weed.”
An ointment made from butter-andeggs was used to treat liver and skin disorders, jaundice, hemorrhoids and eye inflammations. Before you concoct your own toadflax medicine, you might also want to know that, in Sweden, the plant was boiled in milk and used as a fly poison.
Butter-and-eggs spreads through its roots and rhizomes and therefore is often seen growing in clumps and colonies. It produces minute winged seeds, which are dispersed by wind or attachment to animals. The seeds remain viable in the soil for up to eight years. Plants bloom during their second year. The oldest, tallest and heartiest specimens have the largest flower spikes and are usually in the centers of the colonies.
Although toadflax begins blooming in early summer, autumn rains and cooler temperatures tend to foster rapid growth and profuse flower production. Unless killed by a hard frost, the plant is most visible at this time of year. Watch for it on your fall outings.
This column appears in the Sept. 23-29 edition of the Centre County Gazette
