| Author | (Hooker) A. Gray | |
| Distribution | Known only from a specimen collected in Nags Head Woods on the Outer Banks of Dare County on August 1, 1955; a specimen sheet is visible in the SERNEC database, and is located at the LSU herbarium. The species has been recorded from four VA counties, three in the Coastal Plain and one of those three is bordering NC. Thus, it could occur somewhere else in northeastern NC.
This is essentially a species of the lower Mississippi River Valley, from southern IL and southeastern MO, south to AL and eastern TX. There are scattered records in VA, and this one form eastern NC. These VA and NC records might be thought of as possibly not native, but the locations and habitats seem to be far removed from man and seem to be natural.
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| Abundance | "Frequent in moist depression at Nags Head Woods" (specimen label). This was from 1955, and despite much field work at that preserve and elsewhere in the region, it has not been found again. The website editors have changed the SR (State Reported) rank assigned by the NCNHP to SH (State Historical), though it could be SX (Extirpated) just as easily. Also, the editors have proposed a State Status of Significantly Rare. At any rate, there does seem to now be tangible documentation in NC, as Weakley (2018) states "The report for NC is from a list for Nags Head Woods, Dare County; it is unpublished, apparently not documented by an herbarium specimen, and rejected unless documentation is found." Well, it appears that the specimen at LSU has recently surfaced on a website available to the public! | |
| Habitat | This is a wetland species, found in swamps, pools in forests, and other mostly shaded wet spots. | |
| Phenology | Blooms from June to September, and fruits in that same period. | |
| Identification | This is a very strange member of the loosestrife genera, as it is a slender plant that leans so much as to trail along the ground, even rooting at some nodes! It can reach 3 feet in length. It is often branched, and thus is a "busy-looking" herb. It has paired/opposite leaves, each one lanceolate to ovate, about 2-2.5 inches long and about 1/3 as wide, entire, and with short petioles. Some smaller leaves can even appear within some leaf axils. It has quite small flowers from many of the leaf axils, including those on branches, and these flowers are on slender pedicels often 1-inch long -- much longer than the 5-petalled yellow flower is across (which is barely 1/3-inch across). No one alive has ever seen this "very rare in the East" species in NC, but it should be very distinct, assuming it is found sprawling along the ground or lying in mud or in a shallow pool. The abundance of narrowly triangular leaves, many branches, and very small flowers on long stalks should render it easy to identify -- if it can ever be found again in the state. | |
| Taxonomic Comments | Weakley (2020) has split out Steironema from Lysimachia based on a 2018 paper using molecular research; and in so doing has gone back to "old" taxonomy. In Lysimachia there are no staminodes and the leaves are punctate with elongate markings (vs. staminodes present and punctae absent in Steironema). | |
| Other Common Name(s) | Trailing Yellow Loosestrife | |
| State Rank | SR [SH] | |
| Global Rank | G4G5 | |
| State Status | [SR-P] | |
| US Status | | |
| USACE-agcp | | |
| USACE-emp | | |
