Weeds Inventory

Oh, an ode, hardly, instead of a hoe-full, this is a woe-full inventory of & reflection on weeds ...

I begin with the woe of weeds. Nearly two handfuls of years ago utopia opened her arms to me as I moved house up a zone, from an USDA 6 to 7—but then she revealed herself as wily as any leprechaun or genie: your seedlings can go out a month earlier, your harvests will keep coming so much longer, your once-annuals are now returning friends, but this rich soil, these bright skies, and our long season is wholly equal-opportunity in growth for all. Remember those occasional dandelions and little tufts of weeds you’d spot here or there?, no need to look for them here, you cannot see anything but them everywhere. The compost bin you built could let a small horse have a cozy stall, but it will be the laughingstock of utility when you finish weeding. Don’t fret, though, you will never finish weeding. Think you cleared a bed?, look again, then look tomorrow, and then again: Little Shop of Horrors meets industrial scale manufacturing and is the horror flick you are stuck in now, on repeat. Watch, listen closely, you can even hear the roiling of germination, cotyledons ready to explode forth everywhere. You will never, ever finish weeding.

What’s a philosopher to do?

“Philosophy begins in wonder,” intones Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus and Heidegger sighs, eons later, opening his Being and Time imploringly on how we just no longer let ourselves be perplexed. So, let me try to be surprised. I simply need to open a new perspective on weeds. Phenomenology, Gestalt theory, postmodernism—all embolden our eyes and minds to expanded vistas, grasp greater complexities, link them and to the beyond more creatively. Is it not, too, just like the mother encouraging her toddler to take a bite, you might just like it? Maybe if I try, if I get to know my weeds, I may gain some better appreciation for them? (And, even if it proves to be simply a matter of ‘if you can’t fight them, then join them,’ still, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling reveals there is power inherent in resignation—such can never be a wholly passive giving in.)

Let me give it a try ...
... though, with ...

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.

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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 (Ranunculus acris)
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)
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-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, perhaps G. molle)

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1)

Plantain (Plantago, most notably, P. major)
Gareth Richards, for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Weeds, asks us to “not judge a book by its cover,” but readily admits that “plantain is a bit of an ugly duckling.”* I enjoy Richards’ sprightly descriptive accounts of his many selected species, and find his overall aim to reconnoiter our weed-perceptions persuasive, but beg to differ on aesthetically debasing the plantain. The habitat in which its frequently found is the driest and toughest—pavement cracks, around building rubble, unpaved drives, areas well trampled and mostly neglected by humans—thus many specimens can be scruffy, rather stunted, a bit ratty. But this survivalist streak, itself, warrants some respect: the same plant so tough and skimpy, measurable by millimeters, can, in better surrounds, put up a half-foot crown of deeply green leaves to encircle—and perfectly counter-balance—a cluster of tall and slender flower spikes.

The superb nature writer Richard Mabey, I believe, better appreciates the plantain’s aesthetic qualities, dedicating to it an entire chapter in his book also primarily entitled Weeds, which begins with and upholds as a refrain the lowly plant’s height of portraiture in Dürer, rendered real, in situ, yet at once raised to poetic heights like those bestowed to weeds by the great John Clare, a high mark following its long but more divorced and simplistic representation in medieval herbals. Granted, he is not fully starry eyed for its visuals, for example, when noting plantain, “the mother of worts” as “present in almost all the early prescriptions of magical herbs, back as far as the earliest Celtic fire ceremonies,” he admits that it may seem peculiar for “such a drab plant – a plain rosette of gray-green leaves topped by a flower spike like a rat’s-tail – should have had pre-eminent status,” but proposes that “its weediness, in the sense of its willingness to tolerate human company, may have had a lot to do with it.”**

I suspect that it is something about this duality—its usefulness but ugliness, its scruffiness but crown-likeness, its starring role but drab presentation—that is behind what so captives about the plantain. It is not attractive by flashing bright petals or arching long stems, drooping lacy or radically pinnate leaves, stretching out endlessly twining arms, or transforming into sunrise-mimics in autumn, but it is our little familiar who catches my eye everywhere, looks so hardy, neat and strong, so apt for metaphors, and always makes me smile as I greet it: hello my little plantain, what an attractive one you are.

Plantain amidst Creeping Charlie

Plantain in flower

So, who are you, plantain? While your genus, Plantago, contains over 200 species, your “common” one is the perennial P. major. Your deeply bright green, almost leathery and ovate, prominently paralleled veined and smooth margined leaves form in a large basal rosette with your petioles extending nearly as long as your up to six by three inch leaves. Your minute green-white flowers with white-purple stamens, which can appear from early spring to late fall, are densely clustered up and down pencil-thin spikes that can stretch nearly 10 to 12 inches tall. Pollinated by the wind, each forms a minuscule copper capsules each holding, to the delight of birds and other wildlife, up to 20 seeds. While native to Europe (and perhaps Eurasia), you were observed in North America as early as 1748, up in Montreal by 1821, and out to British Columbia by 1899, and now spread far and wide (named negatively a ‘weed’ in over 50 countries), and extending all the way up to the shadows of the Arctic tree line, especially colonizing lawns, cultivated fields, roadsides, and waste areas. Besides your intentional import for kitchens and physicians, perhaps your dominance is owing to your utter flexibility in growing conditions, hardiness to being trampled, and your reproduction happening both by seed (each large plant capable of producing anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 seeds) and by ramets (side shoots).***

Your common names are nearly as many as the lands you cover, many of these prefixing ‘plantain’ by common, ground, greater, major, dooryard, cart track, roundelay, English, broad-leaved, birdseed, ripple grass, and ripple-seed, cuckoo’s bread, snakeweed, as well as the curious white man’s foot (translating the Native American denotation of you who seemed to spread everywhere the white man went, but also akin to “plantain” and “Plantago” coming from the Latin planta, or ‘sole of the foot,’ for the shape of your flat leaves) and waybread (“The Anglo-Saxon names ‘Waybroad’ or ‘Waybread’ simply mean ‘a broad-leaved herb which grows by the wayside’†).††
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~Footnotes (as immediately following) are listed within &/or at the ends of each entry with full citation information, but a full, growing bibliography can also be found on the ‘Weed Reflections’ page, available ~~HERE~~
* Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 136.
** Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 77.
*** Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 538-39; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Plants for a Future page, available ~~HERE~~.
† Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 77.
††Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 538-39; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; “Plantain (n.2),” Online Etymology Dictionary, available ~~HERE~~.
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Just as many are the ailments you have reputedly aided. According to the Old English Herbarium, a widely copied herbal translated into Anglo-Saxon around 1000 c.e., common plantain (therein named arniglosa) serves 22 ailments, including: aches of the head, stomach, and abdomen, wounds and anal bleeding, worms or snakebites (the latter requiring the plant is well muddled in wine), “For a hard place on the body,” all sorts of fevers, infections, gout, sores, and nose pustules, mad dog bites, and “For daily internal weakness” (this last one, the editor supposes, may be an older instantiation of the German custom for a mid-morning schnapps that helps one to overcome “the dead time”).† † † Ruth Binney, in Plant Lore and Legend, reports that Nicholas Culpeper, the early modern writer of The English Physitian, prescribed plantain’s juice, mixed with that of houseleek, were effective to treat burns and “good for all inward heats and out.”††††

Another species of the Plantago genus, P. media, or the hoary plantain, was introduced to the north-eastern United States from central and western Europe and appears in the 1920-30’s ethnobotany notes of Huron Smith as a medical plant used by the Native American Winnebagos who would finely chop the leaves to make a poultice to heat old sores, and additionally feed a little to cure unwell horses.∆ Smith’s research on the Menomini Native Americans documents the use of the leaves of Plantago major and its paler relation, P. rugelii (also differentiated, barely, by a slight reddish tinge on its petioles), warmed and bandaged on skin, to treat swellings and infections. In a self-experiment, Smith reported on his own swollen and infected hand clearing drastically in the course of one day after profuse sweating, although went on to note more dismissively that “Plantain has been thought by the white man to possess curative powers in many diseases, although it is really a very feeble remedy.”∆∆ Smith repeats the story of his own experience and elaborates his nevertheless skeptical opinion of Plantago (“feeble,” but “ascribed potency in many diseases by eclectic practioners”) when later reporting that the Ojibwe native Americans of the Wisconsin area also use plantain leaves, soaked in warm water and then bound on bruises, sprains, or sores, widely soothing burns, scalds, bee stings, and snake bites, as well as using its ground root to ward off snakes.∆ ∆ ∆ Plantain’s benefit for bleeding and burns is twice further affirmed in the 1970’s, first in the American Encyclopedia of Medicinal Herbs, and then in the British Encyclopedia of Herbs and Herbalism.◊

The use of plantain against snakes has a long, but less convincing, history. The Old English Herbarium instructs one who is suffering snake bites, quartan fever (malaria), or poor hearing, to seek what it first identifies as hound’s-tongue (cynoglossa), then later amends to the narrow-leaved plantain—perhaps our Plantago lanceolate, the plantains with more strap-like leaves and flowers resembling petite cylinders with white tutus—and then encourages you to indulge its raw and cooked edible-ness. All of these cures require the pounding of this plant into something: wine for snakebites, water for fever, and oil for hearing (drinking or dripping the latter as apt), yet, interestingly, its efficacy against snakebites is left uncommented on, whereas against fever, it assures a cure, and against poor hearing, it promotes how “it will help in a wonderful manner.”◊◊

Whether plantains are a panacea, I’ll leave to the judgment of others. However, there are numerous medical articles about testing it for a whole number of therapeutic and pharmaceutical ends (the first two journal pieces I found flatly assert that “Modern pharmacological studies have proven some of [its] traditional applications”), and it is clear that along with its gustative bite (quite bitter, with a more umami or mushroomy aftertaste) it is quite generous in its nutritional profile.‡ Eating the young leaves in salads or boiling the older ones is mentioned most often, although can also be steeped for a tisane; the fresh flower heads can be tossed in stir-fries and, if one has the patience to collect its tiny, oily seeds, they can be ground into a rich flour.‡‡

Untitled, by Johann Hieronymus Kniphof (1704-1763), Acad. Caes. Nat. Cur. Coll. Botanica in originali pharmaceutica, das ist (1733), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C..

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† † † 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), 120, 143, 145. On “arniglosa,” cf., the Old English Plant Names page, available ~~HERE~~.
†††† Ruth Binney, Plant Lore and Legend: The Wisdom and Wonder of Plants and Flowers Revealed (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2016), 96.
∆  Kelly Kindscher and Dana P. Hurlburt, “Huron Smith’s Ethnobotany of the Hocak (Winnebago),” Economic Botany 52, 4 (1998): 352-72, 363, 368 (an introduction to, commentary on, and editing of Huron Smith’s field notes for the “Ethnobotany of the Winnebago”).
∆ ∆  Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1923, reprint 1970), 46-47.
∆ ∆ ∆  Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 380-81, 431.
◊ Joseph Kadans, Encyclopedia of Medicinal Herbs (New York: Arco Publishing Co., Inc., 1973), 165-66; Malcolm Stuart, ed., The Encyclopedia of Herbs and Herbalism (London: Orbis Publishing, 1979), 66.
◊◊ 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.
‡ Y. Najafian, S. S. Jamedi, M. K. Farshchi, and Z. Feyzabadi, “Plantago major in Traditional Persian Medicine and modern phytotherapy: a narrative review,” Electronic Physician 10, 2 (Feb. 2018): 6390-99, available ~~HERE~~; S. Gonçalves and A. Romano, “The Medicinal Potential of Plants from the Genus Plantago (Plantaginaceae),” Industrial Crops and Products 83 (May 2016): 213-26, available ~~HERE~~.
‡‡ Many sources make mention, but the Canadian Wildlife Federation page includes interesting recipes, available ~~HERE~~.
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Gareth Richards’ Weeds best identifies two reasons to praise the sometimes mundane plantain; first, he calls plantain a “compacted soil specialist,” being “one of those plants you can drive over and it will barely notice,” in fact, you will find it most often in the most trampled areas, and since “Compaction does terrible things to soil, literally squeezing the air and life out of it – plantain is nature’s rescue remedy, as its tough fibrous roots simultaneously break up compressed layers while protecting the soil from future erosion,” in return—and thus offering the second reason to well regard this little weed—plantain thus gains “quantities of minerals such as calcium and sulphur, adding to its health-giving qualities when consumed” by humans and grazing animals alike, for it is also “rich in vitamins A, C, and K.” He delineates a further reason to appreciate plantain, beyond, too, its long known medical properties, noting that some of its varieties are, in fact, rather interesting ornamentally: P. major ‘Rubrifolia’ and ‘Rosularis,’ often called ‘rose plantains,’ have striking red wine colored leaves, and ‘Bowles’ Variety’ bears unusual green bracts rather than its normal flowers—all of which can serve as slug-deterring hosta substitutes.‡‡‡

I have identified various mentions of wildlife and grazing animals happily nibbling your leaves and flowers (groundhogs, rabbits, deer, cattle, sheep), birds benefitting from your oil-rich seeds (cardinals and some sparrows), some insects (including the two-striped grasshopper), but the most extensive biodiversity list seems to be butterflies and moths of the Lepidoptera order that use Plantago for host plants.» Unfortunately, though, you can also play host to various plant viruses, including tobacco mosaic, aster yellows, beet curly top, beet yellows, tobacco streak, and tomato spotted wilt.»» Nevertheless, your benefits and interest outweigh, for me, any revulsions from the weed-eradication factions.

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‡‡‡ Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 136-37.
» Cf., Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; The Natural History Museum, London, HOSTS database, available ~~HERE~~.
»» Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 538-39.
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Thus, let me return, at the end, to the aesthetic quality of the little plantain with which I began.

Albrecht Dürer, “Das große Rasenstück [The Great/Large Piece of Turf],” 1503, watercolor, 40.3 cm x 31.1 cm, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria

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].*)

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* Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 57.
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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.**

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* 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.
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Finally, two notably different but still clearly plantain illustrations from the 18th century:

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Above, left: Plantain, [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~~.
Above, right: Plantin, Collection of seventy-eight water color plates of plants. [18th century?]. RARE RBR N-2-1. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C. Available ~~HERE~~.
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2)

Creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea):
Creeping Charlie, oh my, you are known by so many wonderful common names: creeping jenny, cat’s foot, alehoof and tunhoof (from hofe, Old English for ‘herb;’ ‘tunning’ was a mashing and fermenting of a brew), run-away-robin, ground-ivy, gill-over-the-ground or gill-go-by-the-ground, and the best: Devil’s candle-stick. You wildly, widely stretching weed, rhizomes racing and stems clonally rooting, mat-making but also somewhat lovely weed, with your ruffly fan-shaped leaves that betray your mint-family relations when crushed and your sweetly petite lavender and violet flowers the early bees quite enjoy. Native to Europe and northern Asia, with your presence in North American first reported in 1829, you were once used in making ale (a superb clarifier and flavoring) and replacing rennet in cheesemaking, treating so many bodily woes—Galen, around the second century, knew your aid for treating inflamed eyes; others said how good you were for pains, especially in the head, ridding one of coughs and inflammations; and an early 1930’s American herbal touted you as a superb “stimulant, tonic and pectoral, and is useful in many conditions,” notably “very beneficial in lead-colic, [so] painters sometimes make use of it,” plus certainly how your “fresh juice snuffed up the nose often relieve[s] nasal congestion and headache”—and, supposedly, according to the Tennessee Native Plant Society’s guide, “helping those who drank it to extend their lives,” besides otherwise spicing up salads and making the honey from bees who sip your nectar so, so sweet, no matter some suspicions as to your toxicity (namely, the massive Weeds of North America tome reports that, ingested in large quantities, Glechoma hederacea may be toxic to horses, but reports no evidence concerning other livestock, instead noting that it is more often deemed “a nuisance weed in turf”).* Say what they like, those who call you a nuisance, even when you invade my garden beds, I’ll just gently curb you back, as you delight my bees and make my backyard an utterly lovely greenscape—so, so much preferable to dull grass—as your scalloped fans are the brightest, crispest shade of lime green, providing perfect counterbalance, and thus harmony, with the yard’s other dominate leaves: the cadmium hearts of violets and British racing green strawberries.

* 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.

3)

Smilax, vining and at baby stage

* Wikipedia entries, for more, ~~ here~~ and ~~ here~~
** Ovid, Metamorphoses, ending the section “The Transformation of Clytie,” book four, trans. Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al., available ~~here~~

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.”**)

4)

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana): your further common names many, from scoke to inkberry and red ink plant, American cancer and cancer jalap, coakrum and pigeonberry garget, pocan bush and just poke*, you sculptural and towering marvel, your colors are as bold as your jointed stretched branches, but you are dreadfully poisonous, and my dogs dreadfully ravenous scavengers, so, no matter how those roots of yours are just so cruel to dig, you must go.

Native to America from the northeast through the midwest to the deep south, the south last being its most prevalent grounds, pokeweed seems remarkably torn between an angel or devil. It towers far taller than I do with an impressive fleshy, hollow stem, green streaked with ruby red, large leaves and brilliant blackish-purple berries—attractive giant, yet dermatologically toxic, capable of causing third degree burns from wrestling with the giant plant (as one really must do to uproot its prodigious rhizomatic root system), and also crazily poisonous (especially to curious children or other mammals attracted to the luscious looking berries), even as a good food source for birds, and, as Allan Armitage reports, a once long-sold food for southerners, as “the boiled young leaves are quite tasty and are known as poke salat. This delicacy was available on the grocery shelf until about 2000.”** (The encyclopedic tomes Weeds in North America and Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians confirm your agricultural nature, noting that you are “widely planted as a vegetable; [and the] juice of berries used as a dye;” the latter is confirmed by its genus name: phyton, ‘plant,’ and lacca, ‘crimson lake,’ referring to its red juice, and the former is qualified as “often grown as a spring vegetable, although poisonous.”†) Armitage further relates two good anecdotes per its common name: first, the mistake President James Polk's supporters made thinking its name was in his honor, thus donned sprigs of the mean weed in their lapels; second, the ballad “Poke Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White that made eighth on Billboard in 1969.††

Pokeweed

Pokeweed flowering

* Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 524.
** Allan M. Armitage, Of Naked Ladies and Forget-me-Nots: The Stories behind the Common Names of some of our Favorite Plants (Athens, GA: Allan Armitage, 2017), 210-12.
† Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America, Op. Cit., 524. The genus etymology plus reinforcement as to edibility and toxicity is found in 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), 72.
†† Armitage, Of Naked Ladies and Forget-me-Nots, Op. Cit., 212.

Pokeweed's insidiousness

Pokeweed's flower & berries forming

Pokeweed & elm, invading a blackberry pot

Further afield, I found an amazing stretch of pokeweed (picture to the right) growing as if it was an ornamental shrub alongside a partially wooded but well-tended park while traveling in Hudson, Ohio in August.

Here you can see pokeweed’s sometimes pinkish-reddish stems

“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.

5)

Porcelain Berry, climbing the copper pole to the left of the oak-leafed hydrangea

Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata): -- imitating grapevine, your leaves are so deeply lobed, three to five times, with greatly toothed margins; you can climb nearly 15-20 feet by your delicate, dancing tendrils. In mid-summer, your small greenish-white flowers are nice, but hardly worthy of postcards and photo shoots, instead, it is your porcelain-looking fruits that come in fall that give you fame, and your name, as they bear that porcelain-milky look in all shades of whites to yellows to pastel blues, greens, and purple.*
* “Invasive Weeds of the Appalachian Region,” University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, Extension Service, publication PB1785, accessed May 16, 2021, and available ~~here~~ . Also see ~~HERE~~, by the Tennessee Invasive Plant Council, for its emerging invasive threat demarcation.

6)

Bush / Amur Honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii): here, my bane is bush or amur honeysuckle, although another invasive Lonicera species that can be found here is the vining L. japonica, Japanese or Chinese or Hall’s or gold-and-silver honeysuckle—neither of these should be confused with some of our prominent native honeysuckle vines: the native vining L. reticulata, grape honeysuckle with yellow flowers that fade to red; the native vining L. flava, yellow honeysuckle; the native vining L. dioica, wild or red honeysuckle; and the native vining L. sempervirens, coral or trumpet honeysuckle, sometimes also called woodbine.*

Tree-like Amur Honeysuckle growing over Euonymous

Bush or amur honeysuckle—you have a sort of celebrity status, just not one to be proud of, the way you wish to take over every even remotely habitable spot in my yard, and have just as thoroughly garnered infamy on all the invasives lists on the internet and in guidebooks. ‘Least Wanted Invasive!’, ‘Avoid!’, ‘Prohibited!’, ‘Eradicate!’, ‘Destroy!’, they all cry. The Tennessee extension service recommends prescribed burning or three to five years of heavy mowing or heavy grazing by goats or deer to control it.** And I don’t blame them. Beyond the incessant invasion on my property, since becoming aware of my weeds, I cannot go anywhere about this city and not see you in yards, gardens, hedges, abandoned areas, tree rings, parking lots, sidewalk cracks. But, you are also so well loved—like my neighbors, who refused to let me clear your broad stripe between our yards to build a fence and replant with anything else they desired—and there is part of me that understands that sentiment, too. You seem to rest deep in memories as beloved as dandelions, through childhoods’ summers’ perfumed nights, those days of plucking and sucking the sweet nectar from your flowers, watching the delight of the bugs and birds and squirrels frolicking throughout your up to 20 feet tall shrubby-tree-like spreads, sipping your flowers, racing through your tangled branches, foreshadowing falls’ arrivals when they turn to nibbling on your berries.

Honeysuckle seedlings everywhere

So, what are you like? A long-lived, fast-growing, and abundantly branching large shrub, sometimes taking on the form of a small tree, you can spread 15 feet wide and over 20 feet tall; your leaves seem to unfurl the earliest in spring and stay on the latest into fall. These traits make you quite deadly to other flora, and your prolific fruiting leads to dense seedling growth, which clinches your competitive advantage. One study, mentioned by CABI, found your seeding density to be as high as 328 babies in a nearby square meter.

honeysuckle, in bloom

Honeysuckle berries in late fall to early winter

The robins, thrushes, and starlings, as well as white tail deer, are effective nibblers on and spreaders of your seed. (The berries, however, have been described as bird ‘junk food,’ being high in sugar, hence tasty, but very low in fats and nutrients.) You are not, however, considered particularly tasty to nearly any North American caterpillars or other insects. (Except, that is, mosquitoes seem to love you as their ideal egg-laying host, and fleas and ticks also seem to especially congregate around you.) You thrive in sunny areas, but can survive in shade, preferring well-drained soils, but highly tolerant of occasional flooding or drought, resistant to heat as well as to cold. Amongst your physical attributes, your leaves—oval to lanceolate, medium green, tapering about one to three inches long oppositely along your long stems—are fine, but really not much to boast about, and your bark is interesting, pale tannish and vertically-grooved, but also not terribly remarkable, for it is quite truly only your prolific flowers and brilliant berries that set you apart. From pale blushing buds come your flowers: small, less than an inch, but prolific along your stems’ leaf axils; they are so very showy, in a fuzzed tubular form with four petals fused to double-lipped as a heart-ish shaped upper hood and arching downward lower tongue, bursting forth white then becoming a lovely golden-yellow, with five long lemon tipped stamens surrounding a white and green capped stigma, and oh so, so fragrant. Your fruit is small, but such a shiny berry, so very brilliant red. Clearly it was your hardiness and lovely flowers and berries that bought you favor and brought you here, for your native range spans China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and eastern Russia, and, since introduced to North America in the late 1800’s, you now range from Ontario down to Georgia to all the way west from the Dakotas down to Texas. But while you do excite the birds and bees and human memories around here, your seedlings plague me horrendously, quite honestly, perhaps worse than any other. I also suspect you of having an allelopathic effect on nearby plants (something suspected of another species, L. tatarica, according to Dickinson and Royer’s Weeds of North America, and the only other documented mention is by CABI against the Brassicaceae family), as I have tried planting everything usually deemed most aggressive—peppermints, spearmints, mountain mints, catmints, oregano, lemonbalm, sweet annie, and so forth—at your base, and all grew mediocrely, stunted, then died or cut and ran after a single season.***

The root of another, kinder species, the Diervilla lonicera -- also called bush honeysuckle, but an eastern North American native -- was documented by the ethnobotanist Huron Smith as being cooked and used for a tea to aid urination and clean a woman after child birth by the Winnebago Native Americans.† In his studies of the Menomini Native Americans, bush honeysuckle was also made into a tea used to cure senility and as a mild diurient, and also notes that “Eclectics among the white men have used the fruit for its emetic and cathartic properties. This plant is valued by them as a diuretic and as a means to relieve itching.”†† And in another work on the Wisconsin Ojibwe Native Americans, bush honeysuckle, again, was identified as “their most valued urinary remedy,” although its root would be mixed with ground pine (Lycopodium obscurum).†††

* Cf., “Invasive Weeds of the Appalachian Region,” University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, Extension Service, publication PB1785, ~~HERE~~, accessed May 16, 2021; Minnesota Wildflowers page on L. maackii, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, on L. japonica, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page on available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, on L. flava, available ~~HERE~~ or the Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; the Minnesota Wildflowers page on L. dioica, available ~~HERE~~; the Missouri Botanical Garden page on diervilla lonicera, available ~~HERE~~; and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page on L. sempervirens, available ~~HERE~~.
** “Invasive Weeds of the Appalachian Region,” University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, Extension Service, pub.: PB1785, accessed May 16, 2021, available ~~here~~
*** On L. maackii, cf., Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 228; the Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, available ~~HERE~~; the Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; the Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; the Invasives page, available ~~HERE~~; the Invasive Plant Atlas of the U.S., available ~~HERE~~; the CABI Invasive Species Compendium page, available ~~HERE~~; the Ohio Environmental Council blog page, available ~~HERE~~;
† Kelly Kindscher and Dana P. Hurlburt, “Huron Smith’s Ethnobotany of the Hocak (Winnebago),” Economic Botany 52, 4 (1998): 352-72, 361 (an introduction to, commentary on, and editing of Huron Smith’s field notes for the “Ethnobotany of the Winnebago”). Also cf. the Missouri Botanical Garden page for information on this bush honeysuckle native, available ~~HERE~~.
†† Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1923, reprint 1970), 27.
††† Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 360, 375.

7)

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.†††

Privet, in flower

privet, center, cloaked by rose of sharon, elm, and honeysuckle

* 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~~.

My wildly scruffy privet hedge

8)

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

Virginia creeper taking over my fence, with some English ivy

Virginia Creeper, before much creeping

wood fence), and especially the zealous favor spread on you by chickadees and mockingbirds, nuthatches, finches, catbirds and flycatchers, thrushes and tanagers, swallows and vireos, warblers and woodpeckers, not to mention hosting the caterpillars of several sphinx moths (the Sphingidae, notably the aptly named Virginia Creeper sphinx, Abbott’s, Pandora, and the White-lined*)—even if your berries are dreadfully poisonous to pets and humans, and your tissues carry skin-irritating oxalate crystals’ raphides. After choking out a neighbor’s no one’s zone’s scruffy brush and volunteered elms, you hopped—coated, actually—my tall wooden fence and plant-smiled at your fortune of finding caged-in raised beds to swag and swaddle, then stretch out from, competing heartily against the violets, Euonymous, and ivy to prove you are as effective a groundcover as a climber. You are lucky your fall show is so nice and so many of the most charming birds here enjoy you.**

Virginia creeper, taking on the first coral-reds of its autumnal colors, soon to be burnished a deep mulberry

* 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~~.

9)

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

euonymous, in bloom

Euonymous berries in late fall to early winter

Euonymous' 'hairy' trunk

small cross from when its small pistils come; but most of all, it is the eye-catching seeds, their dangling papery pods which split to reveal gleaming fleshy seeds some color between a polished pumpkin and brightly red blushing tangerine. The bright and light green of its new growth turns, here, into a dark hunter, more so, nearly the ripest of artichoke-green, one touched with almost a blue and olive hue, although some cultivars have been bred to have purple-tinted or white to green-gold variegated leaves. While there is suspected human toxicity if eaten in large quantities—possibly due a glycoside—I have observed a wide range of birds, especially mockingbirds, red winged blackbirds, and orioles, feasting jovially on the berries. In addition to providing a dense scruff of cover for birds and bugs, from the hairy, tree-like stumps long ago planted along a rusty wire fence, its strong vines have aggressively woven themselves up, through, and over a scrubby brush-line of honeysuckles to securely form an endlessly active squirrel highway along my property line.**

honeysuckle & euonymous, new borns

* Tennessee Invasive Plant Council, available ~~HERE~~
** Cf., U.S.D.A. and U.F.S. Fire Effects Information System page, available ~~HERE~~; Tennessee Invasive Plant Council page, available ~~HERE~~ ; CABI Invasive Species Compendium, available ~~HERE~~ ; Native Plant Trust’s Go Botany page, available ~~HERE~~ ; Ohio Environmental Council page, available ~~HERE~~ ; North Carolina Extension Gardener page, available ~~HERE~~ .

10)

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.”**

English ivy with black wasp (possibly Pimpla rufipes?)

“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.

Above: English ivy and Virginia creeper taking over my fence; Below: ivy in bud and flower

11)

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~~.

mostly wild strawberry & violets

wild strawberry flower and fruit, encroached upon by creeping charlie

* 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), 124, 168.
** Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (Milwaukee, WI: Order of the Board of Trustees, Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee, 1932), 384.
*** David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2004), 146.
† 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), 147-48.

12)

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?

Even if over prolific, violets may prove to have benefits beyond their beauty ... Hildegard of Bingen’s Cause et Cure (ca. 1151) reports that those with “firey eyes”—those that are “similar to a black cloud close to the sun,” and therefore typically healthy and clear, for they have “received them by nature from the warm south wind”—do occasionally suffer from eye impairments due “Dust and any bad stench,” thus, for those who “do not see well with them,” she prescribes a tripartite tincture of the juices of rose, fennel, and pansy blended into a little wine for washing the skin around the eyes in the evening.* Since “pansy” is frequently interchanged with “viola” and “violet,” the precise plant she intends is unclear, but a not-unfounded presumption is that this is not today’s frequently spring-planted hybrid Viola section Melanium, but, rather, the more field-common purple proliferates, Viola spp..

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.†††

* Margret Berger, ed., Hildegard of Bingen: On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Cause et Cure (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 108, 72. Further, grey or turbid eyes need fennel (mix with dew & wheat for the former, or egg white for the latter); ailing eyes “of various colors” need zinc carbonate mixed with pure white wine; black eyes need nightly patches of bread steeped in rue, honey, & wine; & white spots on corneas ought be treated sparingly over three nights with fresh ox bile (Ibid., 108-09).
† Ruth Binney, Plant Lore and Legend: The Wisdom and Wonder of Plants and Flowers Revealed (Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2016), 25-26.
†† William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1, pp.459-63, collected in The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, trans./ed. Brian Copenhaver (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 463.
††† Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2021), 118, 318-19.

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~~)

Image: Violet (Viola odorata) color plate, Serapion the Younger, Herbolario volgare, Padua, 1390-1400; held by British Library, MS Egerton 2020, reprinted in Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael, The Illustrated Herbal (London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, Inc).

13)

pale blue specks of Speedwell in the company of a violet, wild strawberries, bedstraw, and dandelion

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),

it is a challenge to correctly identify which Veronica I have across my yard. It is the basic one, I want to say, the same I see all around here—and perhaps that impulse is why Weeds of North America identifies V. officinalis as a North American native, whereas most other resources identify it as a wide-spread and long U.S. established introduction from Europe and/or Asia, sometimes more specifically identifying origins, either like Plants for a Future’s broadening elaboration of “Europe, including Britain, from Iceland south and east to Spain, W. Asia, and the Caucasus,” or like NatureGate’s minute pinpointing of “rocky outcrops and light-filled hillside broad-leaved forests in southern Finland.”** (Attempting to learn more about this mystery, my google search instead declared it historical fiction, that is, it recommended Deanna Raybourn’s A Veronica Speedwell Mystery Series, the seventh installation available for preorder from Penguin Random House.) Pressing on, I discovered an agreed upon native, V. americana, ranges from Alaska, through most of Canada, and all of the continental U.S. except for the most southeasterly states from Louisiana to Florida. Its pictures look just as close to that in my beds as pictures for V. officinalis and a dozen others. It is petite, oval and minutely toothed opposite leaves along stems barely crawling to 10-30 cm away, its even more delicate spike-like raceme reaching barely three to six cm tall with tiny specks of deeply purple veined whiteish to pale blue to violet four-petaled flowers. Your flowers!, as the U.S. Forest Service’s ‘Plant of the Week’ highlight of you explains, you are one of the few flowers that “are bilaterally symmetrical, meaning that only a single plane of symmetry exists that will bisect the flower into equal, mirror-image halves,” that is, bearing the same sort of symmetry human faces more or less possess, or, again, that is “Veronica flowers resemble a human face when viewed front-on.”† In other words, I am not sure exactly who you are, but you appear in the spring, petite in stature and delicate in leaf, and flocked in the loveliest variations of blue, purple, and white petite flowers, not to mention being reputedly edible (the V. americana and V. beccabunga species reportedly two of the few tart but pleasant tasting species), an old medicinal cure-all, and as a tea, beneficial to allergies—so I declare you a native, grace you with the name wildflower, and, except when you overly blanket my attempting to awaken perennials, will let you be across my property.††

* For the etymology, cf., “Origin of Some Common Names of Plants compiled by Nina Curtis on behalf of The Tortoise Table,” available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., for native status, Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 543; versus the following identifying foreign origins: Native Plant Trust, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Naturegate page, available ~~HERE~~.
†U.S. Forest Service Plant of the Week page, available ~~HERE~~.
†† Cf., Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 543; Native Plant Trust, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Naturegate page, available ~~HERE~~; The Spruce page, available ~~HERE~~; Gail Harland, The Weeder’s Digest: Identifying and Enjoying Edible Weeds (Devon, England: Green Books, 2012), 66-67.

14)

Dock (Rumex):
Docks belong to the Polygonaceae or buckwheat family—generally named, rather impolitely by Weeds of North America, as being “of little economic value,” with “many members of this family [being] weeds”—and to the genus we today call Rumex, following Linnaeus who was following Pliny’s naming, although overtime you have been scientifically dubbed as Lapatium and Lapathum, with your most general common names interchanging variants of ‘dock’ and ‘sorrel.’ Out of nearly 200, your main ‘weedy’ species include: Rumex obtusifolius, bitter or broad-leaved dock, sour dock and R. crispus, curly, yellow, sour, or narrow-leaf dock, although there is also the very visually similar R. salicifolius, or Mexican dock. These docks are native to Europe, with the first North American observation from 1748, which means they have long been naturalized here and even considered federally-listed invasives in Canada and Mexico, and state listed in Arkansas and Iowa. There are, however, two native docks one can find in Tennessee: the Swamp or Water Dock (Rumex verticillatus)—aptly found in swampy areas and identifiable as lacking the other docks’ wavy leaf edges and by its pedicles stretching two to five times its fruit lengths—and the Pale Dock (Rumex latissimus)—who, also aptly, bears paler leaves that are also smaller and more numerous, and its pedicles and fruits match in size. Ancient and Medieval herbals often interchanged your common names of ‘dock’ and ‘sorrel,’ the latter simply meaning ‘sour’ (and today mainly designating the species one may find for their herb gardens or in a nice bistro salad, like R. acetosa and R. sanguineus), but eventually settled on your often-compounded common name ‘dock,’ which has long been used for designating a variety of tall, coarse herbs, coming through Old English (docce) from the Proto-Germanic (*dokkon) akin to the Middle High German tocke, meaning ‘bundle” or “tuft” (and tied to our main noun sense of dock relating to the place where ships come to land).*

Aesthetically, docks are both rather nondescript and striking: our main varieties typically, but most variably, stand 15 inches to over five feet tall out of long, sturdy tap roots; their leaves range from blueish or yellowish to dark forest greens, and tend to long, lance-shapes, often with wavy edges that gently curl each, rising from low clumps up sometimes red-tinged stout and robust, mostly unbranched stems to make a most striking tower of long flower spikes that have individually inconspicuous petal-less greenish flowers but turn a beautiful dark, chocolate brown in late summer. Large specimens can produce up to 60,000 small seeds, which are capable of retaining about 52% viability after 50 years in the soil, some even germinating 80 years on.**

Given their long history and vast spread—their many species across the globe, but also each plant’s impressive collection of long-lasting seeds—it is not surprising to find a wealth of benefits to this common weed. Food and medicine are its most prevalent features, but it also doesn’t lack in truly curious and seriously ecologically beneficial qualities.

Medically, according to the medieval Old English Herbarium, dock helps “swellings that grow on the genitals.” This prescription requires the dock to be pounded into aged but unsalted grease to form a ball that is then tucked into a cabbage leaf and smoked on hot ashes; once the mix is well and toasty, it is to be fastened securely upon the swellings. A further chapter describes bodily stiffness being well alleviated by some dock mixed with aged pig’s grease and bread crumbs applied as a poultice to the sore areas.***

The British and Irish ethnobotanical research of David Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield further chronicle the broad-leafed dock’s mighty leaves to have been primarily and long prescribed for stings, burns and scalds, and staunching bleeding, but with a multitude of other medicinal uses using all parts of the plant, from alleviating the pain of headaches or rheumatism to cleansing the blood and preventing scurvy.†

In America, according to a 1917 governmental bulletin on the medicinal values of weeds, its author, Alice Henkel, describes how the late-summer harvested, split, and dried root of the three most widespread docks in the States—the yellow (Rumex crispus), broad-leaved (R. obtusifolius), and yellow-rooted water dock (R. britannica)—are beneficial for purifying the blood and as a remedy for skin diseases.†† A decade and half later, the ethnobotanist Huron H. Smith reported, in his 1932 study of the Ojibwe native Americans in the Wisconsin area, that the roots of curled dock (Rumex crispus) were frequently used for closing and healing cuts due to their considerable tannins, and that white people in the area would use the plant for its astringent properties.†††

Dock's chocolate-brown seed head, in late summer

Though they have quite a bite, docks have long been respected for their edibility. In fact, it was precisely this sharp, sour, lemony taste that made the herb so appreciated by the medievals. English medieval kitchen gardens grew a number of pot vegetables, although most commonly, cabbage; its mild taste in the winter “porray”—a meal with a consistency from soup to porridge-like stew to a mash made, typically, of greens, leeks, onions, garlic, and bread cooked long and slowly in a caldron—was “hotted up by the addition of seeds: linseed, barley and knotgrass, or wild pot-herbs such as nettles, mallows, docks and plantain.” The selection of these additions, or other exotic bits one might have about, was often called “compost”—obviously not the worm-filled pile of greens and browns so good on our gardens, but literally “a composition [of kitchen pot additions] always to have at hand”—and was determined according to the end of balancing temperature: hot and cool—such determined neither by taste nor the herbs’ preferred growing conditions, but by their givenness to one of the four humours/elements: blood’s heat and moisture, phlegm’s cold and moisture, yellow bile’s heat and dryness, and black bile’s cold and dryness—because food and medicine were wisely deemed most inseparable. Dock’s sour bite made it a superb ‘hot’ compost addition to one’s porray.#

Docks travelled to America incredibly early, but their value to the larder remained long respected, deemed necessary during the lean depression era, and were still around tables well after. For example, in 1950 Joseph A. Cocannouer declared that “Many southern housewives will tell you that no potherb can excel the dock in richness. And they are right. The yellow dock stands near the top of all potherbs in food value. Every garden should have a patch of this dock, especially since it requires no care once it has become established in a fairly damp spot.”##

In a new revival, Gareth Richards, writing in 2021 in the Royal Horticultural Society publication Weeds, notes their close relation to the common garden sorrels when citing their edibility—“if you nibble on them you’ll instantly recognize the similarity in their sharp, lemony taste”—especially their givenness to having young leaves gently steamed, and their similar nutritional profiles, being rich in various vitamins and minerals, yet also containing enough oxalic acid so, like spinach and others, should be eaten in moderation, especially if one has kidney problems or gout or rheumatism. The Spruce Eats site helpfully notes two features that identify the tastiest of leaves: ensure the ocrea, the sheath covering the leaf nodes, has not yet aged to brown, and look for their youth by mucilaginous leaves and stems. Early spring’s youngest of leaves, prior to the development of any flower stalk, will have a crisp lemon bite and are nice additions raw in salads, and young or older leaves (de-ribbed, if needed) can be steamed, boiled, or sautéed in stir fries, stews, or mixed in egg dishes or blended in cream cheese. In the early summer, Four Season Foraging suggests steaming or even pickling any still supple stems; in fall and over winter, one can harvest the seeds and roots.###

Ecologically, docks are a boon to wildlife, hosting the American copper butterflies (Lycaena phlaeas, plus the bronze and purplish) and feeding their larvae∆ as well as that of moths, including the American bird’s wing, ruby tiger, bicolored swallows, and olive angle shades moths; its seeds also feed various game and song birds, from bobwhites and redwinged blackbirds to various sparrows, occasionally some voles and mice, and its whole plants nourishing the less friendly sounding green dock beetles, rhubarb weevils, curled dock leaf-miners, dock aphids, and dock sawflies.∆∆ Richard’s Weeds most respectfully captures another of docks’ ecological import: “Deep-rooted and tenacious, docks are some of nature’s first responders when man messes things up. Craters of mud on building sites, roadworks, trodden-down soil that’s too oxygen-starved to support much life at all … docks will be there. … break[ing] through compacted layers of soil with amazing ease. When they eventually die, the field is opened up to all sorts of plants that couldn’t have grown there before.”∆∆∆

And, finally, the most curious tale in docks’ long history: Marsilio Ficino—Italian philosopher born in 1433, died in 1499, connected to the Medici family and moreover Florentine intellectual life, dedicated to priestly and medical studies and practices—reports on how “to capture the power of a star” in his treatise On Life, wherein one collects its symbols—its associated mineral and plant—within a ring of gold and silver to wear constantly. For example, the power of the constellation Corvus, the crow, in the southern celestial hemisphere, can be captured by embedding in one’s ring “sorrel [dock, Rumex] and henbane [probably Hyoscyamus niger] as well as frog’s tongue [unknown], for increasing boldness, though it may be toxic.”∆∆∆∆

* Cf., Gerald’s Herbal, part 2, Chap. 84: Of Sorrel; Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 604, 618-19; 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), 85; “Sorrel (n.)” and “Dock (n.3),” Online Etymology Dictionary, available ~~HERE~~, and ~~HERE~~; Michael L. Charters’ extensive compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~; on commonly eaten sorrels, cf. Grower’s Exchange, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 618-19; 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), 85.
*** 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), 122, 154, 165, respectively.
† David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2004), 98-99.
†† Alice Henkel, Weeds Used in Medicine, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers’ Bulletin No.188 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 13-17; 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), 381.
# Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 207-08; 208, 173; 185, respectively.
## Joseph A. Cocannouer, Weeds: Guardians of the Soil (Old Greenwich, CN: The Devin-Adair Co., 1950, 1980), 76.
### Cf., Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 167-69; The Spruce Eats page, available ~~HERE~~; Four Season Foraging page, available ~~HERE~~.
∆  Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlive with Native Plants ( Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2021), 319
∆ ∆  Illinois Wildflowers pages, available ~~HERE~~, and ~~HERE~~.
∆∆ ∆  Richards, Weeds, Op. Cit., 167..
∆∆∆∆  Marsilio Ficino, “To Capture the Power of a Star,” from On Life, 3.8, pp.351-52, in The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, trans./ed. Brian Copenhaver (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 351.

15)

Buttercup surrounded by clover blossoms, plantain, & creeping charlie.

The buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, contains over 1,800 species spanning far beyond the immediately conjured buttercup to include anemones & hellebores, clematis & larkspur (Delphinium), & monkshood (Aconitum)—the first & last here, as well as many of genera within the family, being very poisonous—also, it’s a family that contains no trees. Buttercups are good attractants of bees, including honey, mason, carpenter, and others; they occasionally are visited by butterflies, skippers, Syrphid and other flies; the seeds are occasionally eaten by turkey, grouse, and pheasant, snow buntings, and chipmunks, squirrels, and voles; cattle and other grazers are repelled by their toxins.†

The little and brief buttercup that appeared in my backyard was likely either the Hispid Buttercup (Ranunculus hispidus)—its common and species name meaning “bristly,” in reference to its hairy stalks—or the Early Buttercup (Ranunculus fascicularis)—its species name indicating its “clustered or bundled” leaves—both of which are native.†† However, it could also have been the non-native Hairy Buttercup (Rununculus sardous).††† All three species are common in the region, and bear similar looking flowers, the second’s only slightly smaller; while the Early species stays under a foot in height, the Hispid and the introduced Hairy can reach three feet—my lone buttery-sunny example vanished too quickly and has not reappeared so to make a firm identification.

Selection from “A Thought or Two on Reading Pomfrets”:

… Not oaks alone are trees, nor roses flowers;
Much humble wealth makes rich this world of ours.

Nature from some sweet energy throws up
alike the pine-mount and the buttercup;
And truth she makes so precious, that to paint
either, shall shrine an artist like a saint,
and bring him in his turn the crowds that press
Round Guido’s saints or Titian’s goddesses. …

–[James Henry] Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), English critic and poet

For quickly healing lunacy -- according to the Old English Herbarium -- ensure a supply of buttercups or meadow crowfoot (its batracion, and what we identify as the sandy-soiled or field-loving Ranunculus acris, the meadow, tall, or common buttercup); you must pick and then bind it around a sufferer’s neck with red thread during the waning of the moon in April and early October.*

If you haven’t that species handy, the Herbarium, either curiously or keenly, remarks on another species: Ranunculus sceleratus--the marshy-loving tall and toxically blistering cursed or celery-leaved buttercup--that “whoever eats this plant on an empty stomach will die laughing.”** (The text further warns, with something between cruelty and dark humor, to beware of leaving a poultice of this plant on the skin too long, and “If you want to test this as an experiment, bruise the plant and bind it onto your healthy hand; it will quickly eat into the flesh.”*** Galen concurs, more soberly, that Ranunculus “has caustic and ulcerative properties.”****)

* 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), 121, 152.
** Ibid., 151.
*** Ibid., 151.
**** Nicholas Everett, ed., tran., The Alphabet of Galen: Pharmacy from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), #42, p.175.
† Ross Bayton, Simon Maughan, Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists, 106; for biodiversity, cf., Illinois Wildflower page, available ~~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), 62.
††† Ibid., and North Carolina State Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; and the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~.

Herbal illustration (above): 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~~.

16)

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~~

crown vetch

*** “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.

17)

A spurge mat, with a sprig of threeseed mercury shooting up from within it

Spurge's first shoots stand more erect before flopping and growing into a good mat

* 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, in Apuleius Platonicus' Herbarium, ca. 1070-1100, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Ashmole 1431

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.**

18)

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 page, available ~~HERE~~; Plants For a Future page, available ~~HERE~~; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, 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~~.

19)

Dandelion in the garden, a most healthy specimen

Dandy flowers, fresh and spent

* 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:

Dent de lion (lion tooth) leaves peeking out around wild strawberry

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. 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.”****

The dandelion's magnificent seed poof

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.

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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~~

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* 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.††

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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

VA threseed mercury (left) next to palmer amaranth (right)

Palmer amaranth in flower

dubious honor of “most troublesome weed”—with the ‘reward’ of associated draconian language, like at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s page, “Legal Status: Prohibited – Eradicate,” and “Failure to comply may result in an enforcement action by the county or local municipality”— and when you were “accidently introduced to the southeastern US,” your arid roots (metaphorically speaking) were quickly shed in delightful discovery of ample, frequent water, perhaps sparking your genetic development of herbicide resistance.** While in my yard, you are under twelve inches in height, you are said to elsewhere grow up to ten feet tall, and so speedily, up to one inch a day. And, further despite your comparatively petite stature here, and your short, barely a couple inches, flower spike, as an amaranth, your seeds are still so many, reportedly a single plant can produce up to 500,000 of them. Also invisible in my specimens is the occasional whitish V-shaped mark—similar in shape and position to those leaf markings on the Pennsylvania smartweed (Polugonum pensylvanicum). Since you are aggressive, competitive, running amok around here, and your eradication has been called for, though you have reportedly developed a resistance to chemical excision, maybe it is most proper for us to eat you—you are an amaranth, after all, your leaves and seeds are edible (although, possibly toxic to livestock if your leaves’ nitrates levels are too high). Your seeds can be ground into a flour; your leaves can be cooked fresh like spinach or dried; and while not cultivated to have enhanced your traits, you ‘weedy’ amaranths are said to taste much like those purposefully planted as food crops, and share much of the same nutritional powerhouse makeup, e.g., your seed’s beneficial vitamin E and protein supplies.***

* Cf., Larry Steckel, “Pigweeds in Tennessee,” University of Tennessee Extension paper W068, available ~~HERE~~; “2020 Results for the U.S & Canada: Most Common and Troublesome Weeds in Grass Crops, Pasture & Turf,” available for download, ~~HERE~~: . Further news on this pigweed in Tennessee, cf., The Scoop’s article on herbicide resistance, available ~~HERE~~; and Our World’s article reevaluating pigweeds, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Minnesota Dept. of Agriculture Palmer Amaranth page, available ~~HERE~~.
*** Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; “Rethinking a Weed: the Truth about Amaranth,” article at Our World, available ~~HERE~~; “Monsanto’s bane: the evil pigweed,” Salon article, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Dept. of Agriculture Palmer Amaranth page, available ~~HERE~~.

“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.

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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.**

* For the etymology, cf., Michael L. Charters’ extensive compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf. North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; and GoBotany page, available ~~HERE~~.

“We habitually think of weeds as invaders, but in a precise sense they are also part of the heritage or legacy of a place, an ancestral presence, a time-biding genetic bank over which our buildings and tinkerings are just an ephemeral carapace. I still hoick them up when they get in my way, but it’s a capricious assault, tinged with respect and often deflected by a romantic mood.”

--Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 183.

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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.

Oxalis, called 'Alleluia' in the text below it, in the Liber de Simplici Medicina, ca. 13th c., MS Egerton 747.

After your flowery show, your banana-shaped fruits plump longer than your petals were, each standing upright like a candle held on the end of your stems, but prove to be canons exploding forth your ready seeds. Your most delightful characteristic, however, may be your dynamic sensitivity, opening wide to the mornings, curling up your delicate leaves at night. Most of these similar-looking species are North American natives, an exception being O. corniculata, although it is verging on naturalized. Oxalis may be quite dainty, but is described as an aggressive weed, growing fast early and late in the season, seeding heavily, and spreading by rhizomes and stolens. The different species have different light conditions, but most incline to a certain flexibility, and can grow in a range of soils, including nutritionally poor ones, and those that tend to dryness or are well-draining, but are just as likely to pop up in rich and watered garden beds. Prolific, you are also edible, your leaves, stems, flowers, and seed pods are tangy and somewhat sour—although, ought be sparingly eaten due to the high oxalic acid levels.** Huron H. Smith’s 1920’s ethnobotany study of the Menomini native Americans reports their use of any of these species of oxalis boiled whole so to provide a yellow dye.***

* For etymologies, cf., Bill Neal, Gardener’s Latin (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1992), 118; the Online Etymology Dictionary, available ~~HERE~~; and Wikipedia, available ~~HERE~~ .
** Cf., Minnesota Wildflower pages, available ~~HERE~~ and North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox pages, available ~~HERE~~.
*** Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1923, reprint 1970), 78.

“‘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

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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 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~~.

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* 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 ...

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Bindweed (Convolvus arvensis): Convolvus arvensis (‘resembling the morning glory’ plus ‘pertaining to cultivated fields’) has taken on nearly as many common names as stems and twigs and fence posts it takes over: bindweed, wild morning glory, creeping Jenny, sheepbine, cornbine, bellbine. You occasionally bring an inappropriate smile to my face, but it is my horror more than my being impressed that heightens upon learning that its horizontal roots and rhizomes can dig up to 14 feet down and 20-30 feet wide from its mother plant, which is wholly poisonous, and its seemingly infinite seeds are supplemented by the reproductive capacity of a mere two-inch root segment that can survive up to three years of more environmentally-friendly execution by light exclusion.

Hildegard of Bingen’s Cause et Cure recommends bindweed in her composite recipe for treating male infertility: “A male whose semen flows such that it results in infertility should take hasenzeppun [“catkins”], one third that amount of ertpeffer [“water pepper”], as much winda [“bindweed” (Convolvulus arvensis)] as one quarter of the ertpeffer and a small amount of common pepper. He should cook these ingredients with the liver of a young he-goat that is already sexually mature, adding a little raw, fat pork. Then he should discard the herbs and eat the meats, and also dip bread into the water in which the meats were cooked and eat it. He should frequently eat meat cooked as described, until his semen gains, from the juice of this meat, the strength to beget, if God’s right judgment allows this to happen.”*

*Margret Berger, ed., Hildegard of Bingen: On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Cause et Cure (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 110.

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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

yellowish-green flowers fade and as small white berries appear; and even otherwise, the season-long variability of its features is noteworthy, a single plant may bear smooth and toothed leaf margins, whole edges or sharp lobes, notably small to large leaves, fly up on massive vines, or be wispy stems—all making identification tricky, hence the safeguard of simply leaving any and all unrecognized three-leaved plants well enough alone.

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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.**) 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.
*** 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.”

--Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 7.

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.

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Pilewort (Erechtites hieraciifolius): You of the Asteraceae family, with a genus name dating from 1817 and possibly owing to its usually dissected leaves from erechtho, the Greek “to rend, break,” or to the fabled king of Attica, Erechtheus, or Gaia’s rather accidently conceived son by Hephaestrus’ attempt on Athena, named Erichtonius, from the Greek erextho, “trouble,” and ethon, “earth;” its most common common name, pilewort, is likely due to how its unusual bud-like flowers fade to seeds with white tufts that may have been used as pile in bedding or toys, although two other common names, fireweed and American burnweed, identify its preference for scruffy, disturbed habitats, especially those rather sunny and moist.* Pilewort’s leaves vary notably—lanceolate, ovate, oblanceolate, pinnately lobed or nearly full or irregularly serrated, alternate to spiraling on round stems, ranging from three to eight inches, lower ones come from short petioles, the upper are sessile, clasping close to the stem—so it is by the weed’s unique flowers that sure identification can be made. They arise from the uppermost stems as panicles of flowerheads, each much

like a small dandelion minus all the petal-show—well, nearly all, a hint of white fluff can be barely seen, flowers that appear as if they have already fallen to seed, which does soon happen, producing easily wind-riding wispy seeded tufts. These widespread North and South American native weeds tend to form clumps and branch, and can grow from two feet to well upwards of six, but they are an annual, and while producing far-flying seeds, they also tend to disappear from newly burned or disturbed areas when other weeds bully in too close. While the leaves have an unpleasant odor that keep munching mammals from grazing it, wasps of various types particularly appreciate its nectar. Its human edibility has been debated, with some being disturbed by an old study showing the presence of liver-damaging chemicals in it, others turned off by its rather foul odor, and others declaring it delicious.**

* Genus etymology from Michael L. Charters’ extensive compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~; and Eat the Weeds page, available ~~HERE~~; common names’ explanation from The Illinois Wildflowers information page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Illinois Wildflower information page, available ~~HERE~~; Native and Naturalized Plants of the Carolinas and Georgia page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; and Eat the Weeds page, available ~~HERE~~.

A toothier pilewort, in bud

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Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodium): likely C. album, although possibly C. suecicum given you broader, smaller leaves and less noticeable white fuzz on new ones, or C. missouriense, said to be native to the south-central U.S.. The genus, named by Linnaeus, is the Greek chen, “goose,” plus pous, “foot,” hence commonly called the goosefoots, in reference to their leaf shapes; other common names for the several species noted include pigweed, fat hen, and wild spinach.

This summer annual’s leaves are often alternate about the stems, typically one to four inches in length and a couple wide, in variable shapes, triangles to diamonds to egg-like to more lance sleek, some varieties tending to become lobed, on long, slender petioles, with irregular large toothing margins on most but the topmost, newest leaves, although the characteristic feature to identifying lamb’s quarters is their leaves’ pale, whiteish to blueish fuzz, occasionally taking on a pink hue barely ringing its edges—which appears mostly absent in the samples about my yard. The flowers are spike-like, branching arrangements, with some photographs almost reminiscent for me of a petite cream-colored astilbe. My specimens are rarely more than a foot tall, but there are many reports of lamb’s quarters towering out around six feet tall. Besides noticing it due its possible height, the plant is usually found in impressive numbers due to each’s ability to produce nearly 50,000 wind-pollinated seeds that can remain viable for 40 years (although Richard Mabey reports on some 1,700 year old seed from an archeological site being sprouted). Its long proliferation—Mabey notes archeological digs in England finding evidence of it as early as the Bronze Age (2000-500 b.c.e.)—may also be due to its most favored land (well disturbed, its tap root permitting it to survive even in very scruffy plots, and its ability to chemically suppress nearby growth of some crops like cabbages, tomatoes, and carrots) and for being a long favored human-foraged plant. Mabey proposes it may have been cultivated in the Iron Age (the end of the Bronze Age), as further evidenced the prolific usage of melde, its Old English name, for settlements in the U.K. through the Middle Ages. Being in the Amaranthaceae family, its seeds can be ground to flour or eaten similarly to quinoa (and are also well enjoyed by sparrows, fall field crickets, some grasshoppers, and other bugs), and its leaves eaten like spinach, raw or cooked (which are also (well, in raw form) enjoyed by many moth and butterfly caterpillars, and are notably capable of drawing away leaf miners from beet or chard crops). While high in oxalates and saponins, the leaves and seeds have impressive nutritional profiles, notably for their calcium, iron, and vitamins A and C.*

Another species of Chenopodium, the C. vulvaria, unkindly but aptly called the stinking goosefoot or notchweed, is wonderfully honored in Alice Oswald’s poem entitled by that former common name, beginning “Stinking Goose-foot has grown human / It could happen to anyone,” and including the endearing later stanza: “And the little mealy lines of his veins / show what a trouble it’s been / to be quite this strange.”**

* Cf., Michael L. Charters’ compilation of plant names, available ~~HERE~~; Global Biodiversity Information Facility page, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; The Brooklyn Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper-Collins, 2010), 32, 49-51, 79-80; on edibility, cf., the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners page, available ~~HERE~~; the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine page, available ~~HERE~~; Food Print page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Alice Oswald, “Stinking Goose-foot,” collected in Weeds and Wild Flowers (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2009).
Herbal Manuscript Image: A different species of Chenopodium, [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~~.

32)

Swamp rose-mallow and Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus moscheutos and Hibiscus syriacus): you are in the 5,000+ species Malvaceae family, and while both are often called hardy hibiscus, their common names typically blur together and include ‘mallow’ (‘Hibiscus’ being the ancient Greek and Latin name for a mallow-like plant), e.g., rosemallow, mallow rose, swamp mallow, marsh mallow, and to those variations the greater descriptions of crimson-eyed, eastern, wooly, and common, plus a range of others, like wild cotton, sea hollyhock, shrub althea; the former’s species name is derived from the Latin for ‘musk-scented,’ whereas ‘syriacus’ refers to its identification in Syrian gardens.

While the former are a little smaller and bushy, more water’s edge-inclined, these two Hibiscus look most similar, and, I discovered, are often confused for one another in collaborative gardening forums and commercial sites online, with the overlap of many of their common names, which are included on many reliable academic and governmental online resources, perhaps promoting confusion (further, many of the latter reliable sites permit users to upload photos that may not be rigorously vetted). While not a horticulturalist and therefore very tolerant of getting at least close in my identifications, the importance of precision really struck me concerning these Hibiscus because many feelings concerning ‘weeds’ fork dramatically if the plant in question can be called a native (and native plants will better support one’s native bugs), and, here, that is precisely what the former, H. moscheutos, is, whereas the latter, H. syriacus, has a native range from China to India. However, most are surprised to learn that our most common weeds, like plantain and dock, are not native, although can easily be called naturalized aliens, and my light but diverse research and attentive eyes have seen all manners of local wildlife enjoying them greatly. Whether H. syriacus can be called naturalized is a question I cannot answer, but the pollen-laden drunken bees I watch all over it does give the plant a reprieve in my reckoning.

Given the similarity of most of the two species’ characteristics, I will describe both together, adding differentiations when needed.

all photographs: rose of sharon

These stunning herbaceous perennials, which often resemble a bushy shrub or slim tree (commonly growing five to seven feet, although I have two long and lean rose of sharon that tower at 15 feet to seek the sun between some bradford calorie pears, cherry, and a tall wooden fence), bear attractive tooth-margined but notably variably shaped leaves, sometimes whole heart-shaped tear drops growing up to eight inches long and four across on the rose mallow, and the rose of Sharon, varying still, but more so about half the size and deeply cut with one to five lobes. But it is really the flowers that make these hardy and remarkably humidity-tolerant plants stand out: showy, beautiful flowers of four to six large delicately ruffling petals around a dramatic staminal column, quite resembling malvas or hollyhocks, but oversized, the rose of sharon trumpets the size of a cd about my yard with the swamp rose mallow and many hybrids getting up to the size of an lp, each lasting a day or two, but with a large bush supporting over a hundred buds, the show stretches from late summer to early fall. (The Plant Families guide describes their flowers as “often large, even gaudy, and make a striking addition to the yard,” specifically, “the tough-as-nails rose of Sharon shrub (Hibiscus syriacus) will bloom profusely, while cultivars of the cold-hardy rose mallow (H. moscheutos) will shock your friends with blooms the size of dinner plates.”*) Around my yard, the rose of sharon are pale lavender and white examples that are solid and variations with their deep fuchsia-magenta eye, however you will also find bright pink and red flowers on the rose mallows and others. I rarely come across a flower that is not vibrating with drunken bees—honeys, bumbles, carpenters, solitary—and these fantastic flowers are also attractors of hummingbirds, and host 28 species of butterfly and moth caterpillars. After its floral show, its large seedpods are also attractive, nearly sculptural, especially after the plant drops its leaves in fall, its pods drying to brown and cracking open to release its seeds when the cool weather comes. As some of its common names suggest, the rose mallow likes swampy soils, although both are quite tough, with the rose of sharon popping up in some of the driest areas of my yard, fighting it out for the sun amidst a scruffy, rocked and driveway edged honeysuckle and Euonymous clad property line. For those growing rose mallows along the shore or creeks, their thick and buoyant seeds—about 120 per each seed capsule—can travel far and be germinated far into the future, and numerous birds, from bobwhites to wood ducks, dine on the seeds, while red-winged blackbirds use them for nesting grounds. I have noticed the dramatically patterned and colorful bugs (six legged, long antennae, amber headed and red or white bodies well dotted, splotched, and lined in black, brown, white, and red) called Niesthrea louisianica, or simply the Hibiscus Plant Bug, decimating the dried seed pods—they are purposefully introduced sometimes to control another mallow called velvet leaf that has taken over crops—but these tough Hibiscus seedlings are still so rampant about my yard, I don’t interfere with the bugs’ seed feastings. While, as noted above, H. syriacus has a native range from China to India, despite being found profusely through the states, the Hibiscus moscheutos is native to the eastern U.S. from the Gulf of Mexico up to southern Ontario (although now found all the way to California), and was selected as 1997’s Wildflower of the Year for North Carolina and even winning a place on the Sundeck and Water Garden on Piet Oudolf’s High Line Gardens (upper level, W. 14th st. to W. 15th st.).** With the Hibiscus genus including natives from diverse regions, it is not surprising to find its mention in medieval European herbals—however, some may just be identifying its close cousin Malva moschata, musk mallow, which the RHS book Weeds calls “a beautiful native wildflower, one of the most garden-worthy of all,”*** or the Malva sylvestris, which Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition notes as so long and widely distributed whether it was native to the British Isles is unknown, and for being most confusingly and frequently called ‘marsh-mallow’†—for example, according to the Old English Herbarium, “Many authorities attest to the efficacy of this plant” for treating gout, rendering it healed after just three days of a poultice of hibiscus pounded into aged lard; moreover, “For any accumulation of diseased matter on the body,” all a cure needs is boiling this plant with cress, linseed, and flour, which accords with Pliny’s prescription and the British Isles folk medicine traditions for it being “a general cleansant of the system.”††

It is also worthwhile to note a final nominal challenge, beyond ‘hardy hibiscus’ or a variation on ‘mallow’ blurring these two species and others: it is with the specific common name ‘rose of sharon.’ Recall how the maiden in Song of Solomon sings “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens” (Songs 2:1-2, NRSV). She certainly did not self-identify as Hibiscus syriacus; instead, a footnote cites ‘rose’ to be the Hebrew חֲבַצֶּ֫לֶת (chabatstseleth), or ‘crocus,’ the Darby translation records her as “a narcissus of Sharon,” the Wycliffe and Douay-Rheims 1899 as the generalist “flower of the field,” with Biblical encyclopedias and scholars proposing this flower to be everything from a Narcissus Tazetta or N. serotinas, saffron crocus, anemone, or mountain tulip (with other ‘rose’ references beyond Songs veering from a bulb plant to perhaps being oleander or rhododendron), or as Eleanor Anthony King explains, a name “applied to a number of plants which blossomed on the lands [in Sharon, along the Mediterranean] after the rains.”†††

* Ross Bayton and Simon Maughan, Plant Families: A Guide for Gardeners and Botanists (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 155-56.
** Cf., Michael L. Charters’ compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~ and ~~HERE~~; The Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; U.S.D.A.’s Fire Effects Information System report on the species, ~~HERE~~; The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s page, ~~HERE~~; the North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, ~~HERE~~; on the bugs, cf., Mississippi State University’s Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; on its Highline location, cf., Piet Oudolf and Rick Darke, Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2017), 130.
*** Gareth Richards, Weeds: The Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants (London: Royal Horticultural Society and Welbeck Publishing Group, 2021), 122.
† David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2004), 107-10.
†† 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), 168, and David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2004), 108.
††† Eleanor Anthony King, Bible Plants for American Gardens (New York: Macmillan Co., 1941), 94; and, for the Hebrew, Biblehub’s Strong’s Concordance, available ~~HERE~~.

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Far from being poisonous, though, Parsnips--known as pars-neeps or pasternaks--were long cultivated in England by the Romans and known well thereafter in their wild state there and throughout France, making appearances in medieval recipes: occasionally in porray (a vegetable soup or stew) or compost (not the soil-making kind, but from Old French via the Latin compositus, ‘put together,’ a stew or preserved savory or sweet mix of cooked fruit and vegetables), but more often eaten fresh, cut up with apples and fried as fritters, or used to make parsnip wine.***

While I have yet to exactly identify the species of giant umbellifer this prodigious visitor is, the leaf and flower reminds me clearly of something in the wild carrot or parsnip (Daucus carota L. or Pastinaca sativa L.) genera ... both of these, the Old English Herbarium instructs, are a boon for the ladies—either for cleansing or aiding difficult births, both require simmering the herb in water and bathing in and drinking it.* A similar prescription of wild parsnip is recorded in Huron Smith’s ethnobotany research on the Ojibwe native Americans, but also noted that they were “quite cautious in using this poisonous root. They claim that a little bit is very powerful, while much is poisonous,” hence use only a touch mixed with other roots in a tea for “female troubles.”**

Please be aware, if you happen to come across a similar looking plant, but with purple or purplish splotches on its stem, you may be dealing with the skin-irritating and highly toxic invasive poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), and, attractive flowers aside, I highly recommend carefully disposing of the plant, especially before it sets seed.†

* 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), 184.
** 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.
*** Teresa McLean, Medieval English Gardens (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 209-10.
† Cf., King County Noxious Weeds identification page, available ~~HERE~~; and a general news alert from USAtoday, available ~~HERE~~.

P.S., A few months on, and I just saw a photograph of the farm from which I have bought many daylilies. It was a long, lovely row of gleaming golden flowers in full bloom, and speckled heavily through like sugar sweetening up fresh lemonade were lacy white umbellifers—I believe that I have discovered the origin of the unknown queen anne’s lace-looking specimens in my front, predominately hemerocallis, bed.

P.S.S., Now, in an August garden bed clean-up, I have discovered a reason for forbidding this unknown umbellifer’s reoccurrence (or, at least its ever setting seed again). ... To the right, you can see the reason: imagine just as heavy a smothering of prickly, scratchy, itchy, irritating seeds as on the gardening gloves all up and down one’s arms, throughout one's hair, covering one’s shirt, working their way under the hem, in the neck, up the sleeves, plus covering the jeans, clinging ferociously to socks, sticking in shoelaces ... and laundering and drying one’s clothes does no good ... they can only be removed one by one.

After the cruel ‘seed incident,’ I had to get to the bottom of its ontological status. Trying to identify this unknown umbellifer has proved a prodigious challenge … flip with me through the field guides’ regional options in the Apiaceae (or Umbelliferae) family:

Mountain Angelica (Angelica triquinata)—no, your umbels are too dense, your five-foot height just about right, but perhaps a peek tall;
Water Hemlock (Cicuta maculate)—no, thankfully, you viciously poisonous giant, your pinnately compound leaves are too whole and thin;
Poison Hemlock (Conium maculatum)—no, again thankfully, you who poisoned Socrates, your leaves are too lacy;
Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)—no, sadly, you have more delicate leaves, greatly dissected, your flowers are borne in majestic three to five inch wide umbels, held up and taut, with a speck of royal purple in the center;
Cow Parsnip (Heracluem maximum)—no, your leaves are too massive, up to 12 inches long pinnately or palmately lobed, and you are said to have a most rank odour;
Sweet Anise (Osmorhiza longistylis)—no, your scent is far lovelier than the above, and far more distinctive than my unknown flora visitor, although your umbels are more sparse like it;
Cowbane (Oxypolis rigidior)—no, your leaves are too smoothly margined, too long and lean of lances, your umbel is too sparse, too petite;
Big Mock Bishop’s Weed (Ptilimnium costatum)—no, your leaves are thread-like leaflets, and my front garden bed is no swamp or streambank;
Field Hedge Parsley (Torilis arvensis)—oh, wait … “parsley” eh?, hardly petite and tasty, but also known as the spreading field parsley … and widespread in Tennessee … this may just be a candidate, although, granted, mine did reach higher than your reported three-foot statures … but, like you, widely branched, leaves with one to three times pinnate form, coarsely toothed … like you, flowers were small and white, borne in terminal and lateral umbels on long peduncles so to form five to nine umbellets … the flowers on mine appeared at the end of May, hence just a shave earlier than your reported June to July … the only question that remains in my mind is that your guidebook portrait makes you look so slim, wispy and nearly graceful, whereas my specimens were tough: stout yet towering, bulky yet delicately buoyant.*

Oh dear, see all the lime-colored greenery?, it's late October, our first frost hasn't come yet, and ~something~ has sprouted ~all~ over the front bed ... just imagine if my gardening gloves and socks hadn't carried off an extra several hundred seeds ...

So, what else can I find about this likely suspect?
Field Hedge Parsley (Torilis arvensis): your genus, Torilis, means ‘engraved,’ designating the grooves of your fruit, hidden beneath your sticky bristles, and you are also commonly called spreading hedge parsley, and your absolutely perfect name, according to North Carolina’s extension service and iNaturalist’s text co-opted from Wikipedia: ‘tall sock-destroyer’—though, you irredeemably claimed, from me, two socks and two sets of gardening gloves. You are an annual in the Apiaceae /Umbelliferae family imported from your wide spread throughout Eurasia, however, there is one report, on USwildflowers page, suggesting you are also native to British Columbia. Evidently you are present enough there to encourage Washington state to declare you an obnoxious weed, and are listed as invasive by California, Indiana, Kentucky, and Georgia, with this codified in state law by Wisconsin. Here in the States, beyond in my front garden beds, you are found widely through disturbed areas, waste areas, thickets, cleared woodlands, and along railroad lines and roadsides, preferring full sun and average to dry conditions, often liking gravel, including limestone. Your taproot is long, your seeds are many and spread so, so easily by clinging to anyone or thing that ventures near. You are praised for attracting bees and butterflies, pollinating flies and wasps, your foliage notably delighting the Black Swallowtail’s caterpillars, and providing the occasional snack for mammalian herbivores; and yet you are widely and roundly condemned for your viciously sticky seeds and promiscuous spreading habits (although your airy form doesn’t terribly crowd out neighbors). Reports somewhat differ on some of your salient features. For example, for your stature: you are said to erectly yet sprawling-ly grow to everything from one to three feet tall, six inches to a foot wide, and on slender, round stems that are either highly branching or just occasionally so. Your leaves are said to range from three to six inches wide, and stretch beyond six inches in length, their form being pinnately or bipinnately or palmately compound with trifoliate leaflets, each one to two inches long, on long petioles, your margins are either toothy or lobed, and together form a triangular or fern-like alternate spray, with those closest to the flowers being lanceolate or narrowly ovate and lightly hairy. Your flowers are normally pictured as white, but sometimes pink or with a reddish tinge, your umbels (composed of five to nine discrete umbellets that each has roughly eight five-petalled and five-stamened flowers of about three millimeters wide) stretch from two to three inches wide, and your blooming period is said to range from early to mid-summer. Each of your flowers produces a fruit that is variously described as white, pink, rosy-green, whitish-green, green, brown, or copper, and shaped as an oblong bur-like seed with straight to curving bristles—though, every listing agrees on their prodigious number and insane adhering powers. Helpfully, you have been identified as closely resembling the wild carrot, although can be differentiated by your smaller stature, earlier bloom time, and by the sparse, short white hair on your leaves and stems.**

While this seems the likeliest candidate for my unknown umbellifer, my specimens grew to over four feet tall (at least 16 inches higher than the upper range in the guides), and appropriately had far more stout base stems reaching nearly ¾ of an inch in diameter. Perhaps mine were, though, simply quite happy in my full mid-southern sun and slightly underwatered garden beds.

* 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), 208-18.
** 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), 218; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; iNaturalist page, available ~~HERE~~; USWildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; USDA page, available ~~HERE~~; Invasive.org inventory, available ~~HERE~~; Texas Invasives database, available ~~HERE~~.

“To gardeners, the botanist’s definition of a flower—a shoot, modified for reproduction—may seem prosaic and hardly befitting the beauty of a hybrid rose or tropical orchid. But terse, factual, unsentimental descriptions are a part of scientific tradition. In truth, flowers are short branches bearing specially adapted leaves, and reproduction is the sole function for which flowers evolved; the pleasure they bring to people is coincidental.”

--Capon, however, may betray the unsentimental perspective by his attractive, descriptive writing immediately following:

“Flowers are also clever lures, not the innocent beauties poets would have us believe. Casting camouflage aside, most flowers ostentatiously advertise their presence. Brightly colored petals and fanciful shapes flash in vivid contrast to subdued, leafy backgrounds, beguiling insects and other small animals into close floral inspections. Floral aromas fill the air—whether sweet scents attracting bees or putrid odors to which carrion flies mistakenly flock. Convenient landing platforms, formed by petals, are provided for insects to rest from flight. And when the tiny animals are tempted to probe deeper into the flower’s structure, they become unwitting assistants in the plant’s reproductive process.”*

--Brian Capon, Botany for Gardeners (Timber Press), 175.

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Mystery Asteracea: This initially unknown mass invader swept through my front garden three years ago, and has happily returned here and there at its own overpowering whim each spring-to-autumn since … in the spring, their tough and furry stems sport melodramatically lobed leaves, but the summer stretches them into immense wispy towers that eventually erupt in billowy but so sunny of billions of flowers: surely they are within the Asteraceae family, possibly a Helianthus, but, no, most likely a wild species of Rudbeckia. They are the iconic little-kid drawing of a flower—daisy-like done up in pure sunny gold—and permeate my longest memories of sun-drenched late summer gardens, so I was not surprised to read, in Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners, of the genus’ naming by Linnaeus for his old teacher Olof Rudbeck, the plant’s literal stature matching that of the person and professional achievements of his professor, its flowers, he said, bearing “witness that you shone among savants like the sun among stars”*—a remarkable honor, especially considering how crotchety the brilliant Linnaeus was said to be.

Beautiful variation in flower colorings, even per stem, but clearly Rudbeckia-like

While the most common Rudbeckia is R. hirta, the black-eyed Susan—an absolute U.S. and Canadian native powerhouse of biodiversity and as utterly lovely as it is hardy, a one to two foot tall annual or short-term perennial with two to three inch yellow daisy-like flowers around a back center—I suspect my mystery specimen to be the native R. triloba, the brown-eyed Susan. This biennial or short-term perennial native to the eastern and midwestern U.S. differs from its relation, as indicated by its species name, triloba, by its irregular three-lobed basal leaves, and by its towering, two to five (some reporting up eight) foot bushy but airy stems and armies of much more petite, one to two inch flowers, their shorter but wider yellow petals surrounding a more notably coffee-brown eye. With so many blossoms per plant, the brown-eyed Susan can overpower small garden beds, but I have found that by mid

to late summer when they come into bloom, most of my other flowers are spent and their plants comfortably hunkering down in the dappled shade they cast. While the literature I have found consistently identifies their petals as classic gold, my volunteers sported a range of variegation, solid gold flowers dancing alongside those with solid to inner-ringed bright penny copper to currant to milky-coffee brown hues (the sort you may see on cultivated varieties of R. hirta, like var. ‘Autumn Colors’ or R. triloba ‘Prairie Glow,’ but with pure haphazard variety per stem and all the wild non-cultivated features of the common triloba). Their striking variations, and bulk and floral profusion, are remarkably long lasting, with the last blooms outliving the first couple frosts of early winter. Saving some from the cold, I had cut branches bloom well and last long in a vase inside, and, when spent, their seeds were easy to harvest for scattering back in new corners of the yard. Otherwise, while their late-season appearance can be characterized as “untidy” (some generally referring to them all season as “coarse, weedy”), I find them to provide nice winter-interest, and have long entertained by the happy finches working on the seed heads.**

Their innumerable blossoms unfailingly attract a diverse range of native bees and wasps, including bumbles, carpenters and diggers, cuckoos and leaf-cutters, Andrenid and Halictid bees, Sphecid and Vespid wasps, and even pollinating flies like Syrphids Tachinids, and thick-headed and bee flies.*** Douglas W. Tallamy’s inspiring Bringing Nature Home compellingly argues the case for native plants as a necessary foundation supporting, well, really, all life on our planet, but supplements his entomological case by appealing also to our aesthetic sides—doing this especially well with how Rudbeckia are doubly queens of the butterfly garden: “Along with their attractive floral display and nectar, rudbeckias support the reproduction of dozens of species of Lepidoptera [butterflies and moths], including the pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos), silvery checkerspot (Chlosyne nycteis), and wavy-lined emerald (Synchlora aerata).”**** On my marvelous volunteers, I can confirm the favor the Silvery checkerspots pay it, but have also seen the Checkered white (Pontia protodice) and Gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) butterflies drunkenly dancing between the golden flowerheads, as well as the equally captivating scamperings of Goldenrod soldier beetles’ orange and black bodies from flower to flower. Supporting biodiversity has never been so easy or lovely with the arrival of these billowy giants.

* Andrea Wulf, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 124.
** On Black-Eyed Susans, cf.: Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; on Brown-Eyed Susans, cf.: Wisconsin Horticulture Division of Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers, available ~~HERE~~; Grow It Build It blog, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~.
*** Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~.
**** Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2021), 115.

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unknown weed

I had thought (wished?) on first encounter that this unknown weed was going to prove to be like the wild rudbeckia above, given its deeply lobed leaves and quick height ... but its stem is fairly smooth (although not woody, for otherwise its weirdly lobed leaves look akin to sassafras!) and its leaf width and veining is notable different ...

It has reappeared for five summers in different spots around the property ... it is very challenging to pull ... it grows well over waist-high ...

I decided that I was just going to have to wait for a bloom (this IS how I keep getting in trouble, n.b. the unknown umbellifers listed above, whose one became fifty ...) but I could not stop searching ...

So, with my mother’s aid, we scoured plant books, weed id services, websites, exploring possibilities of this mystery plant’s potential links with or being:

Confirmed ... rambunctious squirrels bounding through the figs broke it in half in early September, but its response was to quickly send forth two long, yellowish flower spikes.

someone in the Nightshade family, the Atropa genus -- given, like Atropa belladonna, their immense possible heights, and their long-viable seeds, like this unknown plant's five summer repeat appearances all around the yard ... ??
perhaps in the Malvaceae family -- like the Virginia mallow (Sida hermaphrodita) or the tall mallow (Malva sylvestris), given, again their over waist-height and their lobed leaves ... ??
maybe in the Brassicaceae family, namely the Cardamine genus, the toothworts, who comprise couple hundred species -- some also bearing lobed leaves ... ??

But, now I have a new, most likely suspect:

Giant Ragweed (Ambrosia trifida): also called great ragweed, kinghead, crownweed, wild hemp, horseweed, bitterweed, tall ambrosia, buffalo weed ... so far, this is my best guess as to my mystery plant; from what I can see so far in its growth, its specs—two to ten inch leaves are opposite (although can be alternate at top of tall specimens) with deep three-to-five lobes, reaching up to six meters in fertile soil—seem to neatly match. While its being an annual threw me—I have had the plant for five years in the landscape, but have yet to see it flower—its seeds can remain viable in the soil for at least nine years, and I know my topsoil, brought in five years ago, was horribly root and chigger-full dredge from scrubby old crop and pasture fields, excatly where such a beast prefers to find itself. Giant ragweed, like its cousin common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), is the major pollen contributor to early fall hay fever. If two to five inch greenish-yellow flower spikes appear soon, I will know for sure.*

* Richard Dickinson and France Royer, Weeds of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 56-59.

36)

Sweet Annie (Artemisia annua)
So, it is not fair to call sweet annie a weed—according to a great online herb retailer, ‘The Grower’s Exchange,’ it’s “a wonderfully aromatic annual that will scent your whole yard with sweetness!”*—but it has made my inventory as an un-planted visitor who has volunteered itself sporadically over the last couple of summers in my fieldstone walk, yard, and garden beds. A ‘welcomed weed,’ perhaps, better expresses it; sweet annie is a delight, even when she appears in the most awkward of places. As the retailer’s quote and her common name suggest, sweet annie is remarkably sweet: her scent, her feathery, ferny, cut leaves that billow—especially notable when she reaches her full up to six foot height.

Her form is fairly erect and branching, typically three to six feet tall in the garden, her light green stems staying fairly slender despite the heights she can reach. Her leaves are alternately spaced along her stems, some lower ones reaching up to six inches, those at her tips, rather petite; all are pinnately divided

into narrow lanceolate lobes with the occasional cleft or tooth about their margins. Her late-summer floral panicles are narrow and under two inches in length, held on her upper stems, branching into racemes of tiny, drooping green-white-yellow flowerheads; each flower is barely two millimeters, and rather scentless, not needing to compete with the lush, rather fruity smell of her foliage. Her flower fruits into achenes of the tiniest seed that can drift off on the air, so to reproduce elsewhere and widely. While she prefers full sun and well-drained and fertile soil, her volunteers pop up in all manner of locations--i.e., she is only an annual, but a prolific self-seeder, sometimes rather miraculously appearing, even in dry gravel!, as she does here, for I have never planted her in this yard, but comes she does, again and again. Despite her steady appearance for me, however, she is not considered invasive, and only sometimes named as naturalized, with most instances of her escape from cultivation being short lived.**

As an artemisia, or wormwood, she is as easy and tough an annual as wispy soft and scented. This same delightful scent is also a fairly effective repulsive to garden pests, and proves to be a nice smelling repellant as a dried herb for sachets in drawers and closets. She also seems to appear frequently dried in homemade wreaths, crumpled for scattering as a carpet herb before vacuuming, and being hung in showers or steam rooms. Her pest repellant scent is matched by her bitter foliage, hence she suffers hardly any munching by mammal critters or beneficial insects, her flowers are petite and wind-pollinated, so do not really attract pollinators, and her seeds are so minute, birds seem uninterested. However, she is a rather famous herb for her human medicinal properties. (Any google search on her requires your digging at least several pages in to find an actual herbal guide rather than medical journal or holistic touts.) She was introduced to the U.S. from Eurasia as a medicinal herb, and has a long, 2,000 plus year history of uses, and frequent, current investigation into more. Her main indications have been for relieving pain and combatting fever; her most famous contribution is in helping to treat malaria. In 1970 the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou discovered her to have two compounds remarkably potent against the disease, which were then made into the artesunate drug chiefly used today, and for which he earned a partial Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2015. The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges the efficacy of some sweet annie herbal remedies against malaria due to the presence of its chemical artemisinin (what the journals properly call ‘a lactone sesquiterpene endoperoxide’), although does not recommend its homemade use (which may be under-dosing patients, and could lead to malaria developing a resistance to the plant’s active chemical). Derivatives of this chemical in sweet annie has been investigated for treatment of COVID-19 (including an alternative therapy in drink form publicized by Madagascar’s president, and several more promising-in-the-lab tests by German and Danish scientists showing its anti-viral activity, as well as trials by the University of Kentucky with Mexico, tests by China, and tests of a different species in South Africa), but according to the WHO, initial various trials produced little to no effect and thus they say there is yet no evidence for its effectiveness. There are numerous other traditional usages of the herb, however, many of which have led to rigorous empirical testing of its biochemical composition leading to verified findings of its anti-hyperlipidemic and anti-cholesterolemic (agents for lowering cholesterol), anti-plasmodial (an agent against malarial-causing parasites), anti-convulsant (reductive of convulsions), anti-inflammatory (reductive of inflammation), and anti-microbial and anti-viral (against microbes and viruses) properties.***

While it is impressive how beneficial she has been and may prove to be in our medical investigations, my delight in her is more immediate: the direct sensual conflagration of soft, wispy touch, tinging bright scent, her remarkable color, her newest seedlings merging a baby spring green with glinting silver, her fascinating form that grows so tall but stays so nimble. She is a weed I don’t ever pull.

* The Grower’s Exchange page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Gardening Know How page, available ~~HERE~~; Flora of North America database, available ~~HERE~~.
*** Cf., Mother Earth Living, available ~~HERE~~; World Health Organization, WHO Position Statement (June 2012), “Effectiveness of Non-Pharmaceutical Forms of Artemisia annua L. against malaria,” available ~~HERE~~; BBC News, “Coronavirus: What do we know about the artemisia plant?,” available ~~HERE~~; Axelle Septembre-Malaterre, et al, “Artemisia annua, a Traditional Plant Brought to Light,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 21, 14 (2020): 4986, available ~~HERE~~; University of Kentucky HealthCare news, available ~~HERE~~; WedMD page, available ~~HERE~~.
Herbal Illustration: Artemisia annua, Jan Kops (1765-1849), ed., Flora Batava (Haarlem: Vincent Loosjes, 1906, originally compiled in 1807), part 22, plate 1697, text and poorly reproduced illustrations available ~~HERE~~, specific plate nicely reproduced ~~HERE~~.

37)

Mulberry Weed (Fatoua villosa)
Classified in the Moraceae, or mulberry, family, your genus contains only three species, and yours is furthermore considered an oddity for being the family’s only herb, i.e., being neither a shrub nor tree. Beyond your family membership, your common name is due to your resemblance to a mulberry tree seeding, although you have also been dubbed the less attractive ‘hairy crabweed.’ You are also said to somewhat resemble false nettle (Boehmeria cylindrica) (which, too, likes moist shade, but has opposite leaves with more pointed, toothy margins) and starts of the Asteraceae family’s hairy galinsoga (Galinsoga spp., especially G. quafriradiata) (which also love to appear in container nurseries, but has hairier leaves and develops a petite white petaled and yellow-centered daisy-like flower), although I first took you to be a lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) seedling, as I have a prolific, less wrinkly variety that likes to pop up all over the yard (however, the lovely tea herb has mint’s characteristic square stems and more leaf veining). As an east Asian native, mulberry weed arrived in North

America—especially the southeastern U.S.—in the latter half of the 1900’s—your first report was in Louisiana, variably cited as in the 1950’s or 1964, but thought to predate that—presumably by nursery stock contamination, by which you still frequently enter private gardens, although, as a voracious seeder, you can quickly free yourself from them to spread into surrounding grounds. On typically slender and typically short (but capable of up to two and a half feet tall), erect, and occasionally lightly branching and lightly hairy stems, your leaves are fresh spring green hearts or triangles with neatly petite scalloped margins (sometimes slightly more pointedly toothy) reaching out from half again as long petioles. Your inconspicuous individually white or light green flowers that collectively appear purple to brown can happen when your stature is still at seedling heights and form in under an inch diameter feathery clusters in your leaf axils. Your seeds are many, ripen quickly, occasionally display dehiscent behavior (exploding forth to sail nearly four feet away), and can germinate in a mere 30 days anytime from April to late November with your resultant seedlings producing their own new seeds within 12 days after hitting their two-leaf growth stage, thus each patch producing up to five generations in a season. Understandably, then, you are listed as an invasive in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia. You prefer moist, shady areas, and your seeds require light to germinate, hence can be controlled by heavy mulching or the quick removal of your seedlings that attempt mulch-top growing sites. It is recommended to pluck and dispose of seedlings as soon as spotted, since they may go to seed so young.*

Information on your North American biodiversity is scarce, with the only mention of a plant-insect relationship from your native lands involving two types of aphids, which enjoy eating your leaves. In my own yard, I have yet to see any critters attracted to or bother with you, not a single hole or nibble in any of your leaves. Although, according to the Tropical Plants Database, you do have a history of human medicinal uses in your native realms, with your leaves chewed to aid stomach aches, and your roots used as a depurative, diuretic, emmenagogue, febrifuge, (i.e., something to free one from impurities, increase urination, to stimulate menstrual flow, and reduce fevers, respectively), made into a gargle for treating swollen gums, and a sort of poultice for children with weak legs; however, your root has also been found to contain a phototoxin, which may have helpful medical uses, although also can cause dermatosis.**

* North Carolina Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; Invasive Plant Atlas, available ~~HERE~~; Native Plant Trust Go Botany page, available ~~HERE~~; B. W. Wells Association Rockcliff Farm page, available ~~HERE~~; and University of Florida IFAS Extension page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Tropical Plants Database, available ~~HERE~~ (which cites Plant Resources of South-East Asia (PROSEA) site, available ~~HERE~~); Bplant.org page, available ~~HERE~~.

38)

Red Mulberry Tree (Morus rubra)
Now, please do forgive me for saddling you with the name “weed,” for you are a native tree, a mighty one—your other common name, ‘moral’, perhaps heightening my guilt—but you did appear in my yard uninvited and, I dare say, in an unfortunate location. (I am flattered that, while you are a prolific self-seeder, you chose my yard, as you prefer rich, moist, well-drained soils in full sun -- were you elsewhere, I would leave you, care for you, share your fruits with all the birds and critters, watch you grow to your average 30-36-feet or up to 60-foot possible heights.)

Your growth develops you into a two-foot diameter, rather short, coppery-brown trunked but broad, rounded, densely crowned tree; all parts of you have a milky sap with a low toxicity. Your deciduous, soft, lightly haired leaves are remarkably freestyle, toothy-margined, up to eight inches and roughly ovate to heart-shaped with elongated tips and with or without multiple, irregular lobes, which turn golden in autumn. Your springtime flowers hang in small, greenish cylindrical drupes. Your fragrant, edible-when-ripe fruits make you look like a blackberry vine willed itself into becoming a tree. They transition from unripe green through red to near-black, but are larger, more elongated than vined blackberries. These berries have long been used by Native Americans and people especially throughout Appalachia fresh or cooked into breads, pies and cakes, and preserves, dried for snacking or baking, pressed for beverages and fermented for wine. Medicinally, you have a history of aiding dysentery, and as a worming agent or a laxative and emetic. Your wood serves well outside or in, from fence posts to furniture; the fibrous inner bark of your shoots was woven into cloaks by the Choctaw people. You are the host for the larva of the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) and, possibly, for the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), and feed all sorts of other butterflies, birds, especially catbirds and mocking birds, and critters, like squirrels, foxes, opossums, and raccoons.

A tree care person just confirmed your identity, but looked rather aghast I had yet to cut you down and dig you out. Instead of your chosen spot two inches from my driveway and four from a small stone wall and property line, I wonder if I could transplant you? Perhaps elsewhere, near, and you could grace me with some fruit and split the attention all the local birds and critters pay to devouring my figs … it might be worth the shot: a fall project.*

* Cf., Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~.

39)

Hackberry Tree (Celtis occidentalis):
While we are on the topic of trees … please do not misunderstand me: I am not calling you weeds per se, and mean no disrespect (I love my trees immensely) … but … when it comes to the spring, and then again in autumn, bonanzas of uninvited greenery pop forth in my garden beds, and the good percentage therein are hackberry (and some elm and oak, addressed next) saplings. I fully appreciate your desire to make my postage-stamp sized yard and beds into a forest—and there is compelling argument, environmentally, that I ought to let you—but besides the three large and two medium trees on my property, and dozen more surrounding me on all sides, I’d really like a little land to plant to (at least more of) my whim. So, let me explain my sighing complaints (beyond your excessive barrage of babies) and how I’ve come around to also praise you.

Admittedly, Celtis occidentalis, common hackberry, you did not immediately steal my heart. At first take, you were scruffy, wiry looking greyish towers, dangerously tall to be so thin, warty ridged, corky and lichen-covered, frequently dropping half-rotted branches; your little elm-like leaves are loved by aphid and scale, and they crisp early, barely even turning dull yellow, then fall like snow to show off their mass of nipple galls. But, living U-ringed by five massive trees, I came to better appreciate you. First, to ensure you wouldn’t poison my voracious pups, I investigated your fruit—drupes honestly mistakable for a nut, a little purplish thin skin wrapping a mini-marble-sized case that takes a bit of force to crack. Quite the opposite: birds are crazy for the nutritious fruits, from wild turkeys and quail, cedar waxwings, woodpeckers, and robins, as are deer and small mammals, and edible for humans, too, with perhaps the best, oddest, description on a forager site: “A wild tree fruit that eats like a nut loaded with carbohydrates, protein and fat, and tastes a bit sweet like squash with a hint of dates.”* You hackberries, as large native trees, are also fine supports for good bug-life—and this formed reason two for my eventual respect and straight-up fluttering summertime heart: you are the host for the

phenomenal Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampa celtis) butterflies, who flit, skim, and swoop about in uniforms in my kind of style: tawny brown sveltely adorned with black wingtips, zigzags, and polka-dots, offset with creamy-white bright spots (wild and sleekly chic at once, pictured at right). Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home further enlightened me that you host a number of other stunning butterflies’ caterpillars, notably Mourning Cloaks (Nymphalis antiopa), Snouts (Libytheana carinenta), and Tawny Emperors (Asterocampa clyton).**

Hackberries, despite staying more slender (usually one to two feet, or up to three) can grow to up to around 70’ feet tall, spreading about as wide on long, arching but upright branches, and while preferring moisture, they are tough, with a deep root system, thus can survive in many and less than fine areas and conditions. While its wood is not terribly useful for building or furniture, early colonists would use it for barrel hoops or occasional homestead flooring. Several resources mention widespread Native American use of hackberries for food, medicine, and rituals.***

* Cf., Forager Chef, available ~~HERE~~.
** Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland: Timber Press, 2009), 318-19.
*** Cf., Nebraska Forest Service, available ~~HERE~~; Arbor Day Blog, available ~~HERE~~; Missouri Botanical Garden, available ~~HERE~~; Texas A&M Forest Service page on hackberry nipple galls, available ~~HERE~~; Sciencing page, available ~~HERE~~; Morton Arboretum, available ~~HERE~~; Your Leaf, available ~~HERE~~.
Image above: Nipple galls on leaves and marble-sized dried & cracked hackberry stone. Image right: one of innumerable seedling volunteers.

40)

Elm (Ulmus, maybe American elm, U. americana, or Siberian U. pumila):
Given the devastation Dutch Elm disease wrought on you, I stutter ever calling you a weed, but, in my defense, you do appear in numbers terribly shocking given the one single arm of the one single momma tree that arches over my back fence, and from which I presume you all come, all spring through all fall. With arguably seven or eight native North American species (of which five can be found around Nashville) and around 35 altogether, plus a number of cross-bred varieties, identification of the miniature grove beyond my tall, back fence proved a challenge. From my imposed distance, I can tell that your bark is dark greyish-brown, deeply furrowed, your several inch long leaves are jaggedly toothed and pointed ovals, bright to dark green and turning gold and falling now in late autumn, but last spring I remember your nearly round papery seed cases. This description rules out very few species; your squeezed-in siting obscures your natural height and canopy shape; you bloomed in spring, so that rules our your being an endemic September elm (U. serotina); I see no ‘wings’ on your branches, suggesting you are neither a native rock elm (U. thomasii) nor a native winged elm (U. alata); per your bark, I presume you are neither a Chinese/lacebark (U. parvifolia) nor Japanese (Zelkova serrata) elm, as their bark is flatter, the former flaking to orange patches, the latter much smoother, nor a cherry-bark elm (U. villosa), as your bark looks nothing like a cherry’s, and I am uncertain about but disinclined to red/slippery elm (U. rubra), as pictures suggest their bark is a bit more flaking; and per your leaves, I suspect you are not a cedar elm (U. crassifolia), for your leaves are more pointed. I paused over the description of the Siberian elm (U. pumila) for its shorter mature heights (50-70’), desire for moist, well-drained soil (as you are growing alongside a stream/drainage canal), your tendency to weak branches (as you drop a lot over my fence), and aggressive nature (given the number of saplings I have around)—but remain wholly uncertain. I paused, too, perhaps hopefully, over the American elm (U. americana), which is also inclined to wetter sites, and especially shows your sort of deep, diamond-shaped bark furrows, and similar looking leaves.* Ultimately, I haven’t any certainty who you might be beyond being an elm.

The futile search to identify you, however, has greatly increased my appreciation for elms. Douglas Tallamy registers the sad irony of how our sorrow at losing so many elms to Dutch elm disease led to a worse sorrow at then importing so many Asian elms, which do not support the wildlife our native trees did, and were probably the way the disease first arrived anyway.** Native species, on the other hand, support a number of butterflies and moths—notably mourning cloaks and question mark butterflies, and imperial, polyphemus, banded and white-marked tussocks, and yellow-necked caterpillar moths—including some who are strictly elm specialists, like the master of blending-in, the double-toothed prominent (Nerice bidentata), whose caterpillar back appears just like the jagged teeth of elm leaves, hence mimicking the leaf as perfect and whole (and thus he as not mere bird food) while he nibbles his way to his metamorphosis stage.***

Perhaps if I permit a few of your saplings to grow up, I can watch for any caterpillar activity, and perhaps will then know at least if your species is native or not.

* Cf., Leafy Place page differentiating species of elm, available ~~HERE~~; Vanderbilt’s page on the September elm, available ~~HERE~~; The Morton Arboretum Siberian elm page, available ~~HERE~~, and on the American elm, available ~~HERE~~; USDA publication on Rock elm, available ~~HERE~~; Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center page on winged elm, available ~~HERE~~; Nashville Tree Conservation Corps American elm page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page on American elm, available ~~HERE~~, and on Red/Slippery elm, available ~~HERE~~.
** Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland: Timber Press, 2009), 174.
*** Ibid., 174-75, 317-27.

41)

White and Southern Red Oaks (Quercus alba and Quercus falcata):
You have volunteered about my property, but you, no, I cannot call you weeds: your appearances only number in a handful; you are wanted here (even if not exactly where you have appeared); and ‘weedy,’ despite the health and heights of some (looking at you, giant ragweed), typically implies one “noticeably lean and scrawny,” and while you are now scraggly and barely knee-high, your average maturities find you capable of towering from 50 to over 100 feet tall*--so, really, you just made the weed list by fact of your surprising appearances and so I may sing your praises.

The soul of that praise, most simply, is captured by Douglas W. Tallamy in the beginning of his The Nature of Oaks, a thoroughly engaging, easily accessible while comprehensively researched chronicle: “Oaks support more forms of life and more fascinating interactions than any other tree genus in North America.”** His fascination, he shortly thereafter relates, was his surprise in finding, after disturbing the soil to remove invasives on his land, white oak saplings popping up in spring, despite no mother tree nearby. It was blue jays, he realized, who had likely brought a cache of acorns to hide away over winter, and then forgotten about, in his neatly upturned ground. The insight resonated with me—not so subtly aided by the extreme caws from my own very opinionated blue jays regulars—for I had found a strip of oak saplings (two whites, two reds, one likely a southern red) that spring, though there were no other oaks within at least two blocks. I was surprised, honored, delighted … except by their placement: barely a foot apart in a scruff of ivy-full soil tightly hemmed between a driveway and stonewall topped by a broken wire and euonymous shrouded fence. If only my blue jays had thought to hide their acorns on the other, spacier side of the property, or even in the middle of the weedy-green jungle that I call my lawn.

Wary of transplant—as oaks are quick to produce a critical long taproot—and yet inspired by their new presence, I tried to emulate the jays when I found several oaks several blocks away seemingly masting, as the ground was covered in acorn mana, and pocketed a handful. I carefully prepared loose-draining soil in pots, planted up each, sealing each in a mesh bag to keep the critters from helping themselves—or so I thought. Two weeks later: each rope bag’s bow-tied drawstrings were unlaced, pots pulled and dumped, soil spread across my walk, nuts likely in the bellies of my hoard of squirrel and chipmunk minions. I can only hope some willed to delay instant gratification, and next spring will show the peaking or rounded crowns of oak leaves in better locales.

Why the fuss for oaks? In fall, with a rowdy gang of various songbirds, I spotted my first golden-crowned kinglet, flitting feverishly amongst the leaves of my fig jungle. Tallamy, too, talks of this little hyperactive puff-ball birdie, namely that he is entirely insectivorous. While my phenomenological experience is that my yard teems with insects, it is neither mosquitoes or chiggers that are helpful; rather, it is the caterpillars that a mighty oak can house over winter that would supremely support my visiting kinglet and kin. Tallamy explains that “many species of moths, particularly inchworms …, spend the winter in the caterpillar stage … [they] stop eating and either hide among the nooks and crannies of the tree’s bark, or stay where they are on small branches and do absolutely nothing. … The branches of trees in winter that look so bare are actually overwintering sites for caterpillars that sustain insectivorous birds like kinglets and brown creepers, as well nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, and several woodpecker species”—and, he adds, “This is a cautionary note for us bird lovers: simply keeping our feeders filled with sunflower seeds during the winter is not sufficient to sustain even our most common birds. We also have to plant the tree species that support the caterpillar stages of the moths that seed-eating winter birds depend on all winter long. … [And] oaks do this better than any other tree genus in most U.S. counties.”*** And, obviously, it is not just for the hard days of winter that the birds need our insect-supporting trees, as nearly every bird species rears its young on the gamut of creepy-crawlies. Thus, Tallamy’s point is clear: “we have removed more than half of the forests on earth and, not surprisingly, insect populations have declined globally by at least 45% since 1979. … it should be no surprise that with insect declines come bird declines. There are now 3 billion fewer birds in North America than there were just 50 years ago. …”†   Trees, especially oaks, are fundamental bases for the whole web of the easily overlooked creatures that feed the whole chain, all the wonders of the lovely fluttering and flittering and chirping and singing ones we so love. No matter all the green wildness about my yard, I know so little of it contributes much at all—for they are mostly not native plants—to supporting the moments of nature I can’t dare think of living without. Tallamy, again, explains succinctly why this is: “The differences [in benefit or not] between native and non-native plants are easy to explain. Because plants lace their leaves with nasty-tasting or toxic chemicals to keep herbivores from eating them, insects that eat plants have had to adapt to these chemical defenses both physiologically and behaviorally. This has been such an evolutionary challenge, however, that most insects have only been able to circumvent the defenses of one or two plant lineages that share common defenses. In other words, most insects have become very good at eating a few plants but are completely unable to eat most plants.”††   The speed at which a plant can come from overseas and take over a local area isn’t even a whisker-twitch in terms of evolutionary adaptation. The bugs my little kinglet needs are not to be found munching away at the calory pears behind or rose of Sharon about the yard. But, given the research—despite still having a long way of watching and tabulating to go—it is clear that native host plants are the heart needed for our ecosystems, and that our oak trees lead the pack.

They also stand tall in our imaginative history. Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants chronicles how “one species or another” of oak “has usually been around wherever northern people have lived, and their general all-around woodiness made them pillars of regional culture,” from making “Viking warships and Christian churches” to being “a symbol of the ancien régime” during the French Revolution, forming the roof of Westminster Hall and, from its leaf galls, the ink for Leonardo da Vinci; as to its own form the author discovered that da Vinci was mostly correct in supposing the tree to have a basic growth pattern obedient to physical and mechanical laws, growth exemplifying the Golden Ratio, branches ascending from five to three to two, even in his own oak he had “always assumed to be an epitome of anarchic growth.”††† Plotting this tree of impact of this great tree family, Mabey proposes various “cultural types” the oaks embody: “the workaday oak of the commons,” “the oak of the pastoral idyll,” and “the oak of mythic creativity”—the last mostly seen not in landscapes but The Green Man representations throughout old churches and graveyards, and all forms of human arts those sparked and haunted.§

The wide influence of oaks may be, in part, due the genus’ size. Mabey reports how the Quercus family is “opportunist, mutable, full of hybrids and intensely local varieties,” giving us between 400 and 600 species of oak globally, and so “the family repeatedly overthrows cultural and botanical preconceptions,” like how Britain uphold its “heart of oak,” but their true arboreal home is Mexico, which has 109 wholly unique and a total of 160 species, many of which are aesthetically most unlike our classic North American-mental picture of a grand oak.§§ Most locally here, in my own yard, have appeared a type of white and another red oak.  Southern Red Oaks grow across the south-east of the country, are especially quick growing for an oak, yet just as long-living, and can grow on the most degraded soils here (even if producing a scruffier tree). Like other oaks, they provide nesting sites for birds (chickadees, wrens, hairy and downy woodpeckers, flickers, owls, bluebirds) and host important insects for their babies, offer fruits to a massive range of feathered and furry friends (wood ducks, turkeys, deer, raccoons, mice, squirrels), and notably host the caterpillars of the banded and white m hairstreak butterflies. According to another of Tallamy’s books, the oak genus “supports more species of Lepidoptera,” butterflies and moths, than any “other plant genus,” including “no fewer than 20 species of dagger moths … 18 species of underwings … 8 species of hairstreaks … 44 species of inchworms … and 15 species of giant silk moths,” not to mention other fascinating creatures like walkingsticks and katydids, and a number of beetles. The White Oaks, especially notable as a host for the Edwards’ hairstreaks and bewitching polyphemus moths, have more smoothly lobed leaves and are found through the eastern half of the U.S., a little slower growing and preferring healthier soil and more sun than the Southern Red tolerates, yet equally as beautiful and long-living.§§§

So, I will try to transplant my blue jay planted oak saplings, pick up more acorns next season, support the encouragement of others to love and plant oaks, and work all the harder to make up the shortfalls in my own yard with other native ultimately-for-the-butterflies-and-birds host plants.

* “Weedy,” Merriam-Webster, available ~~HERE~~; for height, on white oaks, cf. Arbor Day page, available ~~HERE~~, and, on southern reds, Nashville Tree Foundation page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees (Portland: Timber Press, 2021), 12.
*** Ibid., 33-34.  For information on the kinglet, cf. Audubon’s page, available ~~HERE~~.
† Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks, Op. Cit., 35.
† †  Ibid., 36.
†††  Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 90-91, 93, 96.
§ Ibid., 99 ff..
§§ Ibid., 89.
§§§  Cf., Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How you can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants (Portland: Timber Press, 2009), quoted 148-53, also cf. 138-39, 144, etc.; Arbor Day pages, available ~~HERE~~; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center pages, on whites, available ~~HERE~~, and, for reds, ~~HERE~~; a helpful page from Bplant differentiating northern and southern red oaks, available ~~HERE~~.

42)

Cross Vine (Bignonia capreolata)

You spectacular native woody vine, from early-spring to early summer your large trumpets (just over two inches long), gleaming gold and apricot in front, deep reds down your throat, your trumpet body an exquisite coral, overall you showily blare, climbing over my scruffy honeysuckle property divider (vigorously up to 50 feet you can climb), draping and hanging down like a set designer’s flashy swags. Your trumpets’ golden lips open like a five-pointed star, most of them upside down, the single point pointing south, the two atop curling slightly back upon themselves. Your long elliptic leaves (two to six inches) hang in opposite clusters, slightly arcing your middle and almost ruffling your smooth edges, a deep, dark green, semi-evergreen, until you turn every earthy to jeweled hue, curiously speckled, over late winter to make way for new growth. After flowering, you form greenish seed pods (up to seven inches long). You are a south-eastern U.S. native, but your style is nearly tropical.

While a member of the similarly named Bignoniaceae (Trumper-Creeper) family—named after the Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (1662-1743), the Royal Librarian of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France known for advancing its classification system, hence perhaps an appropriate name sake for a family of long, wide reaching, interconnecting vines—you, B. capreolata, are the only species of your genus Bignonia. Your species name means ‘having tendrils’—yours not twining, but equipped with adhesive disks that permit your climbing—and your common name, cross vine, comes from the Greek cross shape revealed by cross sectioning your vine. Like other members of your family, you are a true hit with migrating hummingbirds.

You prefer full sun, but will root in shadier areas and simply climb your way to sunny perches. You are also rather adaptable when it comes to soils, preferring those that are organically rich and drain nicely, but just as content with average to sandy soils, swampy forest grounds to medium moisture areas like fence rows. You have no real common problems or pests, really, it is just your own rigorous and wide growth that may get you grumbled about. Given your beauty, ease of growing, and general amenableness, there have been a handful of fine cultivars of you that can be found in garden centers, or, as in my yard, you simply appeared and quickly won me over.*

* 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), 296; Michael L. Charters’ compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~ and ~~HERE~~; Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox page, available ~~HERE~~; U.S. Forest Service Plant of the Week page, available ~~HERE~~.

43)

Star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum)
As a gorgeous perennial in the Asparagaceae family,* your flower stems sport roughly 10 to 20 white and green striped buds open each morning to six-petalled, inch-wide flowers that glow white inside and retain your green stripes on the outsides, and then close up again tight before the evening. Your gleaming stars arise from a rosette of basal leaves that are grass-like and bear a slender white stripe down the centers, for six to 12 inches they arch up and arc out and downwards. For roughly two weeks in the spring, you open, and release your soft and pleasant floral scent, and then by early to mid-summer, even your leaves have vanished. Your common name clearly identifies the star-shape of your flowers, with the specification of Bethlehem nebulously identified for symbolic meaning (as you are certainly not a night bloomer) or potential native lands, perhaps because the bulbs were either eaten in lean times in the Crusades, or brought home by those knights; your genus name was adopted by Linnaeus, but long predated him, compounding the Greek ornis, ‘a bird,’ and gala, ‘milk,’ producing the mysterious moniker: ‘bird’s milk’—perhaps the bulb sold for its stimulus and edibility during famine, mentioned in II Kings 6:25 as ‘dove’s dung’ and going for five pieces of silver (which one writer notes was a common moniker by the Arabs “for vegetable substances”**), or perhaps because the ancients told that doves were a single sex and capable of producing milk to feed their young, thus ‘bird’s milk’ meant ‘a wonderous thing’—I rather find any of these explanations and for both names rather wonderful, indeed.

This lovely-looking early-spring blooming bulb is native to Europe and parts of the Middle East and was introduced through the eastern half of the U.S. with some populations in western states as an attractive ornamental, but you are remarkably aggressive for one who looks so demure. You have been widely deemed potentially invasive for you can escape gardens quite impressively and form quite dense clumps that are challenging to manually remove and remarkably resistant to chemical control, due to the waxiness of your leaves, which also affords you protection from munching critters. All of your noteworthy survivalist traits make you most potentially capable of overpowering and thus displacing native spring ephemerals—but the actual status of such bullying activities reportedly has yet to receive significant study, although you are listed as invasive by states including Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, and by national parks in Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee.

Beyond your beauty, you have a stout resistance to being nibbled up. You are rather toxic to mammalian herbivores and your waxy leaves leave them rarely eaten by insects. Being non-native to the U.S., while you are occasionally visited by honey bees, you are not attractive to most of our pollinating insects, who need much nourishment in the early season when good food sources are scarce. And, beyond both your beauty and your non-appeal to leaf munchers, it is your tolerance of numerous climates and habitats and notable hardiness across them that makes your invasive-potential even higher—you prefer moist, disturbed, loamy soils, but seem wily enough to appear in very diverse conditions, and after flowering and fruiting (April to May, then June to July), you enter a dormancy that permits you to withstand soils that become quite dry in mid to late summer. Beyond forming large, dense clumps, you reproduce by both seed and producing bulbets. These ingredients mean that you can form very large colonies. As noted above, your elimination can be difficult: your waxier monocot leaves leave you resistant to common herbicides, especially those made for broadleaf plants; the death of a mother plant can still leave your dormant bulbets capable of return; hoeing and tilling you often ends up spreading you around, rather than abolishing you. For your control, it is recommended to engage a combination of digging up your bulbs, constantly hand pulling your plants, and planting around you many larger, aggressive natives.

Thus, overall, your buds and flower are strikingly beautiful, your foliage understatedly attractive, you are very easy to grow, and have been used traditionally for heart problems, hence you have been long valued and planted fairly widely; however, you have little benefit to our native wildlife and can over-dominate important native spring bloomers that contribute far more to our much needed local pollinators.***

* Asparagaceae family seems the most agreed upon, however several sources include you in the Liliaceae family, for example: the Tennessee Invasive Plant Council page, available ~~HERE~~, and the Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Eleanor Anthony King, Bible Plants for American Gardens (New York: Macmillan Co., 1941), 114.
*** Cf., Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; The Spruce page, available ~~HERE~~; B Plant.org page, available ~~HERE~~; the Tennessee Invasive Plant Council page, available ~~HERE~~; Invasive Plant Atlas page, available ~~HERE~~; University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Plant of the Week page, available ~~HERE~~.

44)

Garlic Chives (Allium tuberosum)
As the slippery days between late summer and early autumn come, so too a new crop of not-planted-by-me visitors come to my yard. Garlic chives, do I call you a weed? You are not native and noted to be an aggressive spreader and likely to form dense clumps—“can spread and become too much of a good thing” the Washington Post added in a paean to you, amongst other gentle descriptors like “hardy” and “easy” and “robust”—which means you could squeeze out other plants, and have ended up on many state weed lists, but you are also a staple of many herb gardens, purposefully bought, planted, harvested for the pot. Here in my yard, however, you have just appeared, a tiny clump, maybe two rosettes with a total of maybe sixteen leaves and two spindly flowering stalks with just three flowers to count—so I do not fear any invasion is imminent.

While you are growing quite in plain sight, I cannot say how long I have overlooked you, as you have sprouted near some clumps of Liriope muscari, Bermuda grass, and dreadful sedge, so I never took the time and bent low to pay you note. Then I glanced, somehow, a couple petite white flowers: an Allium!? Of course, taking closer note, you are nothing like your neighbors, and are quite distinct from others in your genus, too.

Your leaves look more like a wider blueish-hued grass than the spring-green hollow round of other typical chives, floppy, but stretching up to a foot long, being just outpaced by your up to 18 inch flower stalk. Their scent and taste is decidedly garlicky, even while recognizably a chive. Your flowers are lovely: here you have a baby’s attempt at an umbel, but older plants produce one full and showy, two-inches wide, with each flower barely a quarter of an inch across but interestingly ornate for such a small scale, from a pin-thin pedicle radiate six pointed tepals (i.e., sepals-petals), glistening white, six stamens with glowing yellow anthers that fade to cocoa-tan, a single barely-a-hair thin greenish center style arising from your green three-lobed bump of an ovulary.

There is a native garlicky-onion, Allium canadense, but its leaves are usually a bit shorter and its flower bears a pink hue or pink stripes on white. You, in your pure white, come from a home territory of southeastern Asia, hence your frequent use in, especially, various types of Chinese cooking and traditional medicines. So, non-native, but so adaptable, a perennial hardy from USDA zones three to nine—staying evergreen in the warmer areas—preferring full sun and well-drained, loamy soil, but abide partial sun and moist to dry media, too, as happy on a roadside as in a garden bed, and, once established, you are very tolerant of heat, cold, and drought. While your flat and rather floppy blueish-green blades are too garlicky to be liked by garden critters, your flowers are very attractive to our favorite flying, flitting, and buzzing companions. In the kitchen, your leaves can be used just as one might chives or green onions, lending a mild, garlicky onion taste to the dish; for a sharp bite, slice and eat the raw bulb; your flowers, too, are edible, and look lovely in salads. So, for now, you are a weed that can stay.*

* Cf., Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Barbara Damrosch, “Why you should grow garlic chives,” Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2012, available ~~HERE~~; Wisconsin Horticulture Division of Extension page, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~.

45)

Late-Flowering Thoroughwort (Eupatorium serotinum)
Late-flowering thoroughwort or late-flowering boneset—your two most common fantastically unusual common names—how did I not come to know you until you erupted from my fig bed, from long stems of scruffy leaves to fantastic bb’s bearing into, still scruffy, mini white plumed flowers!? You are said to be common in Tennessee, and generally range through the eastern and central U.S., and are often listed as native, for example, by the Wildflowers of Tennessee guide and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, however the Native Plant Trust’s page mysteriously answers “yes and no (some introduced),” without specifying what exactly that means (is it simply not native to New England but is to the U.S. or North America, or …? But, what is clear about you is that you are a perennial typically one to three but who can come to tower up to six feet tall on softly hairy stems with long petioled and mostly opposite leaves with sharply serrated margins around long ovate to lanceolate leaves, and your late summer frazzled

exclamation of numerously flowering flat-topped corymb inflorescence (thus approximating a looser, wider-arrayed or sprayed umbel) composed of small snowy white disks lacking any petal rays (thus looking like skimpy tassels or cottony tufts sporting a dozen loose white threads). You bear close resemblance to other bonesets (especially the two most abundant, the tall E. altissimum, and common E. perfoliatum, the latter described in 1934’s The Herbalist as “a very valuable medicinal agent,” as a tonic and aperient, diaphoretic and emetic**), but can be differentiated by your leaves and your late flowering time.

You grow happily through prairies, plains and meadows, across pastures or savannas, but do like a little partial shade and more moist soils, hence really enjoy open woods or being along a forest’s edges—or, in my yard, at the edge of a ‘fig forest.’

It strikes me as a little crass to speak of your ‘benefits’ or ‘utility,’ but, cast another way, such a list shows off your ‘excellences,’ that is, arete, your ‘virtues.’ You are a member of the Asteraceae family, and, like most asters, are a superb late summer to early fall bloomer (your white-gleaming flowers especially showy September to November), thus beneficial to birds, bees, butterflies, moths, and other insects (including predatory ones who dine on pest bugs), while not very attractive to deer or other mammalian critter nibbling. (According to the National Wildlife Federation, you are such a “fragrant late-summer pollinator favorite” it calls you “a pollinator bar.”) I hope you will return to my fig forest in years to come.*

* 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), 345; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; US Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Native Plant Trust Go Botany page, available ~~HERE~~; National Wildlife Federation blog page, available ~~HERE~~; and, while no information but many very good photographs, Maryland Biodiversity Project’s page, available ~~HERE~~.
** Cf., Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist (Hammond, IN: Hammond Book Company, 1934, 48-49.

46)

Figwort (Scrophularia marilandica):
Figwort, you native perennial, you are quite a curiosity, and prove well a point this weed list has taught me: oft-overlooked weeds often well repay a close inspection. You can, so they say, reach up to ten feet tall and can reseed yourself pretty widely, but, here, you are just two feet tall and arrived solo in my garden, tucked yourself discretely between the summer location for my massive Philodendron bipinnatifidum and the first of my Hydrangea arborescens in a long, partially shady and awkwardly humped ribbon of bed betwixt fence and drive. Your growth was moderately slow, your leaves are unremarkable, your flowers so, so petite they were hard to see without risking chigger bites from clambering right up to you—but so, so very worth it in the bite gamble. Your flowers test the limits of proper adjectives and apt similes. So, let us bend real close in and properly admire you.

As a perennial, maybe you’ll be back next year and reach your five to ten foot promised heights with four to six inch by three

wide leaves, but, here, now, your two foot frame bears a mostly unbranched central roughly square stem bearing leaves up to three inches long and one and a half wide, opposite, lanceolate to ovate, standard green but jaggedly dentate, beginning cuneate to oblique at their base and stretching forth to acuminate apices that are held off long, one-inch, slightly pinkish petioles—a hint of the notable (your spiky margins, square stems), but nothing terribly remarkable.

But then you began to bloom. It took a little while to notice. Your flowers are so very, very petite, barely a centimeter long and wide, but so, so oddly shaped, so deeply, darkly maroon colored. I stutter as to how to describe them. Your flower inflorescence form is neither head nor umbel, but you look as if you have the potential to almost make a corymb; you were not a raceme like a pure spike, but more spaced out, maybe almost a panicle, but no, not really, maybe a cyme? (Missouri describes you as having “loose, terminal, pyramidal, thrysoid

panicles;” Illinois tries “each panicle is somewhat cylindrical in shape, consisting of an erect central stalk (rachis) with short lateral branches that are widely spreading to ascending;” Kentucky confirms, but more simply said as “Panicled irregular flower clusters are oppositely attached end of the stems.”) Your flowers themselves, their shape: neither a trumpet nor a funnel, not as enclosing as an urn-shape, not flared like a bell, not exactly bilabiate. (The experts, respectively as above, propose: “2-lipped tubular,” “short-cylindrical,” “cylindrical/urn shaped,” while Lady Bird Johnson’s adds “erect, sac-shaped,” Minnesota calls you “tubular with a round base,” and, more creatively, Xerces Society calls your “inconspicuous two-lipped flowers” “shaped like honey pots!”) And, within these deceptively tricky to describe shapely little flowers, there are four bright, sunny-hued spheres, stamens or anthers (plus one more reddish, non-fertile stamen, the experts tell me, that I couldn’t see), and a slender down and back arching, slightly longer

style. Seeing to your more private parts behind is virtually impossible when stretching (to avoid chiggers) two feet into a bed to try to peer inside--and here my once-poet-aspiring accumulation of comparisons and descriptors run nearly as dry as my botanical knowledge—something smaller and darker than a maroon velvet lined pistachio shell (¼- 1/3” (6-8mm) long by ¼” (6mm) wide). Maroon within with pistachio green streaks without are colors you bear (or, “greenish-purple,” “dull green … predominately reddish brown,” “dull green exterior and a predominately brown-purple interior. … [though] the corolla color may vary/overlap in shades/mixes of green, yellow, red, and brown,” “brownish or greenish,” “shiny reddish brown to reddish green.”) Your shape is as even different as your color when viewed from front, side, or back. From the front, imagine a cartoonish mouth, lower lip curled back, sides of mouth opening straight up to form a U, but then with the top a straight jutting, two part line. Like the bill of two baseball caps flattened plumb, one shifted slightly right, one left. (Or, as Minnesota proffers, “The 2 upper lobes are longest, extend straight out. … A lower lobe folds down,” and Kentucky explains “the corolla’s 2 upper lobes … function as a hood to keep rain/moister from entering and diluting the rich nectar.”) But, angle you up a little and those utterly flat top lines look like cartoon rounded dog ears (amplified by now seeing a silvery style hanging out below the anthers like a panting tongue). From the back view, the cartoon dog shape is clear, too. Your sepals perfectly petitely formed like a scalloped setting (“each flower has a short-tubular green calyx with 5 blunt teeth,” both Illinois and Kentucky write) around and holding a goldish-green streaked red garnet that has sprouted two rounded shaggy dog ears. From the side, suddenly you look long and lean, not so roundly squat. Your two top dog ears actually fused, as if your flower is made of just a single petal wrapped around to meet below, like wrapping a nine-by-eleven sheet of writing paper opposite corner to opposite corner, so one side of the tube’s opening overshoots the other notably.

No matter how fascinating and descriptively elusive, you are not, as Illinois reports, “grown in gardens very often because [your] flowers are not very showy (by human standards);” you are, however, a nectar-rich powerhouse for wasps, bees, and, in my bed, swarms of ants, and, according to the wildflower retailer, Prairie Moon Nursery, “one of the best nectar species for attracting native butterflies, bees, other insects—and birds, including the Ruby-throated Hummingbird!,” complete with Xerces Society approval for attracting and supporting native insects and predatory and parasitoid ones that prey upon pests, yet are not enjoyed by deer or little furry creatures.*

In accord with your nectar-richness, you did earn the 1880’s commercial name of Simpson’s honey plant, for your reputation of helping beekeepers let a single acre produce 400-800 pounds of finest honey. Your other names, well … Scrophularia is not terribly pretty; it was donned on you in 1474 by an Italian physician due influence by the Doctrine of Signatures, that is, he recognized a resemblance between the knobs of your rhizomes and scrophula, a tubercular condition of lymph nodes, and was maintained in Linnaeus’ 1753 publication. (Your genus name also forms your family name, Scrophulariaceae, or the roughly 62 genera and 1830 species strong figwort family.) Your species name indicates Maryland, where you were identified. Your common name, figwort, too, equally does not pay you your due, and is medically linked, but this time to the treatment of piles, which are more frequently called hemorrhoids but were once known as figs. A less common common name you sometimes bear is carpenter’s square, which is far more interesting, and aptly in reference to your square and unusually grooved stems. Your medical advantages continue to be studied. Historically, you have praised for drying, thinning, and dispersing troubled areas—being hot and dry, per the medieval theory of the humors, and, in an American text from 1934, The Herbalist, you were noted as having “many valuable and active medicinal properties,” including as an external ointment for bruises and scratches.**

Native to central North America, you stretch across the eastern half of Canada and the U.S., preferring slightly more moist, well-drained, and partially shady disturbed areas—and, I hope, will be a recurrent visitor to my garden bed.

* Cf., Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; Illinois Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Minnesota Wildflowers page, available ~~HERE~~; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center page, available ~~HERE~~; Native Plant Trust Go Botany page, available ~~HERE~~; Kentucky Native Plant Society page, available ~~HERE~~; Prairie Moon Nursery retail page, available ~~HERE~~; Xerces page, available ~~HERE~~.

** Cf., on additional common name, Xerces page, available ~~HERE~~; on etymologies, Michael L. Charters’ compilation of plant names’ histories, available ~~HERE~~; and Missouri Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; on older curatives, Joseph E. Meyer, The Herbalist (Hammond, IN: Hammond Book Company, 1934), 91; and on further medical information, Science Direct’s topics page, available ~~HERE~~.

47)

Italian Arum (Arum italicum):
Sometimes wonderfully (if a bit dirtily*) called ‘Italian lords and ladies’—for its visual similarity to the related species, Arum maculatum, more commonly named ‘lords and ladies’—the Italian arum best lives up to its fashionable name with its striking ruffly-edged arrow-headed or spade-shaped leaves that bear snaking wide, silvery veins, its palely golden spike and creamy hooded flower, and its phenomenally orange berries. It is also a bit of a magician, appearing and disappearing: summer is a dormant season for its leaves, and while found from zone five to nine, it only remains evergreen over winter in its warmer sites, thus in chillier areas flowers emerge in the early spring as if immaculately, with leaves appearing only after they fade, and then, as berries appear, the leaves essentially disappear for the summer only to re-emerge in autumn. Its mysterious arrival in my front garden bed was also like magic, and just as dangerous, for all of its parts are intensely toxic and it produces a skin-irritating sap. So what creature or odd accident brought it? It has also received complaints for its disappearing act being all illusion: it is, in fact, remarkably difficult to remove (a tuber-like plant, so any corms left behind will regenerate anew) and adept at spreading invasively (also reproducing by seed). Indeed, it was likely one of my bird friends who deposited its seeds in my front bed.** With such a showy, tropical look and fantastic name, it disappoints me that someone so lovely is a toxic invader from overseas, thus, nice on the eyes, painful on the skin, poisonous to livestock and humans, likely one to overrun my purposefully planted plants, and, while minutely feeding a few birds, without benefit to my fluttering, buzzing, and insect menagerie.

* As Richard Mabey wittily whispers through brackets while parenthetically explaining the common name of the European wild arum: “(Lords and Ladies, an abridged version of the original name, [the] Lord’s and Lady’s [genitalia]: we had bawdy plants too)” (Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 275). Our more well known American native in the Arum family, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, replaces the bawdy with the holy, as the fleshy spadix, Jack, is enclosed by the spathe-as-pulpit, rather than the lady’s sanctum.

** Cf., Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder, available ~~HERE~~; Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board, available ~~HERE~~; Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden page, available ~~HERE~~; North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, available ~~HERE~~; Maryland Invasive Species Council, available ~~HERE~~.

48)

Cranesbill (Geranium, perhaps G. molle):
For several years I would find a few of you snuck into my garden beds, sometimes I pulled you out, sometimes I left you be, but now, this fall, you must have sensed a mass invasion was in order, but politely chose to populate every crack through my beds’ long fieldstone path (perhaps due to the extra rainy season, the grit between the stones providing incredible drainage)—and your arrival is to my delight. Your numbers are intimidating, but your leaves so beguiling. And, as soon as I determined you to be some sort of geranium—and not a wayward weedy hoary bowlesia (Bowlesia incana)—my hope began to soar that perhaps you were even a native species reported about the area, the Geranium molle, although the slightly-more-common to woodland edges G. maculatum is a possibility, as your chosen location has been more dappled due to an overgrown maple and lush year’s garden than its southern-facing situation would have suggested, or, perhaps as you grow, your leaves will become more cut and even prove you to be the also locally reported G. carolinianum. Your precise identification is a challenge, not simply because there are 422

species in your genus, but also that I have found you so young and unlikely to flower before winter comes, so will have to wait until next spring (and before high summer, as several native species are said to vanish in hot, dry conditions) to study you further. (Not to be confused with the other one-season bedding geranium (pelargoniums), these several possible species are perennials, and said to be, at that, quite profuse spreaders, by rhizomatic root systems, and as re-seeders.) Similarly shared between the spread of our native species is your attractiveness to various bees and even a few birds (here, perhaps for my mourning doves, as I haven’t seen any quail roaming the streets). With your genus name from the Greek geranos, crane, you have description—your styles, when fruiting, are said to resemble the gorgeous bird’s bill—and the origin of your common name: cranesbill.*

* Cf., Tennessee-Kentucky Plant Atlas, available ~~HERE~~; Native Plants for Tennessee, available ~~HERE~~; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, on multiple species, available ~~HERE~~ and ~~HERE~~; Wildflowers of the United States, available ~~HERE~~; Virginia Native Plant Society ‘Wildflower of the Year 2020’ page, available ~~HERE~~; Plants of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, available ~~HERE~~; for the nearly similar looking bowlesia, available ~~HERE~~.

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Weeds
Poor, homely, unloved things beside the way,
That strive in voiceless ignominy, still
Undaunted though downtrodden, to fulfill
Your appointed purpose! Patient the long day
Ye take the buffetings of scornful clay,
Sustained by that small portion of God’s dew
Which thick-strewn dust permits to fall on you.
And live where finer herbs must wilt away.
Have ye too, dreams of better things to be?
Of worlds in which the crooked shall be straight,
Where all that are in bondage shall be free,
And lifted up all those of low estate?
Where, to the thought that knows the potent seeds,
Weeds shall be e’en as flowers, flowers as weeds.

–William Herbert Carruth (1859-1924), American educator, poet

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WEEDS

Oh, an ode, hardly, instead of a hoe-full, this is a woe-full inventory of & reflection on weeds ...

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