_Smilax herbacea_
_Flowers_--Carrion-scented, yellowish-green, 15 to 80 small, 6-parted
ones clustered in an umbel on a long peduncle. _Stem:_ Smooth, unarmed,
climbing with the help of tendril-like appendages from the base of
leafstalks. _Leaves:_ Egg-shaped, heart-shaped, or rounded, pointed
tipped, parallel-nerved, petioled. _Fruit:_ Bluish-black berries.
_Preferred Habitat_--Moist soil, thickets, woods, roadside fences.
_Flowering Season_--April-June.
_Distribution_--Northern Canada to the Gulf states, westward to
Nebraska.
“It would be safe to say,” says John Burroughs, “that there is a species
of smilax with an unsavory name, that the bee does not visit,
_herbacea_. The production of this plant is a curious freak of
nature.... It would be a cruel joke to offer it to any person not
acquainted with it, to smell. It is like the vent of a charnel-house.”
(Thoreau compared its odor to that of a dead rat in a wall!) “It is
first cousin to the trilliums, among the prettiest of our native wild
flowers,” continues Burroughs, “and the same bad blood crops out in the
Purple Trillium or Birth-root.”
Strange that so close an observer as Burroughs or Thoreau should not
have credited the carrion-flower with being something more intelligent
than a mere repellent freak! Like the Purple Trillium, it has
deliberately adapted itself to please its benefactors, the little green
flesh-flies so commonly seen about untidy butcher shops in summer.