Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 38: Hypericaceæ St. John’s-Wort Family

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About This Book

A concise field manual that surveys the alpine and subalpine plants encountered along the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirks accessible by the trans-mountain railway, emphasizing distinct regional assemblages and plant adaptations to differences in moisture and exposure. Species are arranged by botanical families with general keys to families and genera; treatments include ferns, conifers, shrubs and the majority of herbaceous flowering plants while excluding grasses, sedges, and willows. Descriptions are accompanied by plates, watercolour illustrations and photographs, and the text relates local taxa to comparable mountain floras while noting characteristic species, habitats and elevational ranges.

Hypericaceæ
St. John’s-Wort Family

Herbs in our species with opposite, black-dotted leaves, and cymose yellow flowers; sepals and petals 5, twisted in the bud; stamens many.

Hypericum Scouleri Hook. Scouler’s St. John’s-wort.

Simple or sparingly branched above often with numerous small branchlets from running rootstocks, 1—2 feet high. Leaves thin, shorter than the internodes, about an inch long, mostly obtuse, more or less clasping and usually black-dotted along the margin. Flowers bright orange, ½—1 inch in diameter in more or less panicled cymes, sepals oval or oblong, much shorter than the petals, stamens numerous in three fascicles.

In moist gravelly soil in the Selkirks at Glacier; flowering in July.