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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:
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Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Melanthium

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1 Leaf blades (the larger, basal) linear or narrowly oblanceolate, 30-85 cm long, 1-7 cm wide, lacking an obvious petiole; tepals white to cream, clawed; tepal blade 1-1.5× as long as wide.
  2 Leaves narrowly oblanceolate, with margins widening from base to a point well beyond the midpoint of the leaf’s length; tepal margins strongly crisped-undulate; tepal nectary glands whitish to pale green when fresh, blending in (when fresh) with the nonglandular portion of the tepal blade; tepal claw ca. ½ as long as the tepal blade; [of mesic to dry forests]
  2 Leaves (the larger, basal) linear, with margins parallel for most of the leaf’s length; tepal margins entire and planar or nearly so; tepal nectary glands yellow, obviously contrasting (when fresh) from the nonglandular portion of the tepal blade; tepal claw < 1/3 as long as the tepal blade; [of seepy or saturated wetlands]
1 Leaf blades (the larger, basal) narrowly to broadly elliptic, 17-50 cm long, 3-14 cm wide, with an obvious petiolar base 1-10 cm long; tepals green to maroon or purple, cuneate (not clawed); tepal blade 2-4× as long as wide.
    3 Tepals 4-7 mm long, pale to olive green; ovaries glabrous; leaves 4.5-14 cm wide; [Appalachian, from c. KY, c. TN, and n. AL eastwards and northwards]
    3 Tepals 6-9 mm long, dark maroon (rarely green); ovaries densely pubescent; leaves 3-10 cm wide; [mainly midwestern, from w. OH, c. KY, e. TN, sw. NC, w. SC, c. GA, and Panhandle FL westwards]