Q.: How do you get down from an elephant?
A.: You don’t get down from an elephant. You get down from a goose. People still like vests and comforters filled with down, although feather-filled pillows don’t seem to be as common as they used to be. Seems like pillows are most often filled these days with something artificial. Something soft and hypo-allergenic, that kind of thing. Whatever works for that long winter’s nap.

“Down” is, of course, the inner layer of feathers on a bird, the layer that is particularly useful for warmth and insulation. The word, though, has been used variously for anything that is soft and fluffy, and likely to fly around quickly in the air. (Like miniature reindeer.)

And now to the fluffy things in the photograph. You’ll find these associated with various members of the sunflower family, of course. The soft, parachute-like structure is what we call a “pappus,” and it is only found in the plant kingdom within the sunflower family members. A pappus, in general, is a modified sort of calyx, seated at the top of the ovary in each individual flower. Depending on the species involved, the pappus comes in a very wide variety of forms, and can be very important for dispersing the ripened ovary (or achene), which contains a single seed. In this plant’s case, the pappus is modified as a nearly perfect botanical parachute, allowing effective dispersal through the air. What’s important to remember here is that the ripened achene is a fruit, not just a seed. Some confusion arises over a similar system involving the milkweeds, in which the elongated fruit splits open and releases lots of little seeds, each seed equipped with a silky parachute. In the milkweed case, the silky parachute is made up of special hairs on the seed wall. In the sunflower family, though, it is the one-seeded fruits themselves that are aerodynamically equipped -- that is, with a pappus -- and which do the dispersing. The function of the milkweed’s seed hairs and the pappus in the sunflower family are very similar, but their origins are quite different.

Our Mystery Plant grows commonly in a variety of habitats from Maine to Texas, and is particularly common along the coastal plain. Residents of the eastern United States will know it as a biennial, in that it spends its first year as a rosette of very prickly leaves, then sending up a tall flowering stalk, to almost 4 feet high, in the second year. Most commonly, the plants feature wine-red flowers in their massive heads. Otherwise, yellow-flowered heads may be observed, and sometimes the two color forms are intermixed within a single population. Once the summer arrives, the colorful heads begin to produce their achenes, and in this case, the pappus occurs as a snowy mass of silky, plume-like bristles. Birders will know this species and its relatives as a popular food source for goldfinches.

Of course, during the winter holidays, you won’t see this species growing outside, but it will be reappearing in the spring. You also won’t see its downy parachutes: they blew away in the breeze a long time ago. (Photo by Linda Lee.)

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John Nelson is the curator of the Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, in the department of biological sciences. As a public service, the herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, visit www.herbarium.org or call 803-777-8196.