A Case of Mistaken Identity

Every spring, we like to add Spider Flower (Cleome hassleriana) to the gardens and Flight Encounter. Spider Flower, also commonly called Cleome from its botanical name, is a host plant for butterfly caterpillars in the White (Pieridae) family, and we use it along with collards, mustards, and cabbage to feed the Great Southern Whites and Checkered Whites we raise during the spring months.

The flowers themselves give cleome its common name, as you can see when you look at them up close. It grows long seed pods after the flowers have withered and died, and some varieties will readily re-seed. It grows to about three feet, and has a tendency to get fairly long and leggy by the end of the growing season. It doesn’t particularly like Florida’s hot and humid summers, so it’s best grown as an annual in the late winter and spring.

It’s not a particularly friendly plant, as it has sticky foliage and thorns along the stems. But the most troublesome aspect of this plant (at least at a family-friendly science museum) might be the fact that the compound leaves, made of up five or seven pointed leaflets, look an awful lot like marijuana. So much so, in fact, that we have to be very careful to label the plant meticulously throughout the gardens, and still are frequently questioned about it by concerned guests. Even more amusingly, we occasionally have cleome plants stolen from where they’ve been planted… undoubtedly by some folks who didn’t take the time to read the signs. (We always have to assume they’re very disappointed later on.)

Cleome is native to South America. The botanical name cleome means “mustard-like plant”, and it is indeed a part of that family, Brassicaceae. The Hassleriana portion of the name refers to Emil Hassler, a Swiss botanist who spent much time cataloging the plants of Paraguay in the 20th century. Cleome has been cultivated for garden use to provide fuller, more floriferous plants. The cleome in our gardens is from the “Sparkler” series, and we have them in white, dark pink, and light pink. Find them in the Flight Encounter and along the wall in front of the exhibit.