Dressed in a khaki field vest — the kind you might see on a fisherman or outdoor photographer — jeans and knee-high rubber boots, Doreen McVeigh ’09 pulls a leaf from a leggy plant growing at the edge of Sweet Briar College’s Lower Lake.

Commonly known as “meadow rue” or “king of the meadow,” its tiny flowers look like pale yellow sea anemones perched atop a thin, Kelly-green stem; its oblong leaves are grouped in small clusters.

Meadow rue grows naturally at Sweet Briar College, making it a fitting research subject.Careful not to disturb a nearby yellowjacket nest, McVeigh and biology assistant Gin Wilson ’08 bag the delicate specimen, which will be examined later at Guion Science Center.

McVeigh is studying the plant as part of Sweet Briar’s Summer Honors Research Program. She will present the results of her research to her faculty sponsor — assistant professor of biology Janet Steven — and other members of the Sweet Briar community on July 5.

For the past several weeks, she and the other eight students involved in the program have been hard at work conducting research on subjects ranging from mystery cults and chemical compounds to identical twins and murderous Germanic barbarians.

For her project, McVeigh, a biology major from Deer Park, Ill., has focused on the cryptic dioecy of meadow rue.

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, dioecious is defined as “having male reproductive organs in one individual and female in another” and “having staminate and pistillate flowers borne on different individuals.”

McVeigh studies a specimen near the dam at Sweet Briar's Lower Lake.In the case of meadow rue, females have all the male parts but they just don’t work. “What makes its females cryptic is the presence of sterile male parts,” McVeigh said. “What we want to do is understand the significance of cryptic dioecy and try to understand how it fits into evolutionary biology.”

Found particularly in wet or swampy areas, meadow rue is native to Sweet Briar, which makes it a fitting research subject. “It’s been really nice to have a natural population to study right here on campus,” Steven said.

“For most biological fieldwork, the places where the interesting plants grow in natural populations are far separated from advanced laboratory facilities, but here we can be out in the morning measuring plants and in the lab in the afternoon analyzing the leaves and flowers we collected.”

Despite its proximity to civilization, however, studying the king of the meadow has not lacked adventure. “I’ve slipped off a bridge and into the stream while hiking, a snake nearly fell on our heads, and we’ve been covered with more ticks than I can count,” McVeigh said.

“During our early explorations of the campus, we tried taking a shortcut back to Guion, and instead spent over an hour trudging through fields with grass above our heads with no clear idea of where we were going until stumbling upon the observatory.”

In her pursuit of science, McVeigh has seen her fair share of creepy crawlies and muck, but she’s taken it all in stride. “Gin and I have a rule that if a spider is somewhere on the other person you say, ‘Don’t move’ and once they stop the meter stick is used to brush the spider off,” she said.

“That became very useful when I had a spider that would fit comfortably in your palm on my back! We’ve experienced everything from slipping down the hills multiple times after rainstorms to looking like mud people during soil collection.”

Giant arachnids and other hazards notwithstanding, by mid-June McVeigh, Wilson and Steven had found approximately 150 specimens of meadow rue on the Sweet Briar campus.

Their locations were marked with hot-pink surveyor’s flags and samples were taken of leaves and flowers. Notes also were made about plant height, sex, number of flowers and soil and light conditions.

Once in the lab, male and female parts — stamens and carpels, respectively — were counted and the leaflets scanned, dried and weighed. A scanning election microscope also was used to examine the male and female pollen.

It’s been tedious work, but McVeigh has enjoyed it.

“The project has been such a great experience and I have such a wonderful time working each day,” she said. “While counting is not the most exciting part of research, the results certainly make up for it.

“Since Sweet Briar’s population has not been studied we are laying the groundwork for future studies as well as contributing to the understanding of cryptic dioecy.”

McVeigh’s effort and enthusiasm have not gone unnoticed. “Like any first-time researcher, Doreen has had to figure out what research questions are interesting and how to develop meaningful hypotheses, but she has excelled at attacking the primary literature and reading up on plants and microevolution,” Steven said.

“She and Gin have also been very industrious and independent during data collection, which is resulting in a substantial dataset for analysis.”

Like McVeigh, Steven — who has studied similar plants in North Carolina — also envisions a more in-depth study of Sweet Briar’s meadow rue. What kind of research, however, will depend on McVeigh’s initial findings.

“If the males and females are different from each other, I’d like to set up a research garden and give them a more controlled environment to determine the effect of the environment on shaping the differences,” Steven said.

“If the males and females are similar, I’d like to look at other populations in the area to see if the pattern holds elsewhere. I’ve also got a student interested in determining how this species … is related to others in the genus. She’ll be using the DNA analyzer to sequence a gene from it, then she’ll compare the gene with genes from other species.”

– By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer