How are people in S. Ontario, Canada, or elsewhere these grow, telling if they have thalictroides or giganteum if they have not observed the flowers? Once fruits have appeared they, and leaves, are identical, are they not? Thanks.
I just checked Arthur Haines’ Flora Novae-Angliae (its keys are online at Go Botany) and yep: you can’t distinguish these two species without flowers. I suspect some people don’t know that giganteum exists, or they are just blindly picking whatever iNat offers first, or (possibly) they’ve observed that plant before when it was flowering. Someday, I’d like to tackle this issue as an identifier, but probably not this year.
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Thanks. I have found both but only one plant of thalictroides and several of giganteum, both in flower, so I wondered, where are all the other thalictroides other people are seeing, that I have not.
If you dig deeper on GoBotany you can see that mature C. thalictroides has a final leaf segment length of 30-80mm, while C. giganteum has a final leaf segment length of 50-100mm. There is some overlap here, but only from 50-80mm length. Although not listed in the dichotomous key, the leaves are likely not truly identical. I’m not that familiar with Caulophyllum though.
Thank you. That seems close enough to be very hard to tell.
Ah, thanks for the deep dive! And I agree with @cirsium: those ranges overlap quite a lot.
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