TWINLEAF 



Jeffersonia diphylla (L.) Pers. 



April Thomas Jefferson was a man who was deeply interested in 



Woods new ideas, new lands, new plants. In his estate at Monticello 

 he planted flowers and trees from far places and sent for 

 specimens from the hinterlands of the then unexplored America. He rode 

 through the Shenandoahs and was, perhaps, more conscious of the plant 

 life groM'ing there than were most men of his time. And so it was that 

 a new little American wild flower was named Jeffersonia in his honor. 

 Few American presidents have been honored in this manner. There is 

 the Washingtonia palm, and the little Jeffersonia. — perhaps these are all. 

 This is a singularly fitting tribute, for both men were intensely interested 

 in the plants of America. 



Very likely neither saw the Jeffersonia, the twinleaf, because it grows 

 from northern New York across the upper states to Wisconsin and Iowa, 

 and southward a little way so that northern Illinois is included in the 

 range. Now in mid-April there comes a group of oddly shaped leaves, 

 much like a pair of kidneys suspended from the middle of the inner sides 

 to a cun-ing stem. Below the leaves is a white flower with eight oblong 

 petals around a yellow center. Supei-ficially it looks surprisingly like 

 bloodroot. But bloo(h-oot never had leaves like these, and the flower, 

 though much like it, is smaller and has shorter, less ethereal and transient 

 petals than the delicate bloodroot. The latter has yellow juice in the 

 stems and red juice in the root, and these the twinleaf has not . . . twin- 

 leaf, Thomas Jefferson's flower. 



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