The Yellow Adder’s Tongue

Teacher’s Story

“Once a prize was offered to a child if she would find two leaves of the adder’s tongue that were marked exactly alike: and she sought long and faithfully, but the only prize she won was a lesson in Nature’s book of variations, where no two leaves of any plant, shrub or tree are exactly alike: for even if they seemed so to our eyes, yet there would exist in them differences of strength and growth too subtle for us to detect. But this child was slow in learning this great fact, and, until she was a woman, the adder’s tongue leaves, so beautifully embroidered with purple and green, were to her a miracle, revealing the infinite diversity of Nature’s patterns.”—“The Child’s Own Book of Wild Flowers.”

This little lily of the woods is a fascinating plant. Its leaves of pale green mottled with brownish purple often cover closely large irregular areas in the rich soil of our woodlands; and yet I doubt if the underground story of these forest rugs is often thought of. The leaves are twins, and to the one who plucks them carelessly they seem to come from one slender stem. It requires muscle as well as decision of character to follow this weak stem down several inches, by digging around it, until we find the corm at its base. A corm is the swollen base of a stem and is bulb-like in form; but it is not made up of layers, as is a bulb. It is a storehouse for food and also a means of spreading the species; for from the corms there grow little corms called cormels, and each cormel develops a separate plant. This underground method of reproduction is the secret of why the leaves of the adder’s tongue appear in patches, closely crowded together.

Only a few of the plants in a “patch” produce flowers, and it is interesting to see how cleverly these lily bells hide from the casual eye. Like many of the lilies, the three sepals are petal-like and are identified as sepals only by their outside position, although they are thicker in texture. They are purplish brown outside, which serves to render the flower inconspicuous as we look down upon it; on the inner side, they are a pure yellow, spotted with darker yellow near where they join the stem. The three petals are pure yellow, paler outside than in, and they have dark spots like the tiger lilies near the heart of the flower; and where they join the stem, each has on each side an ear-shaped lobe.

The open flower is bell-shaped; and like other bells it has a clapper, or tongue. This is formed by six downward-hanging stamens, the yellow filaments of which have broad bases and taper to points where the oblong anthers join them. The anthers are red or yellow. It is this stamen clapper that the visiting insects must cling to when probing upward for nectar from this flower at the upper end of the bell. The pale green pistil is somewhat three-sided, and the long style remains attached long after the flower disappears. The flower is slightly fragrant, and it is visited by the queen bumblebees and the solitary bees, of which there are many species. The flower closes nights and during cloudy, stormy days. The seed capsule is plump and rather triangular, and splits into three sections when ripe. The seeds are numerous and are fleshy and crescent-shaped.

But the adder’s tongue, like many other early blooming flowers, is a child of the spring. The leaves, at first so prettily mottled, fade out to plain green; and by midsummer they have entirely disappeared, the place where they were, being covered with other foliage of far different pattern. But down in the rich woods soil are the plump globular corms filled with the food gathered by the spotted leaves during their brief stay, and next spring two pairs of spotted leaves may appear where there was but one pair this year.