Category — Wild plants

In my area, columbines are a late spring/early summer flower. But in the high mountains - especially with the late, cold spring we had - they’re blooming about now.

It’s hard not to love the gracefulness of columbines. They’re elegant en masse, as the picture at the top shows, dangling from arched stems, with their pretty almost clover-like foliage hidden by other groundcovers. And I love their individual shapes, which you can see even in the bud.

Columbines are another instance where I find the wild flower much more graceful than many of the garden types. Though I enjoy the larger, bolder McKana hybrids, and some of the others, I find many of the garden varieties distressing.

The trend to make every columbine double, for instance, like a bad re-enactment of a Victorian bonnet, stuffed with frill upon rolled frill until the shape is just a mass of writhing loops.

Or, even worse, the spurless kind - what, pray tell, is the point of a columbine without the graceful spurs?

That’s certainly what some bees must think, because sometimes they bite through the bulb at the tip of the spurs, to steal the nectar. Otherwise, columbines have to be pollinated by very large bumble bees or hummingbirds - nothing else can reach down there. So it is clear their blooming schedule has evolved to accommodate hummingbird migration. How did that happen? It’s only one of the mysteries of life.

I found this red-and-yellow columbine in a boggy spot, a little pocket with corn lilies, sedges, and other moisture-loving plants. The soil was a moosh of crushed granite and silt, and it had an eastern exposure. As you can see, they were thriving there, so if you want to plant them, you can take tips for the garden.

I’ve also seen these columbines in drier places - the wild western columbine is supposed to be a little more drought-tolerant than its twinlike eastern cousin,  Aquilegia canadensis. But I’ve noticed that, when Aquilegia formosa grows in drier areas, it takes advantage of seasonal wetness, then dies back until another year.

We have other wild columbines in California, such as the very-long-spurred, fragrant Aquilegia chrysantha, long on my List of Desired Plants. If you’re wondering why it’s not already in my garden, well, that’s because my List of Desired Plants has hundreds of names on it, and would require winning the lottery to fulfill.

The Latin name “aquilegia” means “eagle”, referring to the shape of the flower (you can especially see it in the forming bud). The namers of this flower appear to agree with me that their spurs are their most distinctive and telling point. (So to speak.) And the species name, I think, makes an even better case for preserving the spurs: “formosa” means “beautiful”.

If you have a boggy spot (or even a container with no holes), you might want to invite some beautiful eagles  into your garden. Or just admire them in their native habitat.

I love the rhythm of tall grasses, bending in the meadow.

Gardeners could take a lot of tips from the way nature has arranged this meadow.  There’s not a clunky note in there, unless you count the power lines.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I can’t identify this flower, which I spent so much time photographing. So I’m going to quickly move to emphasizing what a beautiful job this natural planting does, of providing interest close up

at a short distance

and in the broad sweep.

Pink and pink-purple colors are repeated in this late-summer landscape. Perennial sweet pea*, Lathyrus latifolius,  glows against the green and gold of the grasses. It grows in my area, too. But here in the higher altitudes, it takes on a delicate character absent where I live. It probably dies back in the snow, and doesn’t have the chance to become the tangle of lianas that wild sweet peas become in the foothills. (I once saw a puppy play tug-of-war with the lathyrus in our area: the lathyrus won.**)

The same situation applies to this Sierra thistle, Cirsium californicum, which provides a nice feeding place for bees but doesn’t seem to be taking over the meadow, the way thistles in my own area would.

These fetching little vetches, lower than my ankle,  are making a tiny landscape of their own, interwtined with the grasses. At least I think they’re vetches; I haven’t been able to properly identify them.  (It might be meadow hosackia, Lotus torreyi,  but the typical coloring of meadow hosackia is lighter.) In this plant, the typical pea-family flowers start yellow, then deepen into  tinges of red as they age.

Wetland meadows are probably not the first thing you think about when you hear “high Sierras”. And there’s a reason for that: most of the Sierras are seasonally dry; the vegetation runs from chapparal to sagebrush to red fir communities - and when you get to the timberline, the vegetation runs to rock and very small plants.

Most of the Sierra wetlands I’ve seen have been little pockets, tucked in among the dry clay and granite landscapes that are our usual summer fair. I’ve seen little fens on the side of a long, dusty road;  tiny oases by the side of a lake; and this more unusual wetland meadow, where, as you can see, dry sagebrushy land is not far off.

There’s an important lesson in this for gardeners as well as naturalists: take advantage of your microclimates and - I just made this up - microtopography. Gardeners can get ideas from landscapes like these. If you have a wet spot in your garden, what about making your own little pocket meadow, using wild plants from your own area?

*  Perennial sweet peas (or at least L. latifolia) aren’t actually sweet; they don’t have fragrance.

**Granted, it was a very small puppy. But still.

Last June, all my blog entries were about water-saving gardening. I’m going to carry on the tradition (if repeating something once can be called a tradition) and dedicate my June posts this year to garden practices that save water. To me, one of the most obvious ways of saving water is using plants who already know how to survive on the free water you’re already getting - your own beautiful natives.

 I have a special fondness for this common wildflower, which I’ve know for many years. It’s the kind of feeling that prompted the Pilgrims to slip in a few flowers amongst their strictly utilitarian vegetable and herb seeds. They carried the comfort of their common dooryard and meadow flowers to this unknown land, flowers like heartsease (Viola tricolor) and dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). These weren’t the big glamorous garden flowers of today; they were homely ambassadors of modest beauty: the field and hedge flowers of their native landscapes. These personal loves spoke through even all that Puritan guilt and utilitarian duty.

That’s the way I feel about buttercups: they’re not conspicuous, or glamorous, or productive in any obvious way, but I love them. And, I have to say, I purely detest the large swollen ranunculus relatives in the bulb catalogues, swamped in their multiple folds.

For the first time in many years (I spend less time than I should lying in fields of buttercups these days) I took a close look at buttercups, just to see what I could see. And one thing I discovered made me realize how they might have been persuaded to become the bloated patriarchs of the catalogues. For one thing, color. Wild ranunculus often sports a gleaming white petal or two, which hints that it might be amenable to changing its color, if bred for it.

The second thing is petals. The buttercups in my neighborhood (Ranunculus occidentalis) usually have five sepals, and mostly have five petals - but there are a lot of exceptions.

It doesn’t take much looking to find a buttercup with more petals than five. There’s the occasional six-petal flower. There are the ones that splay out multiple petals (the highest count I got when I went out photographing was nine, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others with more). And there are the ones that stack them up in two layers, which looks to me like a prototype (if you have an evil-genius mind) to those big fold-on-fold-on-fold ranunculus in the catalogues.

When it comes to a discussion of buttercups, there’s an important issue that can’t be avoided: do you like butter? I have no idea where the custom of holding buttercups under people’s chins, to see the yellow reflection, came from. It’s one of those bits of myth that gets passed from child to child (for how long? “Ring around the rosy” comes from the Black Plague), but is seldom noticed by adults.

Maybe it’s an old health question: in winter, people didn’t get much in the way of fats, once the cows or goats went dry and the fall butchering was eaten. Maybe it was a way of checking to see if a person’s skin had enough oil to be healthy. I realize this is far-fetched, and I invite you to add your own theories, far-fetched or close at hand.

Of course I have to admit, I didn’t learn my butter-liking techniques from Ranunculus occidentalis (occidentalis means “west” in Latin). Though I am a native California, my parents transplanted me to New Jersey at a tender age. So the buttercup I learned to put under people’s chins, sometime early in elementary school, was Ranunculus abortivus L., the littleleaf buttercup native to New Jesey.

There is more than one kind of native buttercup, even in California. The white water buttercup (Ranunculus aquatilis) grows in ponds or small streams, as the name implies. Ranunculus californicus has some of the same range as R. occidentalis, but R. californicus has  9 to 16 petals as a standard, not a variation, and grows in moist places.

Whatever their type, wild buttercups can be replanted for years of pleasure. The easiest way to seed them, of course, is to leave them uncut until the seedpods mature and they seed themselves. You can also gather ripe seed from elsewhere, and scatter it nearby, acting as a part of nature (which is, after all, what we properly are).  Of course you’ll want to be sure you’re harvesting only a small portion of seed from a good stand - you want the wild plants to flourish in their own chosen spot, as well as near you.

Where to plant them when you get the seeds home? My buttercups prefer moist water-meadows, but they will grow - for a briefer time - on the winter-rain-soaked dry upland meadows.

At least that’s true for Ranunculus occidentalis. Prairie buttercups (Ranunculus rhomboideus) like dry, well-drained soil.  Other US species don’t seem to care if it’s moist or dry.

And that’s not the end of the likes and dislikes of various kinds of buttercups. In my search for buttercup identity, I came up with scads (a specialized botanical term) of species from all over the world; they seem to especially love very far north Eurasian lands like Finland and Russia. It’s likely that, if you live in a temperate region, there’s a wild buttercup near you, just suited to your climate and rainfall.

So it seems I’ve started this post trying to tell of  a personal love, and wound up in global mystery. Love is like that. What are the homely plants that play a large part in your own inner landscape?

If you’re interested in more on natives, I’ve written up a lot of my own Northern California ones  (just select the Wild Plants). Or try Lost in the Landscape for witty, informative, and beautifully-photographed posts on Southern California natives. For California natives in general, Las Pilitas will fill you in on a plethora of varieties, uses, and habitats - plus they sell the plants in question. And there’s always the California Native Plant Society.

Those of you in Texas might enjoy Conscious Gardening, which has a lot on natives and other ways to save water in the garden. If any readers have suggestions for other reliable native plant sites outside of California, I’d really like to know. Some of the New Jersey wildlings of my youth are also dear to me, and I’d love to know to get a refresher on what their natural environments are.

(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