Marsh marigold
| Caltha palustris | |
|---|---|
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| (unranked): | Angiosperms |
| (unranked): | Eudicots |
| Order: | Ranunculales |
| Family: | Ranunculaceae |
| Genus: | Caltha |
| Species: | C. palustris |
| Binomial name | |
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Caltha palustris L. |
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| varieties | |
| Synonyms | |
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Trollius paluster Krause |
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Trollius paluster Krause
Caltha palustris, known as marsh-marigold and kingcup, is a small to medium size perennial herbaceous plant of the family Ranunculaceae, native to marshes, fens, ditches and wet woodland in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. It flowers between April and August, dependent on altitude and latitude, but occasional flowers may occur at other times.
Caltha palustris is a 10–80 cm high, hairless, fleshy, perennial, herbaceous plant, that dies down in autumn and overwinters with buds near the surface of the marshy soil. The plants have many, 2–3 mm thick strongly branching roots. Its flowering stems are hollow, erect or more or less decumbent. The alternate true leaves are in a rosette, each of which consist of a leaf stem that is about 4× as long as the leaf blade, itself between 3–25 cm long and 3–20 cm wide, with a hart-shaped foot, a blunt tip, and a scalloped to toothed, sometime almost entire margin particularly towards the tip. In their youth the leaves are protected by a membranous sheath, that may be up to 3 cm long in fully grown plants.
The common marsh-marigold mostly has several flowering stems of up to 80 cm long, carrying - mostly several - seated leaflike stipules - or the lower ones may be on a short petiole -, and between four and six (but occasionally as few as one or as many as twenty five) flowers. The flowers are approximately 4 (2-5½) cm in diameter. There are four to nine (mostly five) petal-like, brightly colored - yolk yellow, white or magenta -, inverted egg-shaped sepals, each about 1¾ (1-2½) cm long and 1⅓ (¾-1¾) cm wide with a blunt or sometimes acute tip. Real petals and nectaries are lacking. Between fifty and hundred-twenty stamens with flattened yellow filaments and yellow tricolpate or sometimes pantoporate pollen encircle between five and twenty-five free, flattened, linear-oblong, yellow to green carpels, with a two-lobed, obliquely positioned stigma, and each with many seedbuds. This later on develops into a seated, funnel-shaped fruit (a so-called follicle) of ¾-2 cm long and ¼-½ cm wide, that opens with one suture at the side of the axis and contains seven to twenty ovoid, brown to black seeds of about 2½×1⅓ mm.
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Wikipedia