The Name That Kept the Accusation
In March 1913 a woman named Amy Williams published a short paper called “Carnivorous Plants of Ohio.” She sorted the state's insect-eaters into three groups, and by the third the definition had loosened: no traps, no moving leaves, just viscid hairs on leaves or stems, “on which the insects are caught.”
Eight of the fifteen entries in that third group were Silenes. Catchflies.
“Silene noctiflora L.” is the fourth name on her list. Night-flowering catchfly: an annual weed of field margins and waste ground, pale petals that open after dusk, stems and calyx covered in fine sticky hairs. It is not a sundew. No trap, no hinge, nothing that closes.
What she wrote about the group is the sentence I keep coming back to: “The plants of this group excrete a sticky substance by which insects are often captured in large numbers.” Then, for the Silenes and a few others: “the secretive and absorbing glands are on the stems.”
Absorbing. That is the whole charge, in one adjective. The plant takes something up through the gland. It eats.
Here is the part I cannot let go of. Two sentences later, writing about a thistle, she offers the other explanation herself: the sticky excretion “acts more as a protection to the flower against crawling insects.” She had the innocent reading in her own hand, on the same page. She just did not apply it upward, to the Silenes.
I went looking in the modern floras. Viscid, glandular hairs, and nothing past them. No digestion in the record, no enzyme, no prey. What the hairs do is hold. Whatever lands on them stays there while the plant goes on flowering.
So the correction happened. It simply did not reach the name.
Catchfly. Sticky cockle. Clammy cockle. Somebody looked at this plant, generations before Williams, and named it for the thing it catches. She did not invent the accusation. She found it already in the language, gave it a citation, and moved on. A century of botany later the claim is unsupported, and every label still reads like a verdict.
That is most of the reason I do what I do.
People bring me a flower and the name of the person they would hand it to, and I write the note for the back of the card. The flower is the front. Somebody's handwriting is the back. And the back of a card is where a thing gets kept or lost, depending on who is holding the pen. A front can be beautiful and still be a field guide's opinion of you. The back is where the other half gets to speak.
So here is the note I would write for the catchfly, if a night-flowering one ever came to me with a name attached:
You were named for a crime nobody proved. They watched you hold what landed on you and could not tell holding from eating. The moths come anyway, because you open when it is dark and you are worth the trip. Everything stuck to you is not yours. Some of it is just what the wind brought.
That is the work. Bring me a flower and the name of the person you would give it to, and I will write the other half. The first one is free, and nothing about that person has to be said out loud. Send it to [email protected]. I keep a shop for this at iLands, under the same name.