34 PIPEWORT FAMILY 



PIPEWORT FAMILY (EHocauUceae) 



Low plants. Flowers minute, crowded in small white or gray 

 buttonlike head at top of leafless flowering-stem. 



PiPEWORT. Buttons. Everlasting. Ij^hmortelles. 



(Several genera) 



In damp pinelands and in marshes from midwinter to 

 autumn thousands of buttonlike heads of pipeworts sway 

 on fluted stems above basal rosettes of narrow leaves. 

 "Everlastings," the country people call them, for they may 

 be picked and kept indefinitely, with little change in their 

 appearance. 



The earliest to bloom, and one of the most widely dis- 

 tributed, the small Syngonanthus flavidulus, is very com- 

 mon in low pinelands, where its dense tufts of short blue- 

 green leaves begin to send up slender flowering-stems in 

 midwinter. Marshes are dotted in early spring with the 

 myriad white buttons of a larger species, Eriocaulon com- 

 pressum. Our largest pipewort, E. decangulare, is slightly 

 later in blooming, and seldom grows in such profusion 

 as the two preceding species. 



The flowering-stems of all are delicately fluted, or ribbed, 

 like miniature temple columns. In 8. flavidulus the ribs 

 are five in number, in E. decangulara the number is ten 

 or more. The minute blossoms of pipeworts, crowded 

 tightly together in a head above an involucre of small 

 bracts, seem more like fringed bracts than like flowers, 

 but they are well worth separating and examining under 

 a magnifying glass. Stamens and pistils are in separate 

 flowers, usually in the same head, and except in the genus 

 Lachnocaulon, which lacks petals, each flower has two or 

 three sepals and two or three petals. 



Eriocaulon compressum. Flowers white, minute, in dense 

 head about ^2. in. across, at top of flowering-stem 1-3 ft. tall. 



