Stunned by Shrubby St. John’s Wort
The fourth in a series of gorgeous garden plants that are good for the environment! Let’s establish a pollinator garden full of beautiful native plants! (By request.)
Although this plant may have the least exciting name of any plant I’ve profiled so far, it is one of the most stunning — and unexpected! I mean, who would expect something with the uninspiring name Shrubby St. John’s Wort to be pretty? Wort alone really makes me think of toads. And Shrubby?
A group of plant nerds and I were walking in Patapsco State Park, admiring the river in the beginning of July. We come around a corner, and WHAM! There is this bush, hanging out on one of the big rocks in a patch of sun. It’s covered in bees and butterflies and smells heavenly. And it’s dramatic! Yellow, big, healthy, symmetrical — it looked like something out of a carefully tended garden, not a wild forest plant.
And boy did I have a hard time identifying it. I finally was chatting with some wonderful volunteers from the Natural History Society of Maryland and one of them, an actual botanist by trade, was able to help me identify it. He was not 100% certain, so suggested I add cf. after the Latin name. That is short for the Latin confer, meaning “to compare” to show that it is comparable to this, but might not be exactly Hypericum prolificum. That’s how scientists show they’re just confused mortals like the rest of us.
In spite of the cf., after consulting some botanical guides and my pictures, I’m now positive it’s Shrubby St. John’s Wort.
So this is it! Now that I know the name, I can look it up and find that, surprise surprise, it’s native to all of North America east of the Mississippi (USDA)! And clearly pollinators love it.
It’s recommended by the Missouri Botanical Gardens as a shrubby hedge for a pollinator or native garden. It’s pretty fuss-free, as it’s drought tolerant, not picky about PH, can grow in rocky poor soil, and does fine in sunny to part sun. And it blooms for two months in the summer. Whoohoo!
Apparently it should be pruned back in early spring for maximum bloom. Although I’m sure no one had pruned this random bush in the woods and it was fairly spectacular. Perhaps they get scraggly with age.
I see different heights stated on websites. This one was about 4 feet tall — USDA says it grows to about 3.5 feet tall, while a few other sites say up to 5 feet tall. Your mileage may vary.
You can see in the picture that the leaves are simple, opposite and smooth — not toothed or lobed or anything like that.
The bush structure itself reminds me a LOT of the oh-so-familiar, oh-so-invasive Butterfly Bush. It’s woody, but a soft, splintery kind of wood on the bottom. It has a sort of grayish bark. The blooming stem portions, the new growth, are still flexible, and a smooth green in texture.
Per Illinois Wildflowers (masters of the fancy plant descriptive vocabulary) there are five yellow petals per flower, with a lot of stamens. The stamens are the pollen bearing fuzzy-yellow-topped fine fronds coming out of the flower. There is a single pistil with three united styles. I think that’s the pointy greenish thing coming out of the center of the flower, and it contains the ovaries and turns into the seed capsule. Each of the three styles separates once this matures to seed, producing a separate set of seeds.
Let’s talk about the name. Although wort sounds absolutely appalling to our modern ear, it just comes from wyrt, which means plant in Old English. It commonly denotes a useful plant, one used as medicine. And yes, per NIH, plants by this name were used in ancient times as medicine, and in medieval Germany as magic to repel disease, witches, and demons. Thus the name.
In modern times, a plant with this common name is widely used against depression — apparently very effectively.
However, this can’t possibly be that St. John’s Wort. It’s native to North America. Where would the Romans and medieval Germans be getting this plant? This plant shares a common name with the widely medicinally used Hypericum perforatum, but it is NOT THAT PLANT. H. perforatum is native to Europe, just like the Romans and German witches.
So DON’T EAT THIS PLANT. Unless you are a bee.
As for the St. John’s part? Well, our plant is called St. John’s Wort because it’s in the same family as H. perforatum. And it’s a shrub. That’s it.
If you’re interested in the source of the name for H. perforatum, I found multiple citations that conflict. But I enjoyed this website, Herbal Legacy, the most. It describes a lot of the historical uses of the European plant and the mythology surrounding it. But they definitely don’t in any way describe the history of our North American native, so I won’t paraphrase, I’ll just link. Enjoy!
