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Wild Plant School notes: Old Man of the Mountain by Brenda Porter Imagine sharing your family with 25,000 others, like Old Man of the Mountain does. This plant is a member of one of the largest families in the world, the aster family, known as Asteraceae. Highly evolved, the asters have adaptations that insure successful reproduction and proliferation throughout the world. Old Man of the Mountain, Rydbergia grandifolia, is a classic aster. Well known to alpine hikers, this plant takes several years to bloom. First storing nutrients in its roots, protected from the winds that may exceed one hundred miles per hour and extreme temperatures above timberline, the plant lives underground. When conditions are right, the flower head blooms in a composite of hundreds of small flowers—yellow ray flowers like the rays surrounding the sun and tiny disk flowers in the center. Look closely to see the reproductive parts in the hundreds of individual tiny flowers. I remember the names of the reproductive parts by a simple mnemonic, “Stay back men, that lady has a gun.” Because the male reproductive parts are collectively called stamen (stay men); they produce pollen which, as Angela Overy states in her wonderful book, Sex in the Garden, is the plant equivalent of sperm. A collective term for the female parts is pistil (i.e. gun). The pistil contains the ovary, stigma, and style, which accepts pollen and matures into the fertilized seed. Every flower’s goal is to get fertilized or pollinated—for the male pollen to get to the female ovary inside of the pistil. Every plant species has evolved to get help from the environment for reproduction. Different plants use the wind, insects, or birds to help them get pollen from one stamen to the next pistil. Old Man of the Mountain, like others in the aster family, is well adapted for pollination. The composite flower head acts like an airport landing pad: It is spacious, well-marked by the bright yellow ray flowers, and designed for easy take-off and landing, so that just about any flying or walking insect can come and go safely. Heliotropism is the plant’s ability to turn toward the sun. Old Man of the Mountain’s flower head faces east in order to get the most sunlight and to protect visiting pollinators from the extreme alpine winds that often exceed hurricane force. Long, silky hairs on the stem and leaves give the plant its common name, like an old man’s beard. While humans use sunscreen and special fabrics to help us survive our short visits above timberline, this hairy adaptation protects the plant from harsh radiation, temperatures, and wind throughout its life above 11,000 feet. Once the flower is pollinated and the seeds mature, asters use the wind to help them travel. At the base of every tiny flower there are bristles that catch the wind. These are similar to the dandelion “puffs’ so commonly seen. Like a parasail, the bristly pappus carries the seeds off to new horizons. After it has bloomed, Old Man of the Mountain sends its seeds onward with the wind and quietly shrivels up, symbolic of life and death in the alpine.