Category — Catalogue/book/website reviews

(the continued search for the identity of a small, inocuous weed)

Having failed to find my mystery weed at the California site, I went to another weed site, from the University of Illinois. This one works by the process of elimination, even more like using an automated key: in the window on the right is a long list of herbs. In the left window is a series of questions to answer. As you gradually check boxes on the left (leaf type, leaf shape, leaf edge, and so on),  the list on the right shrinks, eliminating the weed names your choice has ruled out. When you have it down to just a few weeds, you can click on them and go see their pictures and a little writeup.

I decided my little white-flowered shepherd’s-purse-like thing was NOT Virginia pepperweed; the edges of the leaves of my plant definitely have no teeth, the way pepperweed does.

Virginia Tech’s weed id site  simply has an alphabetical index, not too helpful if you have no idea what you’re looking for. They do have .pdfs on common weeds and how to deal with them, though.

But I really wanted to get a name for my weed.  I decided to go for the big guns.  The Weed Science Society of America (who knew?)  has pages on Science Policy, jobs related to weeds,  funding and grants, and other areas of weedy interest. They’ve  got a bookstore and a press room.  You can even follow their press releases on Twitter!

Unfortunately, they also use the list method, so you need to have some idea what you’re looking for before you can see a picture or specs. Sometimes this would work for me, but not for this weed .  They do have weed i.d. links, though: one to a DVD you can buy, another to some of their own weed i.d. materials for sale, and the third to the USDA plant database,  one of the most thorough in the nation. Unfortunately, while the USDA plant database will give you a special page on the plants in your state, it uses the list method, so it was a bust on this occasion.

I flicked back to the Weed Science Society page. There was a menu item that had piqued my interest, “The Intriguing World of Weeds”,  where you can find long, multifaceted articles about common weeds, written by Larry Mitich, who was the first weed extension specialist at North Dakota State U.  I intend to come back here, because these are really good articles. And I’ve read a lot of stuff on plants, so I’m not just talking through my hat.

Still, I had to find a name for my plant. I went to another famous ag school, to see what I could see. Rutgers, in New Jersey, gives you a weed gallery, sorted by scientific name, common name, or thumbnail images, so even not knowing the name, I could search there:

My plant does look a good deal like the bittercress there (Cardamine spp.), but the leaves of the bittercress are too big and the wrong shape - and there’s no basal rosette.  The photographs on this site are of noticeably better quality than on other university sites, where overexposure or unclear portraits are common. The ones I checked were by Dr. John Meade, weed scientist emeritus. He does good plant i.d. photos.

The Northeastern Weed Science Society  is a bonanza of weed identification links: the aquatic weed section sends you to about six sites; the terrestrial weed section has about twenty. What makes this much better than Google is that all these sites have been weeded out, so to speak: you know you’re going to good resources, maintained by people who know their stuff.

The weed i.d. sites I’ve already mentioned are on it, plus many more. I went to the one at Penn State,  since that was one I hadn’t tried, but it became clear that their ideas about weed resources were more geared to science: management and ecology of weeds, studies on herbicides. The ecology of weeds (an entire separate site) would interest me at other times, but I kept moving, in hopes of finding my weed.

I went to the U Mass website, but they use the list format. They do add plant families to the list, so that makes it more possible to find a plant that you kind of sort of have an idea about. Still, there are no pictures available until you click a name, which makes for tedious searching.

I couldn’t resist checking out Purdue’s “Common Weeds of No-Till Cropping Systems”, but the page was decommissioned, with a link to their regular Weed Science page. They do have an excellent series of slide shows, sorted by category. I picked  ”Simple Perennials”; I didn’t know whether my weed was annual or perennial but it sure has staying power.

I liked that the slides are manually operated, so you don’t have to go “Oh wait, was that it?” as the picture whizzes by. And the slides are good. Text above slides describes what you’re looking at: “Dandelion, mature plant.” “Dandelion taproot.”  I was amused to find multiflora rose as a weed.  The “Annual Broadleaves” slide show was more of a problem; the perennial list, coming in at 33 slides, wasn’t a bad browse, but I wasn’t ready to go through 99 slides of annuals. Still, there is a ton of information to be had on this site. Botanical slide sets, for instance, are listed by family, and there are trustworthy links to other sites.

So how did I finally identify my weed? The old-fashioned way. I went over and asked my gardener/botany fiend neighbor, who’d also done it the old-fashioned way. “It’s some kind of cress,” he said. “I’ve tried to key it out, but I can’t identify the species.”

That was supposed to be the end of the post. But Brent identified this weed as a native bittercress (Cardamine oligosperma) in the last post, providing the species that my neighbor hadn’t yet worked out.  The Latin species name means “few seeds”, which seems odd for a plant my neighbor says spreads itself plentifully (but it’s not hard to remove). If you google “Cardamine oligosperma image” you’ll get some good photos along with some lousy ones (one of the lousy ones, unfortunately, is from the USDA website).

The Calflora site describes the types of areas where Cardamine oligosperma is found, and that’s a fit, too. For those of you who live in California, and have a good guess on the name of the plant in question, this site has a county-by-county map that helps confirm where a particular plant grows.

These last sites have me convinced that Brent has the right i.d.; I’ll see if my neighbor agrees.

So I’ve gotten this weed identified using sort of a combination of the old (ask someone local who gardens or naturalizes a lot) and the new (search online). Check out Brent’s blog  “Breathing Treatment”  for more about native California plants, weather, and gardens.

I’d planned to make this post a paeon to more of the weeds I enjoy (I’ve already gone on at length about chickweed and miner’s lettuce).

But, as so often happens, the post decided to go in another direction.

I identified my first weed, henbit, pretty easily, as I do every year. I seem to have a block where the name of henbit is concerned, though I did somehow remember it’s a Lamium.

I looked it up where I usually do, an ancient pamphlet from an herbicide company, identifying common weeds.

Just to check (the pamphlet pictures weren’t all that good to start with, and a few decades on the shelf hasn’t helped) I went online and found not only henbit but another weed whose identity had been puzzling me. It turned out to be Geranium carolinianum, Carolina geranium.  Now I’d identified two of them, I toyed with the notion of just leaving the mystery weed out, and doing a post on henbit and Carolina geranium, plus a couple of others I know.

The U of Arkansas weed index is a very sensible grid, easy to use: thumbnail photo with common name, scientific name, weed type, and life cycle (whether it’s annual or perennial, and what its season is).  Since it’s not very long, it’s quickly searchable, and you can print a .pdf version if you want. It does have a lot of the most common weeds you’d find in a garden, a sort of improved version of my old herbicide pamphlet.

I’d found two of my nameless plants, but I was obsessed with the notion of identifying the little white-flowered weed.  I’d  vaguely thought it was shepherd’s purse. A close look at the shepherd’s purse photo here proved that it definitely wasn’t: the leaves were the wrong shape and size, both on the flowering stems, where they were thin and vaguely spade-shaped

and at the bottom rosettes, where they were rounded and no more than 1/4 inch (a little over half a centimeter) wide, as you can see in the picture at the top of this post. And the flower heads were tiny clusters, not the spikes of shepherd’s purse.

I was on a roll, now; I thought I’d see what other university weed identification sites had to offer. Since I live in northern California, I thought I’d check out the Davis weed i.d. site first. Weeds are usually imports that spread themselves generously - that’s why they’re weeds - so it’s not as vital to look for a university that’s in your area as it might be for, say, tree identification. Weeds are mostly associated with agriculture and gardens and other places where humans have set a heavy foot. A great many of the commonest weeds are Europeans, who, like their human counterparts, set foot on this country and decided to take it over where they could.

But I know that UC Davis has one of the best ag departments in the country, and it seemed a good bet that if there was a weed common in Northern California, they’d have it on their site, whether it was native or not.

I knew it was likely that my weed was an import, and I knew for a fact that imported weeds can do well in California. My horticulture teacher told of one of the more successful weed invasions. I had always assumed that the Himalayan blackberries you see all over northern California (not to mention large tracts of Washington) were a pestiferous native. (I never understood why they were called “Himalayan”, and I think it’s an insult to the Himalayas.) Himalayan blackberries are the huge thorny tentacley shrubs that take over entire fields and can cover dirt roads in a few years.  We have special methods of weed control just for them.

But, my horticulture teacher said, he’d found  a book published in the 1940s that discussed Californian blackberries, and the kind we call Himalayan, it said, were rarely-found imports. Just goes to show how far a weed can go in a few decades. Removing the triffid-like tangles of “Himalayan” blackberries was a business opportunity by the 1970s.

Anyway, I headed over to the University of California Davis site, to see what I could see.

The UC Davis website is a much more sophisticated setup than the Arkansas one. It asks questions on a little multiple-choice questionnaire to guide you to your plant, kind of like an automated key. Knowing some botanical terms, such as leaf arrangements and venation type, is useful, but there are also questions anyone can answer: what kind of lanscape you found it in, what color the flowers are, whether it has prickles or hair. They remind you that a few right answers are better than a lot of “I’m not sure” ones.

Then you get a selection of images that might match your plant. If it had worked better for me, I’d be more enthusiastic about it, because it’s much handier than just going through a list and hoping you’ll find the right thing.

But it didn’t work for me. I got Italian arum, which doesn’t look anything like my weed. (Can anybody out there identify it yet?)

Next post, the story continues: On the Trail of the Mystery Weed

As my geek complement to Daffodil Planter’s Daffodil Blogarama and the many other daffodil posts flashing yellow, pale pink, and white over the web, I’m offering a peek into the daffodil world of a hundred years ago.

Although maybe it’s not so geeky, since it’s mostly concentrated on sex. Daffodil sex, that is. Though a man of the cloth, the author of the “Daffodils” book in the British Present-Day Gardening series, Reverend Joseph Jacob,  has a passion for breeding. And, even more shockingly,  he thinks everyone should share it. “This fascinating pursuit, hobby, or business, to give it names which are appropriate to the different ends in view, is one which I advise every Daffodil cultivator to take up; whether it be for pleasure or with a view to business it is equally alluring and interesting.” (pg. 39) He talks of going from town to town in England, lecturing at daffodil societies, and how the members hung on his lips, asking questions about do-it-yourself breeding.

I wonder if the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will have any similar seminars? These days, we think of daffodil breeding as something only specialists can do, with special equipment and large fields and greenhouses. But, Jacobs says,  all we really need are labels and notebooks, plus little boxes for storing and carrying pollen (it’s viable for about two weeks, if you keep it dry and clean in a loosely covered box) and a camel’s hair brush, gently moistened in the mouth so the pollen will stick to it.

‘Minnow’, a miniature unavailable in Jacob’s time

That’s all the physical equipment that’s required. The rest of it lies in knowledge, and patience.

One of the bits of knowledge we need to try our hand at our own hybrids is knowing when the time is ripe for sex. “…the best time for cross-fertilisation is between 10 A.M and 4 P.M….that in cold and sunless weather the operations should be repeated more than once…that the pollen brushes must be kept very clean, and all the pollen of one variety carefully removed before the same brush is used for any other variety; that it is not found necessary in practice to cover the fertilised bloom in any way with glass or muslin; and that, the seed-bearer should be growing in a  good open position.” (pg. 44-45)

But the deeper knowledge that’s required, the one all those daffodil societies were swarming around Jacob hoping to get, is the knowledge of family background. Some daffodils are good pollinators, some are not.  Since most of the daffodils of a hundred years ago are lost or obscure, I’m going to save his complete lists for the very end of this post, in the hope that some of you have grown the ones I don’t know about, or will be able to point out sources for them.

From his list of “Potent Pollen-Parents” (I told you it was about sex), only  a few remain that are available today: all the poet varieties, W.P. Milner,  and King Alfred. (King Alfred, as I’ve explained before,   is an antique daffodil that’s actually hard to find. If you read the fine type, you will see that below most ‘King Alfred’ blurbs is “King Alfred type”, which basically means any yellow trumpet daffodil that looks more or less like King Alfred and is cheap in production. They may not have the same pollen potency as their predecessor.)

King Alfred is also on the list of “Good Seed-Bearers”, as are most of the poet varieties. Golden Spur, another good seeder, is available through Old House Gardens, as is Lily Langtry. (I’ve grown Golden Spur, a simple yellow trumpet that makes the modern ones look a bit as if they’re on steroids; I have yet to make the acquaintance of the divine Mrs. Langtry.)

Of the “Shy Seeders” I recognize only Maximus (also available at OHG) and Empress, a daffodil I have admired but never bought due to price (I save my most extravagant bulb purchases for tulips, it seems. I might as well admit my prejudice; I have favorite children in the garden).

Amateur breeders today may have a harder time finding this kind of information, as breeding has become something specialized and hard in our minds. It’s making me wonder if a little diligent research among breeders might be a good idea.

But research won’t give me the final attribute I need for breeding: patience. “The one great drawback that can be urged against [breeding] is the time that must necessarily elapse between the seed-sowing and the harvest. From four to six or seven years is a long time to wait for results, but, as the oft-repeated quotation from old Philip Miller (1733) says, ‘After the first five years are past, if there be seeds sown every year, there will be annually a succession of flowers to show themselves; so that there will be a continual expectation, which will take off the tediousness which, during the first five years, might be very troublesome to some persons…’ ” (pg. 39-40)

Is it any wonder that I love old garden books? Where in modern literature would we find someone urging us, urging anyone, to go out in the garden with a camel’s hair brush and start our own hybrids?  Even if it takes seven years. And why not follow these old urgings? Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but, as a look at the emerging spring around us will show, sex still goes on in the same old way.

‘Colleen Bawn’ - an antique now, but still in the future in Jacob’s day

Reverend Joseph Jacob’s Lists of Breeding Daffodils

(I don’t know what the ordering system for these lists is; clearly, not alphabetical. Maybe order of bloom time?)

List of Thirty Good Seed-Bearers:

Duke of Bedford

Lady Margaret Boscawen

Minnie Hume

King Alfred

Mrs. R. Sydenham

Madame de Graaff

Weardale Perfection

Firebrand

Judge Bird

W.B. Hartland

Oriflamme

Most of the Poet varieties

Emperor

Henry Irving

Golden Spur

Pallidus Praecox

P.R. Barr

Eyebright

Glory of Nordwijk

Bernardino

Acme

Golden Bell

Alert

Mrs. Walter Ware

Princess Mary

Mrs. Langtry

Albicans

Evangeline

Lord Muncaster

Decora

List of Shy Seeders

Empress

Horsfieldii

Glory of Leiden

Homespun

Maximus

Sir Watkin

Gloria Mundi

Flora Wilson

Crown Prince

Duchess of Westminster

Autocrat

Potent Pollen-Parents

King Alfred

Maximus

Eyebright

Emperor

Weardale Perfection

Circlet

Madame de Graaff

W.P. Milner

All the Poet varieties

Lulworth

Castile

Poetarum (for its colour)

I was researching for another article when I came across an amazing find.

Amazing to me, anyway. Some of you may have known about this for years. Googlebooks has a collection of old garden books which have been scanned in, so you can see the original layout, font, and often very beautiful illustrations.

(We often believe that color photography is the apex of illustration - and sometimes it is. But a skilled artist can show us more about the textures and colors and personality of a plant than a photographer, who must work at least partly in the realm of the literal.)

More importantly, for historial garden book addicts such as myself, you can read all of anything that no longer has a copyright.

For instance, you can check out Robert Hogg’s 1879  Florist and pomologist (which looks like either a bound magazine or an encyclopedia of sorts) and read how to have new potatoes at Christmas, primula culture, the preservative qualities of seawater, and a number of other things about the fruits and flowers that were popular in 1879. (In those days, a florist was a person who grew flowers, not a person who sold them.) In the case of potatoes, “pomology” is used poetically, since a potato is a tuberous rhizome. The rhizome, in turn, is a modified stem (the eyes on a potato are the same type of bud you would see on a branch of a tree).

Or you can move up a generation or so, and read The School Garden Book,  which has the most thorough, clear instructions on forcing bulbs I’ve found in many a day - and which encourages you to tell the story of your plant as you saw it grow. It’s long been my habit to read a children’s book if I want clear, non-jargony instruction. This one may be from 1911, but the writing is clear and easy to follow. I also like all the little science suggestions, such as cutting the bulb in half and drawing a picture of the proto-flower inside (someday it’s my aim to cannibalize a bulb to such purpose. So far I haven’t been able to make myself do it).

The section  for August includes an essay on “Useful Flower Jars” :

“In few things could the average American home be so greatly benefited by a little careful attention as in the choice of receptacles for displaying cut flowers,” it starts, and goes on to lay out some very simple, cheap arrangements very suited to modern gardeners who don’t want to spend a lot of money and time.

My old friend Peter Henderson  is back with his classic 1904 Handbook of plants and general horticulture (they didn’t necessarily capitalize every important word in a title, then; initial caps were more of an art). Since Henderson started writing in the mid 1800s, this would have been a summing-up of his considerable output and knowledge. Henderson was one of the first serious U.S. garden and farm writers, and he did phenomenal amounts of research. Liberty Hyde Bailey’s 1906 Cyclopedia of American horticulture is also available. Bailey wrote the first Hortus, whose later editions are still standard references, so the information in this compendium is bound to be thorough. Bailey, who started the Cornell School of Agriculture and wrote some of his classic works there, retired to spend his time campaigning for the environment, natural studies classes in schools, and to travel the world researching plants, becoming an expert in both carex and palms. He also kept writing books into his hardy old age.

Googlebooks also has garden books from other countries and in other languages. Even a cursory review shows that this is a meaty collection you can find a lot of good stuff in.

Online books aren’t substitutes for books on paper: I love the smell of old books, the indented letterpress print, the way they open out (the art of bookbinding was well understood in those days); I love the idea that I’m holding something some gardener held in 1841 or 1880 or 1904. But while it’s more informative, in many ways, to travel to a library where you can have access to historical books (for one thing, you learn a lot from the books next to the ones you think you want), not all of us can do that. Googlebooks opens the attic door to treasure chests of old garden lore. A great spot for a gardener to spend a winter day.

It’s time to plant seeds. For those of us in mild-winter climates fall is the best time to plant cool-weather annuals. For those of us in any climate, it can also be an ideal time to plant perennial seeds (they often have cooling or cooling/warming requirements which are naturally met by  overwinter germination. Why not have nature do the work instead of fiddling with stratification and the rest?). And it’s a good time to plant wildflower seeds (after all, when does nature do it?).

So I was already tuned into seed when I got my fall letter from the miso company I patronize*, and found an article by Christian Elwell about planting seeds in a way that’s designed to strengthen plant/human communion.

The article describes a Siberian healer (real or imagined), Anastasia, who says that one of the big problems in plant/human communication is that plants no longer know whom they are serving.

Think about it: we grow huge monocrops of plants, plants which are often untouched by human hands, and which get attention only from machines. Our culture thinks of plants sheerly in terms of production.

But every gardener knows that there is far more to plants than that. We know that plants satisfy our souls in some way we may not be able to describe but would be devastated without. Gardeners also tend to be more aware than other human beings that we need plants: for the air we breathe, for the food we eat, the places we live in, the clothes we wear, the medicines we take, and for that valuable soul-sustenance.

What we might not quite be aware of is that plants may also need us. And not just for our CO2.

Humans and plants have been working together for thousands of years. But in the last several decades, humans have been separating themselves from plants more and more. According to Anastasia, plants need the feedback of our being. They need their souls fed by us. When we withdraw our personalities and attention, plants suffer.

One way to heal this lack is to plant seeds imbued with our consciousness. Anastasia recommends a three-part method for doing this. The first step is putting the seeds to be planted under the tongue for nine minutes, to infuse them with the invisible but tangible messages of our bodies.

The second step is to put the seeds in our palms, and breathe on them. Breath has holy meaning in many cultures; in ours, the word “inspire” means to take in breath or spirit. And by the way, seeds breathe, too. Just very very slowly. But that’s how they manage to keep viable for years (sometimes centuries, or even millenia).

The final step to conscious seed-planting is to  stand barefoot on the ground where we will be planting the seeds, and hold them  to the sky.

If we are planting a large crop (Elwell plants rice), we can just do this with a few of the seeds; they will communicate the messages we’ve given them to the other seeds.

Sound whacky? Maybe. But to me, it sounds like some of the less formal rituals I like to do when I plant, and it sounds worth trying.

Gardening and wandering in the woods has led me to a clear understanding: plants are sentient beings. In fact, I’ll come out of the closet and admit that for me, everything is sentient: I’m an animist. Working on that assumption can completely change your life. In fact, working on that assumption might be just the change our fast-moving produce-produce-produce culture needs so badly.

So, even if you think treating seeds this way is crazy, why not try an experiment, if only to prove that it doesn’t work?  Plant some seeds without this attention and some with it. See if you notice a difference in the growing plants, the flowering, and the harvest.  Or yourself.

* If you haven’t tried it, South River miso is an entirely different experience than other misos.They make the miso in wooden tubs over wood fires, doing everything the traditional way. At first I wondered why their miso was so much more expensive than others. Then I tried it, and all was revealed: it was the difference between a bottle of table red and a bottle of fine vintage wine. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this: it’s unsolicited enthusiasm.)