Two Prefacing Notes & Identifying Diagrams:
1-- I am side-stepping debate as to the nature of the weed until the end ... keeping the question in mystery akin to the etymology of “weed”: while by way of the Proto-Germanic *weud-, its origins are unknown. So, for now: despite any variability in what you or I may identify by it, I say “weed,” & you -know- what I mean ... we all know well the offenders, know them by their vehement assaults to garden beds, our lovingly toiled over soils that suffer so due those incessant, pernicious flora invaders. 2-- Do mind that many of the curative & palliative insights here come from late antique through medieval philosophical & folk or literary sources, readings undertaken for intellectual interest & philosophical insight, NOT for any medical or gustative advisement ... i.e., do NOT try these without your own further, contemporary, & most rigorous research. |
Contents:
1) Plantain (Plantago major) 2) Creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea) 3) Smilax (Smilax rotundifolia or S. bona-nox) 4) Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) 5) Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) 6) Bush / Amur Honeysuckle (Lonicera Maackii) 7) Privet (Ligustrum sinense) 8) Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) 9) Wintercreeper (Euonymous fortunei) 10) Ivy (Hedera helix) 11) Wild Strawberry (Fragaria virginiana and Duchesnea indica) 12) Violets (Viola spp.) 13) Speedwell (Veronica officinalis or V. americana) 14) Dock (Rumex spp.) 15) Buttercups (Ranunculaceae) 16) Crownvetch (Securigera varia) 17) Spurge (Euphorbia humistrata or E. maculata) 18) Bedstraw / Cleavers (Galium aparine) 19) Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) 20) Virginia Threeseed Mercury (Acalypha virginica) 21) Pennsylvania Smartweed (Polygonum pensylvanicum) 22) Pigweed (Amaranthus palmeri) 23) Virginia Buttonweed (Diodia virginiana) 24) Oxalis (Oxalis stricta) 25) Creeping Cucumber (Melothria pendula) 26) Whitestar / Small White Morning Glory (Ipomoea lacunose) 27) Bindweed (Convolvus arvensis) 28) Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans or T. rydbergii) 29) Fleabane (Erigeron annuus or E. strigosus) |
The following are located on page two, link ~~HERE~~ & at bottom:
30) Pilewort (Erechtites hieraciifolius) 31) Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodium album) 32) Swamp Rose-Mallow and Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus moscheutos and H. syriacus) 33) Mystery Umbellifer, maybe Wild Carrot (Daucus carota) or Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca), probably Field Hedge Parsley (Torilis arvensis) 34) Mystery Asteraceae, maybe a wild species of Black- or Brown-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia) 35) Mystery Giant, maybe a Giant Ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) 36) Sweet Annie (Artemisia annua) 37) Mulberry Weed (Fatoua villosa) 38) Red Mulberry Tree (Morus rubra) 39) Hackberry Tree (Celtis occidentalis) 40) American Elm (Ulmus americana) 41) White and Southern Red Oaks (Quercus Alba and Quercus falcata) 42) Cross Vine (Bignonia capreolata) 43) Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) 44) Garlic Chives (Allium tuberosum) 45) Late-Flowering Thoroughwort (Eupatorium serotinum) 46) Figwort (Scrophularia marilandica) 47) Italian Arum (Arum italicum) 48) Cranesbill (Geranium, likely G. carolinianum or G. bicknellii) The following are located on page three, link ~~HERE~~ &at bottom: 49) Henbit & Red Dead-Nettle (Lamium amplexicaule & L. purpureum) 50) Chickweed (Stellaria media) 51) Crow Garlic (Allium vineale) 52) Little-leaf or Fig-leaf Buttercup (Ranunculus abortivus) 53) Smallflower Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila aphylla) 54) Black Medic (Medicago lupulina) 55) Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) 56) Perilla (Perilla frutescens) 57) Oriental False Hawksbeard (Youngia japonica) |
In his remarkable nature study, “Das große Rasenstück” (left), Albrecht Dürer clearly shows greater plantain [Plantago major], dandelion [Taraxacum], and tall, seeding grasses, from their roots to their flowery tips. The identifications of these grasses have been proposed as cock’s-foot or orchard grass [Dactylis], creeping bent grass [Agrostis], Kentucky bluegrass or smooth meadow-grass [Poa pratensis]; the work’s two other pictured plants: in the front right, perhaps a wisp of leaf of a yarrow [Achillea millefolium], and, in the rear left, a few sprigs rising up of what Richard Mabey in his fantastic book Weeds proposes to be burnet-saxifrage [Pimpinella saxifrage].*) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 57. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
While less naturalistically rendered, cut out of its own environs, an equally horticulturally-attentive work is this fine color etching of plantain from 1774, credited to a M. Bouchard (pictured to the right)* -- I hesitate as to whether this is monsieur Jean Bouchard, the French expatriate publisher in Italy in the mid-to-late 1700’s, or perhaps an engraving by his daughter Maddalena Bouchard, especially known for her etchings of exotic birds.** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * M. Bouchard, color etching, 1774, catalogued at the Wellcome Collection, available ~~HERE~~. ** Perrin Stein, Charlotte Guichard, Rena M. Hoisington, and Elizabeth M. Ruby, Artists and Amateurs: Etching in 18th-century France (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 42-43. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Finally, two notably different but still clearly plantain illustrations from the 18th century: |
* Cf., Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 71; Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 438-39; Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist (Hammond, IN: Hammond Book Company, 1934), 114-15; Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2018), 260; Malcolm Stuart, ed., The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Herbalism (London: Orbis Publishing, 1979), 197-98.
|
To the right: Creeping Charlie, identified as hedera terrestris, ground ivy, illustrated in: [Botanical manuscript of 450 watercolors of flowers and plants], dated approximately 1740, RARE-FOLIO QK98.2 .B683 1740, at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C.. Available ~~HERE~~. |
“When stems recline on the soil surface or grow below ground, they have no need to spend energy or nutrients on the construction of metabolically expensive strengthening tissues. Thus, they are able to direct all of their resources into a burst of rapid, primary growth that carries the leaves into more favorable illumination.”
--Brian Capon, Botany for Gardeners (Timber Press), 111.
Smilax Spp. (e.g., S. rotundifolia, common or roundleaf greenbrier or S. bona-nox, a.k.a., saw greenbrier or the more humorous tramp’s trouble)--oh, you rhizomatically growing woody and up to 20’ vine, you who crawls or climbs by tendrils (aided by hooked thorns), with cruel, cruel thorns up to 9mm, your first pale olive-ish then glossy green leaves round to heart shaped or speckled in lighter green, with 3-20 umbels of greenish-white flowers from April-August, and bluish-black berry ripe in September. You are so hard to get rid of, you survive droughts and your rhizomes survive fires, and you just pop up all over--not to mention your native range spanning the eastern half of the U.S. up to northern Ontario, with the S. bona-nox more likely found in southeastern U.S. down through Bermuda and Mexico--and you have thorns to scare the devil.
Yet, your young shoots can be cooked like asparagus, your young leaves and tendrils can be eaten raw or cooked; and your roots have a natural gelling or thickening agent, and those from some of your species (e.g., S. ornata, S. domingensis) have been used to make sarsaparilla or root beers. Not to mention that your fruits and leaves provide food for many animals (e.g., birds, deer, butterflies) and your dense thickets provide shelter (e.g., small animals).* Most beguilingly, your name “Smilax” comes from the Greek myth of the nymph Smilax, who was transformed into a bramble vine, after her failed, unfulfilled love of Crocus (his fate, kinder?)--though, admittedly, Ovid’s Metamorphoses only mentions that “Crocus, and Smilax may be turn’d to flow’rs.”**) |
“As long as favorably lit places are open for encroachment, the relentless advance of perennial stoloniferous and rhizomatous species may continue indefinitely.”
--Brian Capon, Botany for Gardeners (Timber Press), 111.
Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata): -- while sometimes called porcelain vine or amur peppervine, you more closely imitate grapevine with your deeply lobed, three to five times, leaves bearing toothed margins on vines that can climb 15-20 feet by tendrils, and your small greenish-white flowers in mid-summer that develop porcelain-looking fruits in fall in whites to yellows to pastel blues, greens, and purple, as if miniature and more uniquely colored grapes—though, while you are also in the Vitaceae (grape) family, your genus (recognizing your imitative powers in its combination of the Greek ampelos and opsis, vine and likeness) is different from that of our traditional table grapes. It may be your visual trickery and, while certainly not tasty (in fact, mildly poisonous) your certainly beautiful berries, that explain why you can still be found rather widely for sale (or your ability to adapt to most soils and thrive in sun or shade, albeit the latter restricts your flowering); however, it is your drastically invasive properties that should restrain our purchase and encourage our plucking you out should you mysteriously appear. Your appearance here was certainly as a volunteer, yet
|
Privet (Ligustrum sinense):
In the Oleaceae family, Ligustrum are nearly all shrubs and can be found worldwide; L. sinense is one of nearly 50 species, and certainly the one spoken of with the most ire. The genus name is simply Latin for privet, and was officially recognized by Linnaeus in 1753; while it would have been most apt, most dictionaries dispute any connection of its common name to “private.”* Well-clipped privet is iconic—as topiary or the classic boxy edge, hedges are the “unofficial emblem of Great Britain” according to a fairly recent Smithsonian article, “They are a charmed circle drawn around family and self,” and do certainly populate every memory and dreaming I have of fine gardens across the Continent.** But I am in the States’ mid-south and too plagued by days of 105º F heat indexes and yards full of invisible, thoroughly demonic chiggers to keep my privet all pretty. Instead, it is headstrong: utterly unhappy being a clipped monochrome between properties (just in the front, running two thirds of the way from house to street—any more and it’s too un-neighborly), it stays twiggy when shorn and so invites every elm baby and bindweed to join it, and then runs off and pops up like little leafy pikes across the yard, in the beds, in every nook and cranny one doesn’t patrol endlessly. It is an extremist interpretation of Isaac Ware’s 1756 advice in A Complete Body of Architecture that the most cheerful and pleasing landscape design is that with wild hedges, those “mimicking savage nature, only in a state of more variety.”*** And it is actually most pleasing as such, for no neatly clipped privet hedge is permitted to bloom and when one of those unpatrolled upstarts suddenly erupts in a froth of white flowers, the humid nights are as magically perfumed as the jasmined Persian gardens of storybooks. Thus privet is another ambiguous case: a prized shrub or invasive weed? In Tennessee and 13 other states, as well as by the U.S. Forest Service, its threat level is established: invasive species. Despite its reported low seed germination rate (only 5-27%), birds enjoy and spread the seeds widely, while old stumps and roots can readily sprout new plants leading it to be what the Tennessee Invasive Plant Council describes as “Aggressive and troublesome invasives, often forming dense thickets … thus gaining access to forests, fields, and right-of-ways,” and as capable of growing up to five to seven thickly leaved meters, privet can easily shade out and kill native species and destroy biodiverse areas.† While called a shrub, the privet strays about my yard far more resemble small trees, with pale, smooth bark and dark pine to nearly phthalo green, petite oval, and oppositely arranged leaves. Its flowers are white, very small but clustered on panicles dangling daintily at the ends of its stems. While, for me, their fine fragrance is reminiscent of some synthesis of jasmine, paper-whites, and lily of the valley, the North Carolina Extension Service describes the flowers as “fetid,” and productive of “an odor that can be offensive to many people.” After, its hundreds of small fruits then turn a dark bluish black, staying on the bush all winter, if not devoured by the birds first. Privet was introduced to the U.S. from China around 1852 as an ornamental shrub, and proved superb to tolerating air pollution and diverse, including poor, environmental conditions while remaining a hardy, mostly evergreen, attractive shrub and useful, wind-blocking hedge plant.†† Oh, privet, you invasive yet attractive rascal. The Smithsonian article also cited John Wright’s hedge history to estimate that Great Britain has about 435,000 miles of hedgerows, and while not just privet, of course, it sometimes feels that it is privet alone taking such mileage about my property—but when the summer’s dog days are here, the nights’ din of tree frogs and cicadas overwhelming, I want the stray privets’ perfume.††† |
* Michael L. Charters’ compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~; the OED reputedly denies it directly, while those such as Merriam-Webster simply date it prior to the 12th c. and origins unknown, whereas the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests a potential connection to “prime” (for the last, cf. ~~HERE~~).
** Peter Ross and Kieran Dodds, “How Hedges Became the Unofficial Emblem of Great Britain,” Smithsonian (Nov. 20, 2020), available ~~HERE~~. *** Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton, 1756), 645; also extracted in Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, “History of Early American Landscape Design,” A Project of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, available ~~HERE~~. † Tennessee Invasive Plant Council page, available ~~HERE~~; also, for statewide and worldwide invasive listings, cf. Invasive Plant Atlas page, available ~~HERE~~, the USDA National Invasive Species Information Center page, available ~~HERE~~, and CABI, Invasive Species Compendium, available ~~HERE~~; There is an additional report of privet dominated forests not destroying the bug population and its diversity, although likely decreasing local bee populations, cf. ~~HERE~~. ††Cf., North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; Tennessee Invasive Plant Council page, available ~~HERE~~; University of Florida Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants page, available ~~HERE~~; Carolina Nature page, available ~~HERE~~. ††† Peter Ross and Kieran Dodds, “How Hedges Became the Unofficial Emblem of Great Britain,” Smithsonian (Nov. 20, 2020), available ~~HERE~~. |
Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), member of the Vitaceae (grape) family, sometimes also called Victoria creeper, five-leaved ivy, five-finger, or woodbine (the last, technically, more apt to western U.S.’ non-ariel-rooted P. vitacea). You eastern and central U.S. native rhizomatic woody vine with your peculiar way of climbing by adhesive disks on short branches, but capable of clambering up or out 40 feet, your dramatic five elliptical toothy-edged and palmately arranged leaflets that eagerly greet fall in red, mauve, and purple, and your petite yellow-green flower clusters that develop light honeydew cum deep merlot mini-grape-looking but poisonous berries—you are lovely and utterly horrendous at once. Such vigor you have, not caring if the soil is luscious or terrible, the sun bright and bold or barely there, and spanning zones five to 11. Little kids are counseled by the refrains of “leaves of three (i.e., poison ivy), let it be; leaves of five (i.e., Virginia creeper), let it thrive,” but thrive—you do it too well about my yard, attesting to the caution The Spruce offers, that while you are native, and “cannot, technically, be listed as an invasive plant,” you are one “that spreads out of control,” “said to be ‘aggressive’.” Gardening sites love to recommend you: for your sizable, speedy spread, spring lime and darkening forest summer greens to autumnal garnet blazes, for your tolerant nature, your gentler disposition to mortar (although you do leave bare polka dots on my stained
|
* Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2021), 324-26.
** Brian Capon, Botany for Gardeners (Portland: Timber Press, 2005), 137, 107; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; Gardening Know How page, available ~~HERE~~; The Spruce page, available ~~HERE~~; Colorado State University Guide to Poisonous Plants, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~. |
Wintercreeper (Euonymous fortunei), sometimes called climbing euonymus, or spreading euonymous—which I am tempted to elaborate to spreading-like-wild-fire-euonymous—was introduced from its native China as an ornamental in 1907 and is still freely promoted and planted as a mostly evergreen, fast-growing, dense perennial spreader superb for tough areas, but I consider it one of the most unruly weeds about my yard (and this, I have found, is not an uncommon view, as this euonymous has made it on the invasive species list for a dozen states plus Tennessee*). Commonly found in the eastern and central U.S. states, most especially Kentucky and Tennessee, (but also reported in Canada, Argentina, France, Germany, Poland, and of course throughout much of Asia,) especially around homes, through disturbed grounds, forested areas, and into grasslands. Sometimes maintaining a meter tall shrub-like form, more often its ‘creeper’ nature is to spread its viney arms out 20 plus feet and use its abundant aerial rootlets to climb up to 70 feet, quickly rooting when media is found. Its flowering-fruiting seed production is immense, too, with many birds and animals enjoying and thereby spreading its seed. Its seedlings erupt rampantly in all my garden beds and “yard” in the spring, from the sunniest and driest to the shadiest and wettest corners, and persist springing up here and there all summer long. Coupling its persistence and flexibility with its tendency to cover and smother anything in its path, it is quite a bane of my existence—yet, I must also admit to its possession of several very attractive features: its newest twiggy vines and leaves blare a bright lime green in pleasing contrast to its deep and dark, mostly opposite, small but broad and oval, and slightly under-turning adult leaves; its flowers are most petite, but striking clusters of unusual greenish-yellow cross-forming flowers whose darker green inner eye is marked with another
|
Ivy (Hedera helix): You are the cape cladding every stately old building in my imagination, and appropriately prove well-documented in medieval herbals. According to the good Old English Herbarium, you prove remarkable for stones in the bladder (eleven berries should be stewed in water that “will collect the stones in the bladder in a wondrous way and will destroy them and send them out through the urine”), pains in the spleen (the first attack requires three berries, the second needs five, then seven, nine, and so on, up to the tenth attack, each time drinking them daily in wine, unless there is a fever, as then warm water is a better medium), headaches (ivy and rose juice should be mixed in wine and rubbed on the face and temples), especially those from the sun (soft leaves pounded in vinegar are here prescribed for wiping on one’s face and head), healing wounds (simmered in wine) and poor hearing (with wine, and dripped in the ear), and “For evil-smelling nostrils” (poured into the nose).† (It also remarks on two other species ... so, if you happen to come unkindly across a spalangiones—some sort of venomous spider, although later described as a snake or scorpion††—and he doesn’t take it well, the resulting bite should be treated with hedera nigra, specifically, by drinking the juice of its roots.* While hedera crysocantes, is good for dropsy (the swelling of soft tissues).** In an American natural pharmacological text, The Herbalist, from 1934, English ivy’s leaves are both broadly and briefly described as a “stimulant, vulnerary, exanthematous and insecticide,” and its berries as an “emetic and cathartic.”**
“When you look at what ivy is, what it can do and how much life it supports, calling it a weed seems hugely ungrateful.”
-- Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 92. |
† Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine, chapter five: “A New Translation of the Old English Herbarium” (New York: Routledge, 2002), 130, 193-94.
†† Ibid., 208. * Ibid., 130, 194. ** Ibid., 132. *** Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist (Hammond, IN: Hammond Book Company, 1934), 82. |
Wild strawberry (Fraga, or Fragaria spp.) aids pain in the spleen or abdomen as well as asthma when served (more palatably than most of the Old English Herbarium’s other recipes) with honey and a little pepper in a drink.* The ethnobotanist Huron H. Smith reports the Ojibwe native Americans steeping its root—which they called ‘heart berry root’—to cure stomach aches, especially in babies; he further reports white people using it as an astringent and convalescent tonic for children with bowel or bladder concerns.** And, to cure another sort of ache, ethnobotanical sources report that Ireland had a tea of strawberry leaves said to cool “excessive ardour.”***
|
However, I learned that my lovely lawn-cover is not truly wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), but the common but non-native mock or Indian Strawberry (Duchesnea indica, some sources include this in the Potentilla genus, specifically thus as P. indica)—an equally beautiful trailing perennial herb that closely resembles the other except for its having brilliantly sunny yellow flowers. Its genus was named in honor of the French strawberry expert Antoine Duchesne (1747-1827), and its species name identifying its hailing from India or the East Indies, or even occasionally China. It is common through much of the eastern U.S., including Tennessee, where it tends to bloom far longer than otherwise reported, stretching its April to June period more to March to August. Its berries are edible, but far more petite and seedy than one’s green grocer may carry, and hardly have any flavor, although the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks about the yard seem to enjoy them.†
Image: Fragaria indica, R. Wight, Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1846-1851), vol 1 (1846), t.62, available ~~HERE~~.
|
Violets (Viola spp.)
Oh, miss violets, I love to see you in spring, and I do coddle you, you who are clustered and strewn so widely -- like rose petals in a romance novel -- across the lawns; your wonderfully regal purple velvets and varying chambrays all charmingly, coyly beguile me to leaving you all be ... but, I must ask you, why must you invade so ferociously my garden beds? |
The Doctrine of Signatures is the medieval update of a late ancient theory that each plant served a purpose and bore a divinely given ‘signature’ identifying this purpose, for example the palely spotted leaves of Pulminaria resemble a sickly lung, hence the plant, commonly called lungwort, was to be used in treating lung ailments. Botanicals were prescribed for infirmities well beyond strictly bodily woes, too, including the relief of hexes and for many emotional disturbances. According to this philosophy, Dr. Thomas Johnson (the London botanist, apothecary, and 1630’s editor—and extender and occasional critic—of John Gerald’s Herball) speculated that the pansy (Viola) was so named for its being a general ‘panacea,’ although it was also called love-in-idleness and heartsease, and therefore was especially recommended for soothing heartache.† One will well recognize the name “love-in-idleness” from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “… yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell: it fell upon a little western flower before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, and maidens call it love-in-idleness. …”†† Beyond bringing beauty to lawns and beds and aiding our sore hearts, violets play an important ecological role as host to various caterpillars, namely those of the Great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele), Meadow fritillary (Boloria bellona), and Variegated fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) butterflies.†††
|
The Violet
The Violet in her greenwood bower, Where birchen boughs with hazel mingle, May boast itself the fairest flower In glen, or copse, or forest dingle. Though fair her gems of azure hue, Beneath the dew-drop’s weight reclining; I’ve seen an eye of lovelier blue, More sweet through wat’ry lustre shining. The summer sun that dew shall dry, Ere yet the day be past its morrow; No longer in my false love’s eye Remain’d the tear of parting sorrow. --Sir Walter Scott (Published originally in the Edinburgh Annual Register, 1808; collected in volume IV of Ward’s The English Poets, ~~HERE~~) |
Speedwell (Veronica, e.g., V. officinalis, V. americana, but also looking similar to V. umbrosa or V. pedundularis (creeping speedwell)): you are also sometimes called just veronica, or birdseye and gypsyweed or brooklime, but your most common common name is said to come from ‘speed’s’ archaic meaning, ‘to thrive’*—and that you do! You are one of the few weeds I tend to always welcome, even if needing to sometimes violently reclaim an early spring bed from your profligate lushness. In fact, I wish your relative was just as rampant, the demure, ever-reliable garden perennial we also simply call Veronica (e.g., a ‘spike’ speedwell, like V. spicata and other hybrids), the usually fairly petite plant with brilliant purple to almost bluish spikes the bees and butterflies so love. With over 200 species in the Veronica genus (and the photographs of many different “mat-forming” or “ground-covering” or just “weedy” ones looking so very similar and all called speedwell),
|
Herbal illustration (left): Ranonculus, [Botanical manuscript of 450 watercolors of flowers and plants]. approximately 1740. RARE-FOLIO QK98.2 .B683 1740. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C. Available ~~HERE~~.
* Ross Bayton, Simon Maughan, Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists, 106; for biodiversity, cf., Illinois Wildflower page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2018), 62; North Carolina State Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; and the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~. *** Cf., King County Noxious Weeds, available ~~HERE~~; BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, available ~~HERE~~; Invasive Plant Atlas, available ~~HERE~~; Dave’s Garden article, available ~~HERE~~; Biodiversity of the Central Coast, available ~~HERE~~; Garden Organic, available ~~HERE~~; RHS Weeds, available ~~HERE~~; Penn State Extension Lawn and Turfgrass Weeds, available ~~HERE~~; Thurston Integrated Pest Management Prescription, available ~~HERE~~; and First Nature, available ~~HERE~~. |
Crownvetch (Securigera varia, occasionally Coronilla varia): what a perennial: foot-tall mounding and 10-foot stretching stems with just as wide-reaching rhizomes (“A single plant may fully cover 70 to 100 square feet within a four year period.” *), with dozen or doubled leaflets, pink-purple flower clusters spring to summer, seed pods like short, slender, flattened beans (apt, as it is in the Fabaceae family). There is really something quite strikingly unusual, attractive, about this, sadly, vicious invader (as may be amplified, too, by its state of being quite poisonous to horses and non-ruminant animals** ). Like many invasives, however, it has been often purposefully planted for erosion-controlling groundcovers. (Given the way it overtook one of my garden beds, I suspect it excels at such a task.) Some of its more unusual common names include: axseed, axwort, hive-vine.*** According to Galen, “Axe weed is a plant which grows in grain fields and has many small and slender branches, tiny little leaves, and little pods in which red and extremely bitter seeds grow in bunches of three and four together. The seeds can vigorously contract with a degree of causticity, and are therefore used in antidotes, and they stimulate menstruation.”†
* “Weed of the Week: Crown Vetch,” USDA Forest Service, Forest Health Staff, Newtown Square, PA, accessed May 16, 2021, available ~~here~~ ** “Invasive Weeds of the Appalachian Region,” University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, Extension Service, publication PB1785, accessed May 16, 2021, available ~~here~~ |
*** “Crownvetch,” Ohio Perennialand Biennial Weed Guide, available ~~here~~ † The Alphabet of Galen: Pharmacy from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed./trans. Nicholas Everett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), #219, p.315. |
* For the etymology, cf., the Online Etymology Dictionary, ~~HERE~~; Michael L. Charters’ extensive compilation of plant names’ histories, ~~HERE~~; Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2018), 193; and, while oriented to more ornamental Euphorbias, the Chicago Botanic Garden page, ~~HERE~~; for the possible Chaucer connection, cf., Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 192.
** For plant information, cf., Purdue Landscape Report page, ~~HERE~~; Missouri Plants page, ~~HERE~~; U. of Arkansas Division of Agriculture ‘Plant of the Week’ page, ~~HERE~~. |
Spurge (Euphorbia): you are likely E. humistrata, prostrate spurge, but possibly E. maculata, spotted spurge ...
While now classified as a Euphorbia, spurges were originally named Chamaesyce, the Latin meaning ‘to grow low on the ground.’ The common name, ‘spurge,’ comes to us from Old French espurgier, meaning the same as its origin in the Latin ex-, ‘out,’ and -purgare, ‘to purge,’ for their roots’ purgative and emetic qualities—which makes it quite possible that the widow in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale was thinking of spurge when she named the ‘katapuce’ (herbs with milky juices) in her back weed patch as perfect “To purge you, beneath and eek above.” Such spurges (prostrate, spotted, and the slightly more upright eyebane (E. nutans)) also acquired common names like milk purslane, for their sap, and emetic weed, eyebright, and wart weed, for their sap’s medical properties and uses.* Spurge is a demure but still rather striking annual weed from whose shallow central tap root its prostrate, usually reddish stems stretch out into a round, dusty greeny-gray small leaved mat; it appears in the summers most frequently in dry, nutrient-poor soils, especially sidewalks and gravelly areas, or scruffed up landscape sites. Its flowers are numerous (though, not nearly as much as its seeds), but so small, nondescript dots hiding on the base of upper-stem leaves. Spurge stems produce a milky latex sap, as to be expected from a member of the Euphorbia genus, which was named for the 1st c. Euphorbius, a botany-inclined Greek physician who used the skin-irritating sap, possibly for laxative properties, in medicinal treatments -- although the king he served was said to have named one such plant euphorbos both in his honor and for the pun of its meaning as ‘well fed’ (eu, ‘good,’ plus phorbe, ‘pasture, fodder’), as apt for his grand corpus and its fleshy leaves. Despite its prolific seeds, which can last in the soil for a long time, these spurges are annuals, low growing, and prefer hot sandy planes, hence pose little threat to crop harvesting.** |
The insidious bedstraw or cleavers (Galium aparine L.)—also called catchweed, goosegrass, and sticky-willy—is fondly described by the Herbarium as “called philantropos … ‘loving people’—because it willingly adheres to people, and it has seeds like a human navel,” and aids snake and spalangione spider bites if its juice is mixed in wine, or cures an earache if its juice is dripped in the ear.*
While there are some discrepancies as to your native grounds—North America or a wide span from the British Isles through Europe and out to north and west Asia—the literature on both sides of the pond speak of your ‘people-loving’ clingliness. What a way to show love, you dreadful pain—your infinite little scratches and sap leaves my arms raw in welts after tackling back a bed from your grasp, and then, later, I slip on freshly laundered socks or gardening gloves just to be scratched again by your still clinging seed pods. Though, admittedly your ‘stickiness’ is really quite a marvel. Gareth Richards expresses it perfectly for the RHS’ Weeds: “Goosegrass is a cunning plant. Instead of wasting energy on growing strong woody stems, it cheats—sprawling out over other plants to make the most of the light. It slips, slides, scrambles and rambles, filling the space between others, sometimes smothering them too. But how does it do this?,” neither by tendril or twining, but its “very clever method of climbing: trichomes.”** Your remarkable BB-sized fruits are covered with these trichomes, bitty hooked hairs, tiny barbs that cling like velcro, as are, in fact, your just as impressive artistic whorled leaves and long, slender stems, these hooked hairs so adept at snagging anything passing by—making me wonder if it is really right to say, as Plants for a Future does, that you are “noted for attracting wildlife,” or whether it you that is their hanger-on-er.
You are the clingy street-toughened big brother of the very demure sweet woodruff (G. odoratum), whom I purposefully plant in shady edges and coddle beneath a lacy-leafed Japanese maple. Unlike your gentler fellow Galiums, you are just an annual, which may explain your extreme seed-spreading tendencies. But when you are just sprouted, your tender shoot tips are edible—for humans as well as fowl, your fans alluded to in your common name goosegrass—both raw and as a potherb, even if bitter, and are said to aid weight loss. Your seeds can also be used, after being dried and roasted, as a coffee substitute (apt, as you are a member of coffee’s family, Rubiaceae).*** |
According to a 1934 American herbal, you can be valued for your roots’ service as a permanent red dye, but more interestingly, your leaves and stems are a “somewhat refrigerant and diuretic, and will be found beneficial in conditions calling for such a combination of qualities.”# Also in America, two other cleaver species, Galium tinctorium and G. trifidum, feature in the medicine of the Ojibwe native Americans in the Wisconsin, as reported upon by Huron H. Smith in his 1932 research: the former was dried in full to be steeped as a tea to aid the respiratory organs, which, Smith notes, has a “pungent, aromatic, pleasant, [and] persistent taste;” while the latter was brewed to treat skin concerns including eczema, ringworm, and scrofula, to which Smith notes, “White men undoubtedly use it in much the same way as the preceding species though error in identifying it correctly.”##
# Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist (Hammond, IN: Hammond Book Company, 1934), 112. ## Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 387. A final facet of your inspired/wily resourcefulness is revealed by Peter Mabey, that “The goosegrass that grows in cultivated fields, for example, is quite different from that in hedges. It germinates at different times, has seeds closer in size to crop seeds and grows with a more creeping habit—adaptations to weed-control methods that go back two or three thousand years.”###
* Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine, chapter five: “A New Translation of the Old English Herbarium” (New York: Routledge, 2002), 224-25. ** Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 76-79. *** Cf., Minnesota Wildflowers, available ~~HERE~~; Plants For a Future, available ~~HERE~~; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, available ~~HERE~~. ### Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 66. |
A “gallium” which closely resembles Galium aparine or cleavers, as painted in: [Botanical manuscript of 450 watercolors of flowers and plants], dated approximately 1740, RARE-FOLIO QK98.2 .B683 1740, at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C.. Available ~~HERE~~. |
* For the etymology, cf., Michael L. Charters’ extensive compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~. ** Alice Henkel, Weeds Used in Medicine, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers’ Bulletin No.188 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 11-13; digitized by the Missouri Botanical Garden, available ~~HERE~~. *** Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 366, 399. **** Alice Henkel, Weeds Used in Medicine, Op. Cit.. Illustrations from Mid- to Late-Modern Herbals: |
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale): earlier you were called Leontodon taraxacum by Linnaeus, which is in reference to (along with its common name’s derivation from the French dent de lion) the plant’s jagged leaves; the origin of ‘taraxacum’ in the genus’ name is disputed (be it the Persian for ‘bitter herb,’ or Greek taraxos and akos, ‘disorder’ and ‘remedy,’ or taraxia and akeomai, ‘eye disorder’ and ‘to cure,’ or even the Arabic for ‘wild chicory’ or an Asian linguistic origin meaning ‘wild lettuce’).* Although ‘dandelion’ is a truly dandy name, you have collected some further curious names over the years, including: blow-ball and doon-head-clock, fortune-teller and one o’clock, horse or yellow gowan, Irish daisy, and cankerwort.**
You are the preeminent flower of childhood: your sunny heads are beacons, your hollow, lightly milk sapped stems pop so satisfyingly when plucked, your petals tinting little fingers yellow, your saw-like leaves can be nibbled, and best of all, wishes can be cast while casting with a blowing breath your seed parachutes to the sky. While native to Europe and Asia, it was imported very early to North America as a food crop, and quickly naturalized itself widely. According to Huron H. Smith’s 1932 ethnobotany research of the Ojibwe native Americans in the Wisconsin area, they would eat the young greens of dandelions, which they called ‘yellow lights’, and use their roots to make a tea for heartburn, although, he adds, “Among the [local] whites, the virtues of the root are much overrated. The dried root is steeped in boiling water and is used as a stomachic and tonic, with slight diuretic and aperient action.”*** A governmental agricultural bulletin from 1917 further underscores the medicinal value of your long taproot, mainly used in a tonic for the treatment of liver diseases and in dyspepsia—and notes, perhaps as much for salads as for medicinal use, that 1903 saw 115,522 pounds of dandelion root imported to the U.S., and fetched four to six cents per pound, which is remarkably surprising given the lovely weed’s prevalence, as the bulletin even notes, with it being “very abundant throughout” the country, and being “so well known a weed, especially in lawns, that it scarcely requires a description.”**** |
Image Left: Kniphof, Johann Hieronymus, 1704-1763. Johannis Heironymi Kniphofs, M. D. Acad. Caes. Nat. Cur. Coll. Botanica in originali pharmaceutica, das ist. 1733. RARE RBR N-3-1. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C.. Available ~~HERE~~. Image Above: [Botanical manuscript of 450 watercolors of flowers and plants]. approximately 1740. RARE-FOLIO QK98.2 .B683 1740. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C.. Available ~~HERE~~. |
“I am drawn to the concept of a fickle nature, indifferent to our needs, which the continued success of weeds seems to epitomize. Weeds suggest what sudden floods and earthquakes demonstrate more dramatically: that despite our efforts the world remains beyond our control.”
--Nina Edwards, Weeds (London: Reaktion Books LTD, 2015), 24.
Virginia threeseed mercury (Acalypha virginica): formerly known as Acalypha digyneia, of the Euphorbiaceae (spurge) family; common names further include: Virginia copperleaf (as the young leaves are slightly copper colored), mercuryweed, threeseeded mercury, and wax balls (for the very small axillary flower clusters). This summer annual flowers very discretely from June to October, with petal-less nondescript pale, buttery-greenish mini-clusters hidden right next to the stems in the leaf axils, but will be most identifiable for its young copper-tinted leaves and deep red to pinkish to green stems, which, upon very close inspection, have delicate hairs, as do some leaves, but both appear bare from any distance or in poor light. The lanceolate to slightly elongated oval leaves grow from under one to nearly three inches in length with scalloped to slightly toothy leaf margins, and tend to grow closer at the top, giving the plant a slightly flat-topped look. At first sprouting, the leaves are arranged rather opposite from the stems, then soon develop a more alternate pattern. While in the spurge family, they lack their relatives’ milk sap. Their root systems tend to the tap root form with secondary fibrous roots. Found in pastures, meadows, fields, weakly managed lawns and landscapes, woodlands, and shores—soil tillage will spur large clusters of plants—throughout the eastern two thirds of the U.S., from zones 5a-8b, threeseed mercury, however, is considered a native plant and not deemed invasive. Some birds eat the miniscule seeds, and deer browse the leaves.*
Described as growing up to two feet tall, my yard has only seen them reach six to nine inches tall. Further research also describes older, taller plants developing excessive bracts surrounding the axial petal-less flowers on roughly ¾ inch spikes, and red in color, but mine show barely little pale yellowish to pale green pompoms in axials. Pictures of larger plants also show much smoother leaf margins. What sets my plants apart immediately is by their being the food of immense favor of a very petite bronze-ish beetle—likely some species of flea beetles, in the Chrysomelidae family, which love weeds and many veggies—who leaves scattered pin-pricks on all leaves, even on the smallest of their seedlings. * Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Weed Identification, Available ~~HERE~~ and North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, available ~~HERE~~ |
* For the etymology, cf., “Origin of Some Common Names of Plants compiled by Nina Curtis on behalf of The Tortoise Table,” available ~~HERE~~. ** Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Plant Database, available ~~HERE~~ , and U.S. Forest Service Plant of the Week page, available ~~HERE~~, and Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~ *** Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1923, reprint 1970), 47. † Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2018), 83. †† Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 381. |
Pennsylvania smartweed (Polygonum pensylvanicum): one of the ca. 900 species of the Polygonaceae (Buckwheat or Smartweed) family; the family and genus name compounds the Greek polys, ‘many,’ and gony, ‘knee,’ in reference to their plants’ knotty stem joints.*
The oft-marked—by a dark purple V-shape blotch—lanceolate leaves and roughly one inch spikes of numerous small light-to-dark pink flowers will quickly let this weed stand out as it invades your garden or any wet spots in your yard, local fields, or about any scruffy areas across the continental U.S. and parts of Canada. While in its ideal conditions it will quickly stand up to six feet tall, my gardens only see them reach up to about a foot at most. Honey, Bumble and other bees, wasps, flies, butterflies and moths, and beetles feed on and pollinate the attractive flowers, and some mice, turtles, and birds will eat its seeds.** According to the ethnobotanist Huron Smith, members of the Menomini native tribe use the bitter dried leaf of this species of smartweed as a tea to aid bloody hemorrhages of the mouth, or is mixed with other herbs for internal healing after childbirth.*** The TN Native Plant Society’s field-guide reports that a variety of Native tribes used a leaf infusion for gastrointestinal complaints, as well as rubbing the leaves on childrens’ thumbs to deter their sucking.† On another similar species within the genus, Polygonum muhlenbergii, Smith reports the Ojibwe native Americans making it into tea to cure stomach pains.††
|
Pigweed (Amaranthus, most likely A. palmeri, but possibly A. retroflexus, redroot pigweed, A. hybridus, smooth pigweed, or A. granilis, slender pigweed): A. palmeri, or palmer amaranth, is the main pigweed or careless weed found in the southwest, although in the last several years it has become rampant and troublesome in Tennessee, and it appears most similar looking to the curious flora who has appeared in my own weed patch.*
I did not scrutinize you closely enough, when you first appeared in my weedy corner to and through which the property’s rainfall runs. To be honest, you first appeared to be simply less eaten samples of Virginia threeseed mercury (Acalypha virginica), which surrounded you. But, one day I bent closer, risking picking up chiggers, and noticed your leaf edges were not gently scalloped like your neighbors; the veins running from the center to edges of your leaves were so straight, evenly spaced and symmetrical; and at the tip of each leaf, a little sort of hair, a soft spine-like hooked leaf growth. Then, finally, one of you put forth a flower: not some nestled and understated thing, but a flag-poled spike of small and pale petal-less flowers, not appropriately called green or yellow or cream, but some pale brightness of those, and a cluster more of little spikes came from your tallest stem’s base, truly making you look like a mini and blanched amaranth. Having grown the tall and arresting Amaranthus hypochondriacus before, I hadn’t thought an amaranth would escape my notice, but there you were, undeniably of that family, but small and airy, a nice but unremarkable green. So to research, I turned, and discovered your demure looks really do hide an inner wild one. While you are an annual native to the U.S. and Mexico, you are also fairly widely listed as a noxious weed, even earning the |
“Look everywhere, and you will find wild plants in places so unlikely and so unfriendly to growth that you can only be amazed at the toughness and vigor of the plants that survive in the rubble, in the cluttered ‘gardens’ of their own making.”
--Anne Ophelia Dowden, Wild Green Things in the City: A Book of Weeds (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1972), 2.
Virginia buttonweed (Diodia virginiana): The genus name derives from the word for ‘thoroughfare,’ indicating the plants’ common habitats; this and other species also commonly called rough buttonweeds or poor joe.* ... Oh, you outward spreading and flat matting perennial weed — a native, but a nuisance, they call you, for your deft trick of reproducing from the tiniest shred of root broken off when you are yanked from beds, leaving us pullers mad (apt?, I wonder, your family being the Madders?, more properly, Rubiaceae). Your brief but summer and fall blooming flowers are especially petite, four-petaled white stars or crosses that linger in your leaf axes—lovely, but requiring keen eyes and readiness to stoop and peak. You are said to be fond of swampy areas and near streams or ponds, even providing nibbling bits for aquatic life, but around my yard you don’t mind stretching from the high and dry ‘lawn’ into the paved drive.**
|
Oxalis (Oxalis stricta): commonly called common yellow woodsorrel or sometimes lemon clover, occasionally simply clover or shamrock, or more unusually the pickle plant (due its seed pods). In the Oxalidaceae (wood sorrel) family, its genus name simply meant ‘sorrel’ in the Latin, derived from the Greek oxys, ‘sharp’; its species’ name comes from the Latin for ‘upright’. Remarkably similar looking species include: the nearly indistinguishable O. dilleniid, the southern wood sorrel, which is more sun-tolerant; O. acetosella, its species name indicating a sour, acidic taste, its common name being common woodsorrel, but it is white flowering; O. corniculate, from the Latin ‘horn-like,’ ladies’ sorrel, creeping or procument woodsorrel, or sleeping beauty; and O. montana, the mountain woodsorrel, but its flowers are white with pale purple stripes.* Oxalis, despite its often diminutive stature, stands high amongst my favorites in the realm of weeds. Its petite clover-imitating leaves are hued one of the freshest greens in the garden, dancing up such slender stems, and its lovely flowers never trespass a half inch and each of its five graceful petals are the perfect classic yellow.
|
“‘Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace:’
And since, methinks, I would not grow so fast,
Because sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.”
--York, initially quoting Gloucester, in Shakespeare's The Life and Death of Richard the Third, Act II, Scene IV
Creeping cucumber (Melothria pendula): such a little vine—petite ivy-shaped leaves and slender coiling tendrils, most minute golden flowers and miniature fruits looking like watermelons in a kid’s play-set when unripe which develop to be as black as night—but so mighty you are in appearing utterly everywhere, twisting your way up and over everyone, from the smallest thymes to scaling clematis supports and berry cages. You are an eastern-half of the U.S. native in the cucumber family, and your barely inch-long fruits are edible (most accounts urging only the green to be eaten), although are an exceedingly strong laxative.*
(For size comparison, note the pictures to the right show it climbing over thyme!) *Cf., North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; and Eat the Weeds page, available ~~HERE~~. |
* Cf., Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Thomas E. Hemmerly, and David Duhl, Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2018; Illinois wildflowers info page, available ~~HERE~~; ; Wildflowers of the United States page, available ~~HERE~~; here: ; Daves Garden page, available ~~HERE~~ ; a number of photographs displaying leaf and flower variations, at Maryland Biodiversity page, available ~~HERE~~, and the Invasive Plant Atlas, ~~HERE~~; and the Eat the Weeds page documents numerous Impmoea species, ~~HERE~~.
|
Whitestar, or the small white morning glory (Ipomoea lacunose): also commonly named the white or pitted (its species name, Latin for ‘pitted’) morning glory, of the Convolvulaceae (morning glory) family. This pesky but beguiling North American native is distinguished from bindweeds and other morning glories by their especially petite and almost always white flowers of up to only 3/4 inch diameter trumpets enclosing a glimpse of lavender anthers, compared to other species all easily exceeding an inch. Like all the morning glories, their flowers open with the sun and close up at night. A fascinating feature is how each plant always twines in the same direction, as the Tennessee Native Plant Society’s guide puts it, “typically clockwise, without variation, regardless of heat, cold, light, climate, or even hemisphere. In comparison, honeysuckle (Lonicera) and bindweed (Calystegia) can twist in either direction, even on the same plant.” While the plants have a slight toxicity, keeping other animals away, there are a number of caterpillars and insects that feed on the leaves, quail and pheasant will eat its seed, and many bees heartily enjoy their nectar over their two to three month mid-summer on blooming period. Native populations reportedly would also eat its tubers (while not as tasty or large, the plant is in the same family as sweet potatoes) or dry and grind them for an expectorant tea; the flowers were fermented for a wine; and its seeds and leaves were also steeped for laxative—although the toxicity of the plant can trigger hallucinations and seizures. No matter how petite the flowers, the usually clockwise spiraling, twining vine and roots run vast stretches, nearly ten feet. The small white morning glory is an annual, but it is the root system and prolific and long lasting seeds that spark the plenteousness and tenaciousness of this swirling, curling beautiful pest that can be found through much of the eastern half of the U.S. and up into Canada.*
Whitestar may be a pest to North American gardens, but its rap-sheet is so much shorter from another much, much maligned Convolvulaceae species ... |
Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron): either T. radicans, eastern poison ivy, which usually develops a climbing habit, or T. rydbergii, western poison ivy, which usually stays bush-like, both otherwise appear similar, albeit with great variability between and even on individual plants, nevertheless still abiding to the rhyme’s “leaves of three, let them be.”
You, through and through, harbor urushiol--a nasty, oily irritant that causes severe contact dermatitis in those who touch you, touch a pup who ran through you, or unfortunately ended up downwind of a burning brush pile with you on its pyre. Both species are native to the Americas, found through much of Canada and the United States, the former also stretching through Mexico, Central America, and Bermuda and the Bahamas. Birds especially enjoy the attractive white fall berries, hence widely spread this itch-monger far and wide. While a vicious, but also mostly unassuming plant, its fall color is a remarkably fiery scarlet that comes after its unremarkable |
Fleabane (Erigeron): this one is likely E. annuus, eastern daisy fleabane, although E. strigosus, prairie fleabane, a less hairy, non-toothed species is present in the area; the genus name compounds the Greek eri, ‘early,’ or erio, ‘wooly,’ with geron, ‘old man,’ indicating its early bloom and/or its rapid development of grayish to whitish hairy seed heads; the common name described the early belief in the dried plants and especially flowers being a repellant of or poisonous to fleas.
Belonging to a massive genus in the Asteraceae family including species (Kew lists 460) that are annuals, biennials, and perennials, many of these North American natives, and all can be quickly identified by their petite daisy-like flowers with wispy crowns in white, lavender, or pink (more profuse than asters) around sunny yellow disc centers. The eastern daisy fleabane can reach two to three feet tall. The Illinois Wildflowers page describes the annual fleabane as least fussy and widely tolerant of most conditions, and an aggressive re-seeder that is truly “a native pioneer species that competes directly with many Eurasian weeds.”* (One wide-flung species, E. canadensis, did emigrate to Europe in the stuffing of a bird in the 1600’s, but the nature writer Richard Mabey reports that, while it is naturalized in waste areas, it does not trouble farmland.** And while the Old English Herbal includes a listing for a “coniza” identified by the editor as Fleabane (as the aforementioned seas-crosser was once named Conyza canadensis) or Spikenard, the former common name has been used in Europe for a number of different species said to be such a biter’s bane, thus its suggestion to use the plant for scaring off biting things, wounds, purifying a woman’s womb, fever and chills, and headache, may intend its more local Inula conyza, Ploughman’s-Spikenard or Great Fleabane.***) Many species of larvae and developed moths and butterflies are fond of the dainty daisies for vegetative munching and nectar sipping, as well as numerous bees, wasps, flies, and beetles; its seeds may be a treat for some mice, and its foliage for sheep and deer.† Humans, too, appreciate the plant: Huron H. Smith’s ethnobotany of the Ojibwe reports their mixing it, dried, into their smoking tobacco.†† I noticed a little leggy plant stretching out of my weed-lawn in early July, and within days was delighted to see a scruff develop into wispy crown about pure sunshine: fleabane!—modern science may disprove what it will, but I am desperately itchy enough to encourage anyone who is said to repel fleas (maybe it will work on chiggers, too?). Moreover, every bee and flying bug seems just as delighted to stop at this stumpy solo spot of joy. The plants are sad, indeed, short and tatty, leaves betray mite-like vampiric activity, but their brilliant rounds and frilly tutus distract and make up for all other shortcomings. Since, two more have appeared in the chinks of the sandstone walk out front: delight! * Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~. ** Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 142,151. *** Anne Van Arsdall, The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2002), 134; on the potential intended plant, cf., Plants for a Future, available ~~HERE~~; and Botanical.com: a Modern Herbal, available ~~HERE~~. †Cf., Friends of the Wild Flower Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; the U.S. Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Virginia Tech weed ID page, available ~~HERE~~; Inaturalist, available ~~HERE~~, and also lists Erigeron as a host plant for several species of Flower Moths (Schinia), including the lynx flower moth (Schinia lynx), obscure schinia (S. obscurata), little dark gem (S. villosa), and two lacking common names, S. intermontana and S. sexata, available ~~HERE~~. †† Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 399. |
“Weeds, those vagrant plants, those wanderers, the uninvited … they have an infinite capacity to heal the earth, to heal our bodies, and maybe just heal our souls too.” P.S., As autumn is warning that a Mid-South winter is nearing, and I rake the fallen leaves into neater looking circles beneath the trees and lightly across my garden beds, I note that the scruffy fleabane have vanished from sight ... well ... except for one, a mightier one than I ever did ere see, taken her place and happily spreading her five inch long and two inch wide wavery-edged leaves in a bald spot in my front perennial bed! -- I wonder how long I’ve walked by her, not noticing her ascension into the rich soils?, but I assure her that she chose well, and is more than welcome to stay where she is. |