Tendril unbranched or bifurcate. Inflorescence usually a polychasium. Seeds elliptic, obovoid-elliptic, or obtriangular, surface smooth, corrugated, or with strumose protuberance or ribs.
In spring it can sense when the nights are getting shorter and the temperature is warmer, and when the timing is right, it flowers with two sets of catkins.
The Cherokee bean puts up brilliant scarlet spikes from poor soil. It is always a marvel to me that some of the handsomest wild flowers grow profusely in the barest places.
The most influential of the grasses composing the sod is a delicate calamagrostis with fine filiform leaves, and loose, airy panicles that seem to float above the flowery lawn like a purple mist.
Here you find mats of the curious dwarf willow scarce an inch high, yet sending up a multitude of gray silky catkins, illumined here and there with, the purple cups and bells of bryanthus and vaccinium.
It belongs to the rose family, is about six or eight feet high, has small white flowers in racemes eight to twelve inches long, round needle-like leaves, and reddish bark that becomes shreddy when old.
Below this point the climate is no longer arctic. Butterflies become larger and more abundant, grasses with imposing spread of panicle wave above your shoulders, and the summery drone of the bumblebee thickens the air.
But if you pull one of these flower-heads to pieces, you will find that it is really made up of a great many small separate flowers, which all grow close together on the cushion-shaped top of the flower-stalk.