Flowers like birds smell strange

The first time I heard about this plant was in Ye Dan's tweet "Daxing'an Mountains where Wild Flowers are in full bloom" last year:

... Next to the road to Enhe, a Russian national township, I encountered a batch of fresh peony. The white peony in the mountains is very beautiful with pink and purple white fresh.

Last month, I also met this beautiful plant in Beijing.

[Dictamnus dasycarpus] Rutaceae Rutaceae > > White fresh Genus

White fresh is distributed to the north, and can be found from Anhui and Jiangxi to the northern border of our country. This is also a kind of herb, "Compendium of Materia Medica" wrote: "fresh, sheep gas is also, this grass root white, as sheep gas, its seeds as numerous as pepper."

The root of this grass smells like sheep. In the Flora of China, Bai Xian's nicknames are Baixian, smelly, Aries fresh and so on, all saying that he stinks. The naming of traditional medicinal plants is often like this, which only describes the characteristics of medicinal parts, but does not pay attention to the more obvious characteristics of plants.

I don't know whether the white fresh root smells like this or not. After all, I saw it in the botanical garden. I can't dig out the root and smell it. But the white part of the ground actually smells good, and the flowers and leaves smell like his Rutaceae fruit relatives-similar to lemon, but slightly peculiar and hard to describe.

One of the characteristics of Rutaceae is fragrance (or smelly) because they tend to have glands that secrete aromatic oils. A lot of white aromatic oil overflowed, turning into brown oil bubbles protruding from the plant surface, scattered on stamens, petals, calyx and stems, but not on leaves.

When I first met you, I thought these oil bubbles were aphids. After careful observation, I got a few of them down, only to find that they were all oil spots. In addition, the Compendium of Materia Medica says that "his son is as numerous as pepper", which means that the surface of his fruit is oily.

The white flowers are quite unique, with a long string of racemes, a single flower pink and eye-catching dark red veins.

His flowers are five-petaled, symmetrical on both sides, with four upper petals and one lower petal. There are ten stamens and one pistil, all of which are very long and the tail ends are raised. Petals and stamens look like peacocks with open screens.

White fresh leaves also have characteristics, similar to maple poplar, odd-pinnate compound leaves, leaf axis with "small wings". If you crush the leaves, you can smell a wonderful smell.

Author: Jiang SB.

Photo: Jiang SB.

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