HONEYSUCKLE FAMILY CAPRIFOLIACEAE 
HORSE GENTIAN.. WILD COFFEE 
Triosteum perfoliatum L. 
This interesting plant has various other names, such as Fever- 
wort and Tinker’s Weed. Formerly it was much used in medi- 
cine, and it is said that Indians made a beverage from the fruits. 
It is found in rich, 
low open woods from 
Massachusetts to 
Illinois and Nebraska, 
south to Albama and 
Missouri. 
The stout stem is 
2-4 feet high and cov- 
ered with fine gland- 
ular hairs. Leaves, 
calyx, corolla and the 
filaments are also 
somewhat hairy. The 4-9-inch leaves are 
acute or acuminate, entire or wavy mar- 
gined, soft hairy beneath and somewhat 
hairy above, and are abruptly or gradu- 
ally narrowed into clasping bases that join around the stem. 
The plant blooms in May and June and the fruits ripen in 
August and September. Perfect, sessile and 2-bracted flowers are 
solitary or clustered in the leaf axils. The corolla is purplish 
brown. The berries are orange-yellow, densely covered with fine 
hairs, about one-half inch long, flat globular, and contain usually 
3 single-seeded nutlets. 
The Scarlet-fruited Horse Gentian, Triosteum aurantiacum Bick- 
nell, is a tall, coarse, open woodland perennial that flowers 2-3 weeks 
earlier and is to be found locally. The lower of the large broad leaves 
are sessile by narrowly winged bases that do not clasp the stem. The 
corolla is dull red with more spreading lobes than in the Horse 
Gentian, and the half-inch fruit is a bright orange-red ellipsoid drupe. 
Another shrub of the Honeysuckle family is the Indian Currant 
or Coralberry, Symphoricarpos orbiculatus Moench, uncommon or 
absent in the extreme northern part of the state but abundant in 
open woodland pastures and along roadsides farther south. It is 
2-5 feet high, the branches light brown and soft hairy, and has 
opposite, oval or ovate, entire leaves 1-2 inches long and very short 
petioled. Pinkish flowers are produced in dense axillary spikes in 
July. In fall the twigs are loaded with the purplish red berries, 
which hang on and retain their color until late winter. 
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