POP QUIZ Answered

What are we?

But first, the clues:

Palustris means swamp, swampy, or of the swamp.

Hot, stylish, phat, fly, and coxa are, or can be, other words for hip, although coxa is more literal than the others in that it refers to the hip bone.

So, now we have “swamp hip,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense. I was going to use a clue such as rosa or rouge but thought it a bit too obvious. So, I left it to you to piece it together, to visualize red fruit, hips, swamp…I only know of one fruit that is referred to as hips, and that is the fruit of roses.

Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris) in the Wetlands (5/26/10).

By the way, rose hips are edible, are very nutritious, can be made into tea, soup, jelly, syrup, and wine, among other things, and they have way more vitamin C than do oranges. So go pick you some hips, but make sure that the hips you pick have not been sprayed with some sort of pest or herbicide.

Swamp Rose grows in our Wetlands here at the Museum and is just one of several common species found in our area. It is very similar to Carolina Rose except for the habitat in which it tends to grow and the fact that the Swamp Rose has thorns that are recurved, curved backwards on the stem. The thorns on Carolina Rose are typically straight.

Multiflora Rose is an introduced plant and has many small white flowers, not single blossoms such as the Carolina and Swamp Roses display. Multiflora Rose can quickly take over a meadow or field edge, crowding out native plants.

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