Geranium maculatum
Geranium maculatum, the wild geranium, spotted geranium, or wood geranium, is a perennial plant native to woodlands in eastern North America, from southern Manitoba and southwestern Quebec south to Alabama and Georgia and west to Oklahoma and South Dakota.
Names
It is known as spotted cranesbill or wild cranesbill in Europe, but the wood cranesbill is another plant, the related G. sylvaticum. Colloquial names are alum root, alum bloom and old maid's nightcap.Distribution
It grows in dry to moist woods and is normally abundant when found.Description
It is a perennial herbaceous plant growing to tall, producing upright, usually unbranched stems and flowers in spring to early summer. The leaves are palmately lobed with five or seven deeply cut lobes, broad, with a petiole up to long arising from the rootstock. They are deeply parted into three or five divisions, each of which is again cleft and toothed.The flowers are in diameter, with five rose-purple, pale or violet-purple petals and ten stamens. In the Northern Hemisphere, they appear from April to June. They are grouped in loose corymbs or umbels of two to five at the top of the flower stems.
The fruit capsule, which springs open when ripe, consists of five cells each containing one seed joined to a long beak-like column long produced from the center of the old flower.
The rhizome is long, and thick, with numerous branches. It is covered with scars, showing the remains of stems of previous years' growth. When dry it has a somewhat purplish color internally.