From Blue to Purple 



American or Mock Pennyroyal; Tickweed; 



Squaw Mint 



{Hedeoma pulegioides) Mint family 



Flowers — Very small, bluish purple, clustered in axils of upper 

 leaves. Calyx tubular, unequally 5-cleft ; teeth of upper lip 

 triangular, hairy in throat. Corolla 2-lipped, upper lip erect, 

 notched; lower one 3-cleft, spreading; 2 anther-bearing 

 stamens under upper lip ; 2 sterile but apparent ; i pistil with 

 2-cleft style. Stem: Low, erect, branched, square, hairy, 6 to 

 18 in. high. Leaves: Small, opposite, ovate to oblong, scant- 

 ily toothed, strongly aromatic, pungent. 



Preferred Habitat — Dry fields, open woodland. 



Flowering Season — July — September. 



Distribution — Cape Breton Island westward to Nebraska, south te 

 Florida. 



However insignificant its flower, this common little plant un- 

 mistakably proclaims its presence throughout the neighborhood. 

 So powerful is the pungent aroma of its leaves that dog doctors 

 sprinkle them about freely in the kennels to kill fleas, a pest by 

 no means exterminated in Southern Europe, however, where the 

 true pennyroyal of commerce {Mentha Pulegium) is native. Herb 

 gatherers who collect our pennyroyal, that is so similar to the Eu- 

 ropean species it is similarly employed in medicine, say they can 

 scent it from a greater distance than any other plant. 



Bastard Pennyroyal, which, like the Self-heal, is sometimes 

 called Blue Curls ( Trichostema dichotomum), chooses dry fields, 

 but preferably sandy ones, where we find its abundant, tiny blue 

 flowers, that later change to purple, from July to October. Its 

 balsam-like odor is not agreeable, neither has the plant beauty to 

 recommend it; yet where it grows, from Maine to Florida, and 

 west to Texas, it is likely to be so common we cannot well pass it 

 unnoticed. The low, stiff, slender, much-branched, and rather 

 clammy stem bears opposite, oblong, smooth-edged leaves nar- 

 rowed into petioles. One, two, or three flowers, borne at the 

 tips of the Dranches, soon fall off, leaving the 5-cleft calyx to 

 cradle four exposed nutlets. 



From the five-lobed tubular corolla protrude four very long, 

 curling, blue or violet stamens — hair stamens the Greek generic 

 title signifies — and the pretty popular name of blue curls also has 

 reference to these conspicuous filaments that are spirally coiled in 

 the bud. 



In general habit like the two preceding plants, the False Pen- 



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