Eyebright

Today’s fall flowering plant proves that you don’t need to be big to be showy: meet the small and beautiful Common Eyebright (Euphrasia nemorosa).

Common Eyebright is native to Europe but was first recorded in Canada in 1792, and discovered in the US about 50 years later. Although this plant does have traditional medicinal uses, Eyebright’s arrival to this continent is thought to have been accidental rather than intentional.

Today, Common Eyebright is found in grassy areas, woodland edges, and along trails and roadsides across PEI. In unmanaged areas it can grow to be about 15 centimetres (six inches) tall, but among mowed lawns, as shown here, it will be much smaller. Even so, it’s easy to spot the lovely purple, white, and yellow flowers winking up at you.

These aren’t the easiest places to make a living, but Eyebright has an adaptation to help it succeed: it’s a hemiparasite. Most parasitic plants forego green chlorophyll altogether and get all their nutrition from their host; examples include Swamp Dodder, Pinesap, and Ghost Pipe, three species that I’ve posted about before. Hemiparasites like Eyebright make the best of both worlds, not only making food from sunlight but also tapping into the roots of nearby plants to steal water and nutrients.

Common Eyebright prefers to parasitize grasses and, while it doesn’t usually kill them, can reduce their growth. In this way, Eyebright supports diversity in its native range by preventing uniform mats of grass from forming, and allowing native wildflowers and other plants to move in. Here, it does the same sort of thing, although the species moving into these disturbed habitats are mostly non-native.

As its name implies, Eyebright has a long history of use for relieving eye irritation, styes, and conjunctivitis (aka pink eye), and Eyebright drops are sold commercially in the natural remedy sections of many pharmacies. More recently, research has explored Eyebright’s anti-oxidant and potential neuroprotective properties, and this plant may have a future role in preventing or treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Eyebright is a small but mighty member of PEI Untamed!