Cleome ornithopodioides

Cleome ornithopodioides is an annual plant growing to a height of .3 m.[3]

Flowers possess both male and female reproductive organs.[3]

Illustration 1700

The first samples of bird spiderflower to arrive in Europe came from explorations of the area called Levant and were successfully cultivated by James Sherard in 1732.[4]

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort named the Claude Aubriet illustration of C. ornithopodioides Sinapistrum Orientale in the 1700 Institutiones rei herbariæ.[5] Being named before the 1753 Species plantarum disqualifies the name from being considered to be a synonym.[6]

When Carl Linnaeus first published this species with its current name in his 1753 Species plantarum[7] he referenced descriptions of Sinapistrum Ornithopodiisiliquis found in Johann Christian Buxbaum's herbarium Plantarum minus cognitarum centuria, that was published posthumously by Johann Georg Gmelin in 1728,[8] Johann Jacob Dillenius's 1732 Hortus Ethamensis.[9] a collection whose list was published in 1907 by George Claridge Druce[10] and also the description he wrote of Cleome ornithopodioides in his own Hortus Cliffortianus from 1737[11] and of Sinapestrum orientale triphyllum from his 1748 Hortus Upsaliensis.[12]

In 1754 when Philip Miller described the genus Sinapistrum in The Gardeners Dictionary, he described the species with English words "Three-leav'd Eastern Sinapistrum, with Birds-foot-pods" and called it by the Latin name Sinapistrum Oriental triphyllum as it had been assigned by Tournefort who had described it before him.[13]

Native to the area of the eastern Mediterranean,[4] C. ornithopodioides was described in 1865 as living in the wild along with Trifolium stellatum in a fertile valley at the foot of Mount Serbal.[14]

Philip Miller wrote of the ease of cultivation of C. ornithopodioides in his 1754 The Gardeners Dictionary: "...will thrive in open Air; so the Seeds of this may be sown on a Bed of light Earth in April (late Spring), where the Plants are to remain; and will require no other Culture, but to keep them clear from Weeds: in June (early Summer) they will flower, and the Seeds will ripen in August (late Summer); and the Plants will soon after perish."[15]

• Media related to Cleome ornithopodioides at Wikimedia Commons
• Porter, Noah, ed. (1913). Webster's Dictionary. Springfield, Massachusetts: C. & G. Merriam Co. Missing or empty |title= (help)