About
Spotted St. John's wort is a perennial of eastern North America named for the dark spots on its petals. Bees visit it for pollen.
Care at a glance
- Pet safety
- Leaves contain hypericin, which is toxic to mammals: it can blister skin and irritate the digestive tract, so foraging mammals seldom eat the foliage.
- People
- Not recorded.
Field notes
Morphology
Grows 50–100 cm tall, seldom branched, with reddish spotted stems that are woody near the base. Leaves 2–6 cm long are oblong to ovate. Many yellow flowers crowd terminal clusters. A taproot and short rhizomes let it form colonies.
Distribution & habitat
Floodplains, roadsides, moist fields and thickets at 50–1,200 m across the Midwest and Atlantic coast into Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec; also wild in Sweden.
Ecology
Produces no nectar; bees such as the American bumblebee and sweat bees collect its pollen. Gray hairstreak caterpillars feed on the capsules.
Habitat
- Altitude
- Not recorded
- Altitude class
- —
- Native to
- United States, Canada, Sweden
Cultivation
- Difficulty
- Not recorded
Text adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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