Family Papaveraceae (Poppy Family).
These charming relatives of the Bleeding-Heart like a damp wooded hillside, more often a gentle slope than a steep incline. The flowers really do look like old-fashioned pairs of breeches hung upside-down to dry. “Pretty, but odd” is Gray’s description. These plants were growing in Bird Park in Mount Lebanon.
Gray describes the genus and the species:
DICÉNTRA Berah. Petals slightly cohering into a
heart-shaped or 2-spurred corolla, either deciduous or
withering-persistent. Stigma 2-crested and sometimes
2-horned. Filaments slightly united into two sets. Pod
10-20-seeded. Seeds crested. — Low stemless perennials
(as to our wild species) with ternately compound and
dissected leaves, and racemose nodding flowers.
Pedicels 2-bracted. (Name from dis, twice, and
kentron, a spur; —accidentally printed Diclytra in the
first instance, which by an erroneous conjecture was
changed afterwards into Dielytra.) Bikukulla Adans.
Bicuculla Millsp.
* Raceme simple, few-flowered.
D. Cucullària (L.) Bernh. (Dutchman’s
Breeches.) Scape and slender-petioled leaves from a
sort of granulate bulb; lobes of leaves linear; corolla
with 2 divergent spurs longer than the pedicel;
crest of the inner petals minute. (Bicuculla
Millsp.) — Rich woods, N. S. to L. Huron and
Minn., s. to N. C. and Mo. — A very delicate plant,
sending up in early spring, from the cluster of
grain-like tubers crowded together in the form of a
scaly bulb, the finely cut leaves and the slender
scape, bearing 4-10 pretty, but odd, white flowers
tipped with cream-color.