Prairie Smoke (Geum triflorum)

I got to be a trainer for the Native Plant Master course on the Grand Mesa! One of the plants that I talked about is Prairie Smoke (or Old Man’s Whiskers, but I prefer to think about Prairie Smoke and not Old Man’s Whiskers…). The scientific name is Geum triflorum. Geum derives from Greek, meaning tasty, and triflorum means 3 flowers – you can see in the photo the flowers come in threes. In the second photo, you can see what is meant by the smoke part of the common name.

The coolest thing about the plant is that it has what is called buzz pollination. The pollen is locked in tubes which have only small pores for it to come out of. A pollinator that can do buzz pollination, such as a bumble bee, grasps the anther tubes and leans against them. She stops her wings and vibrates her entire body against the tubes. This vibration shakes the pollen out of the tube, covering the body of the bumble bee. The bee then grooms herself, putting the pollen into her pollen baskets on her back legs. However, she is moving around and from plant to plant and so also pollinates plants in the meantime. Only about 6-8% of plants require this specialized buzz pollination. But 60% of bees can perform buzz pollination – bumble bees, carpenter bees, and some solitary bees, but honey bees cannot.