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Who do the agents at the Clemson Extension Service call when they get stumped?
USC's 99-year-old A.C. Moore Herbarium, that's who. Seems a Beaufort County resident sent in a plant for identification, and the extension service folks sent it on to John Nelson, curator of USC's herbarium.
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| Yellow spider flower |
"It's a new plant in South Carolina--Arivela viscosa or yellow spider flower," Nelson said. "It's a tropical plant that's sort of scattered around. It's actually a weed that might turn out to be noxious or it might wind up being one of those plants that shows up every now and then and just dies off."USC's herbarium has become a front-line monitoring station in the watch for alien plant species showing up on South Carolina soil. To positively identify the spider flower, Nelson consulted a botanist at Eastern Illinois University herbarium who is the world's guru for this particular genus.
"This species might or might not prove to be aggressive. We already have too many aggressive, introduced species that are serious pests," Nelson said. "The yellow spider flower, which is actually an attractive herb, might disappear as quickly as it has shown up, but we want to keep an eye on it to see if starts to spread."
Among the most obnoxious introduced species in South Carolina are the tropical soda apple, a spiny plant in the tomato family that infests cow pastures, and also multiflora rose, a spiny shrub that forms impenetrable thickets.
The A. C. Moore Herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, call 7-8196 or go to www.herbarium.org.
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