plants

This one stumped iSeek for a while, until the flowers came out. The arrow-straight stems made me think it’d be called arrowroot or something. But it was the corymbs that caught my eye first when reading about it.

Jul 22, 2024

A random weed, growing from crevices on the Tower Road bridge across the railroad tracks, but then it’s everywhere. Why would I feature it? Partly because I keep mixing up all the plants that look like that, for instance hawkweed …

Jul 12, 2023

At last, reading about plants ahead of time has prepped me for a plant I actually found soon after. At the moment, I can’t quite remember where I read again about partridgeberry.

Sep 30, 2021

Yes, I said to my companion, this is shadbush again. But no sooner had my statement passed my lips - and the berry pass mine and his - than I realized something was amiss.

Aug 16, 2021

Until recently, I’d been anxious about the true identity of an umbelliferous plant in our backyard, because it might be Water Hemlock. A neighbour, confirming it was indeed (fide an allegedy knowledgeable visiting friend), made me worry even more.

Aug 14, 2021

When I saw this in a basil pot on the deck, I figured it’d be just some noxious weed. Turns out it’s orache, which no, isn’t the name of some extinct ox, but which is, scholars tell us (well, my dictionary tells me), derived from the Greek atraphaxus.

Aug 10, 2021

The best the app could do on other goldenrods was, well, goldenrod. But for this one, the species popped up right away. Apparently it, along with 10 or so other species, stands out so much from Solidago that they were all recently split into their own genus.

Jul 21, 2021

I could have sworn I knew this plant as sweetgale or sweet pepperbush or something. But turns out it’s meadowsweet. Not the meadowsweet of England that’s also called meadwort and was the orginal source of aspirin, but a Spirea that is host for the lovely azure blues, those little blue butterflies that seem to be everywhere sometimes, and nowhere oftentimes.

Jul 20, 2021