Mystery Plant: Plant's flowers shaped like little fancy trays

Sometimes you go to one of those fancy indoor or outdoor settings, maybe a big wedding reception under a tent. There’ll be a couple of tables with a nice white tablecloth and plenty of goodies piled up on top, and a scrub-faced little boy whose job is to shoo away any flies. I’m thinking of the kind of get-together where they are not just serving Vienna sausages on paper plates (although there might be some of those little “barbecue weenies” served with a toothpick) or Cheetos. (And I am a big fan of all of these items.)

Try a blue cheese gougère. And what about those lovely prawn cocktail cups? It wouldn’t be a fancy party without some mouth-watering trout roulades, I’m telling you. You’ll need to carefully use the silver server to load these things onto your little plate: Be careful. And of course, you need to dish these things off the surface of a beautiful shiny, silver plate.

This shiny, silver plate is sometimes called a “salver,” and it is sometimes equipped with a pedestal at the base, elevating the plate above all the carnations and ferns so you can easily get to all the goodies. The word “salver” is, essentially, a fancy word for what most people would call a tray: the word comes to us ultimately from Latin. You might be wondering why on earth this Mystery Plant column is involved with the meaning of the word “salver,” so here it is:

The flowers of this plant are “salverform” — that’s the term that botanists like to use for it. More specifically, it is the corolla of the flower that is salverform, and it consists of a long, hollow tube, made up of the five fused petals, and a flattened (more or less) upper part formed by the lobes of the petals. The corolla tube is sort of a pedestal and the flaring lobes up top are plate-shaped. Like a salver.

Our Mystery Plant is in the morning glory family. You will recall that most morning glories, especially the cultivated kind, usually have a more funnel-shaped corolla tube and thus not salverform. There must be nearly 2,000 species in this family, and as native plants, they are distributed pretty much all over the world in temperate and tropical regions. Many of these species are viny, either climbing or crawling (sometimes both): the scientific name for this family is “Convolvulaceae,” which comes from Latin meaning “to twine” or “bind.”

Our Mystery morning glory is native to eastern North America, although there is some argument about this. It is found along railroad tracks and roadsides from New York to the Midwest and down to Texas. The leaves are heart-shaped, and those corollas offer an array of colors: very often bright red, but sometimes orangish or even salmon-colored. The ovary of each flower will form a small, papery capsule containing several seeds. The plants can form a tangle of vines and so can be a bit annoying in great numbers. But butterflies love them and the vines might be covering up an old trash pile.

(Answer: “Scarlet creeper,” Ipomoea coccinea)