Dr. John Nelson
The Original Mystery Plant

Photo by John Nelson

I took Dr. Wade T. Batson's introductory plant taxonomy class. Actually I took it twice, in two successive semesters at USC. Of course this was a good while ago, when I was an undergraduate.

The course was so interesting, I decided I would be a botanist. Dr. Batson had developed a huge reputation for his fantastic class, and, of course, for the marvelous adventures we all had on the field trips.

The field trips were always on Friday and were basically the high point of the week. Dr. Batson was not afraid of going through briar patches, ditches, and mud- holes in the deep woods to show us the local flora, and woe unto whatever student was foolish enough not to be dressed for the occasion.

The end of the field trip generally involved a happy ride back to campus. The students would brag about our exploits of the day and how much mud we had caked on our blue jeans.

The field trips also involved a quiz, but these were not as much fun. Dr. Batson grilled us royally on plants we had previously studied, as well as the new ones we had seen earlier in the day. This particular plant, for some reason, was always tough for me to identify.

It is a rather common Southeastern shrub or sometimes a small slender tree. It may be found in woodlands along bluffs, ravines, or black- water creeks, on much of the coastal plain from Delaware south to north Florida and eastern Texas. It also occurs inland, sometimes in large numbers on high elevations from Arkansas to Kentucky.

The plants are usually evergreen with dark, leathery leaves, a bit fuzzy on the lower surface. Great variability occurs in this species, though, and some plants (like the one in this photo) are devoid of foliage during the winter.

The leaves are rather boring, shaped like skinny footballs, and not very attractive. The midrib tends to be a bit yellow, and the leaf blades are somewhat sweet when chewed. The wood of this plant is rather soft and somewhat yellowish and has been used, along with the bark, as the source of a yellow dye.

This plant has no other near relatives here in the Southeast, but there are probably at least 300 similar species in the same genus that occur in South America and throughout much of the Pacific basin.

The flowers are truly a breath of fresh air in the early spring, bursting forth in roundish clusters on the twigs. The flowers are highly fragrant and a real treat to smell.

Small, fleshy fruits follow the flowers, each one containing a single seed. The plants are extremely easy to identify once the flowers have popped open, but the plants are a bit less memorable without them. Perfect for a question on a field quiz.

Answer to this week's mystery plant

[Answer: "Sweet leaf," "Horse sugar," Symplocos tinctoria]

Dr. John Nelson is the curator of the USC Herbarium.

To learn more about the Herbarium, call 777-8196. The

department also offers free plant identification.

www.herbarium.org