It’s always a delight to find a new flowering friend, so I was pleasantly surprised to find one while driving around taking in the sights of Mountain Laurel blooming.
As I slowed down before turning onto another country road a different white-flowering plant caught my eye. Its flowers seemed scraggly as if the petals were getting ready to fall off. I recognized that I didn’t know what it was so I stopped to take a closer look.
It was a single specimen having a stem that rose up about two feet tall. Its leaves were jagged-looking in threes. Photos taken 29 May 2011.
Bowman's Root flowering at the side of a mountain road.
Bowman’s Root, Gillenia trifoliata, is native from Michigan to New York and points south in rich woods, according to Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers. It’s a member of the Rose family, Rosaceae.
Leaves with toothed edges and prominent veins occur in triplets. Each leaflet is 2-3 inches long and tapered at the tip. The leaves are nearly stemless and alternate up the main stem.
Triplicate leaves of Bowman's Root.
The flowers are pure white with five long petals that come to a point at the tips. The petals emerge from a light green, bulbus calyx in a tubular shape and then unfurl as the blossom opens.
White, five-petaled flowers of Bowman's Root. Three flowers getting ready to open up are visible in the lower part of the image.
This plant was at the side of the road in dappled shade.
Habitat of Bowman's Root at the side of a country road in the Tuscarora mountains of Pennsylvania.
A similar and closely related plant is American Ipecac, Gillenia stipulata. It has very large stipules at the base of the leaves that make them appear to be five-parted. American Ipecac is used as an emetic, in other words to make you throw up.
It’s interesting that an alternate name for Bowman’s Root is Indian Physic. According to Peterson’s Medicinal Plants Guide, a tea made from the whole plant was used traditionally for its strong laxative and emetic properties. Very small doses were used for indigestion, colds, asthma and hepatitis. Rheumatism, bee stings and swellings would be treated with a wash or poultice of Bowman’s Root.
As I mentioned earlier I came upon the new plant while driving around looking at the pretty Mountain Laurel, Kalmia latifolia, in bloom. It’s a large evergreen shrub that may remind you of Rhododendron bushes. The long, oval leaves are leathery to the touch. It has unique flowers that you should see up close and in person. In case you’ve missed it here are a couple of pictures.
Mountain laurel flower buds start out pink and often lighten into white flowers when blossoming.Each mountain laurel flower has little pits or pockets in the petals where stamens are neatly tucked.
Weeds at the side of the road are bountiful. So many kinds of plants grow in disturbed areas, like what you find at the edge of the road where it meets the fields. If you find a country road and travel it real slowly, you’ll see flowers that you never knew were there.
One day in May as I drove along a country road I saw these really tall dandelion-type flowers, so you know I just had to stop. What were these “giant dandelions” that reached over three feet tall?
Tall yellow flowers alongside a country road. Photo taken 29 May 2011.Tall yellow flowers between the agricultural field and the roadside.
The height of the flower, more than a foot and a half, told me the plants weren’t dandelions. Also, the stem wasn’t hollow, like the hollow tube of a dandelion flower stem, but it felt solid.
Against my walking stick the height of the flower heads measures about 3 feet tall. The yellow flowers are large, measuring 1-2.5 inches in diameter. The composite flowers on long stalks with alternate, grass like leaves that clasp the stem make this plant Yellow Goatsbeard, Tragopogon pratensis, an alien to the U.S.A.
Composite flowers of Yellow Goatsbeard. Note the long pointed bracts of a young blossom that's not yet open at the right side of the image.
The leaves of goatsbeard clasp the stem at their base. They’re long and grass-like and tend to curl when developing near the top of the stem.
Long, grass like leaves of Yellow Goatsbeard.
An interesting character is that the blossoms close up by mid-day. You can easily see this in many lawns in our area where goatsbeard attains only a few inches in height before blooming and eventually being mowed over. In fact that is where I first learned about goatsbeard. In the grass yellow goatsbeard forms colonies of a few to many plants which open happily in the sunshine and that close up in the afternoon or on a cloudy day.
Knowing that it’s often seen as a lawn weed, I was surprised to see that the three-feet tall plants were also Yellow Goatsbeard.
I’ll search through my archived pictures to see if I have a photo of the lawn variety. Can anyone share a photo of a colony of yellow goatsbeard in the lawn?
What does a short-tailed shrew have to do with a crabapple? (Image via Wikipedia)
Weeds are everywhere, so they are often overlooked. Most of us would think of dandelions or anything else growing in the grass as a weed, or point to any of the plants along the roadside as weeds. Our definition of a weed here at Wildeherb is:
A weed: any plant that is growing in the “wrong” place.
As our high school horticulture teacher taught us, a rose bush could be considered a weed if it was growing in the wrong place.
When a plant is identified as a weed, someone will pull it out, mow it down, or heaven forbid, spray it with chemicals to kill it. If everyone would spend less energy on all of the above, imagine the time and expense we all could save.
Weeds are kind of like cockroaches. They’ve been on this Green Earth long before humankind ever made the first fire to keep warm, and they’ll be here long after 2012. At least consider other options before polluting the Earth with nasty chemicals because your lawn or flower bed isn’t quite uniform. Being uniform isn’t very natural, and in my humble opinion, it looks pretty fake.
Major Pet Peave: Watching road crews spray chemicals at the base of road signs or seeing the dead brown mass of plants afterward! Isn’t there a better solution? Right away, I’d vote for fewer signs. How about putting down some stone or mulch that wouldn’t interfere with mowing? Why not plant a ground cover that won’t grow as tall as the other weeds that need to be mowed? With millions of miles of roads in the U.S.A. this is a problem of immense proportions looking for a green solution. We need to find better, healthier alternatives to the way we do things! <Rant over…back to my own weed “problems”.>
Just a couple weeks ago I chopped down two trees that I had planted about six years ago. They were pretty Sargent Crabapple trees, but they were in the wrong place. Hence, these weeds were removed.
Sargent Crabapple flowering in the backyard. Photo taken 3 May 2011.
We’re surrounded by the forest, so we really didn’t need more trees filling in the most sunny places we have. The little foot tall saplings were planted there until I found the right place to move them. The trees were beautiful this Spring when blooming, but that wasn’t enough of a reason to keep them. They were taking up more sunny real estate than five blueberry bushes!
I thought about digging them up for a friend who admired the sprawling crabapples, but that seemed like waaaay too much work. Besides, she could get her own set of ten trees just by signing up for the Arbor Day Foundation. At $1 per tree it’s a deal that can’t be beat.
The Sargent Crabapple, Malus sargentii, grows wider than it does tall. These “little” trees had most branches less than an inch in diameter, so I used a pair of loppers to tackle the job. Each tree had a spread of 10-12 feet. They took up too much space in the sunny spot, so they had to go. If the root ball had spread out like the limbs did, we could have had a fish pond if I bothered to dig them up instead of cutting them down. Too late!
Today, there are cabbages growing adjacent to where the crabapples stood. Moss roses or portulaca adorn the area, too.
The dog was helping me in this project, so he had to sniff and dig around the area. He was relentless and obviously after something. No matter what I said or did that dog wouldn’t quit, so I knew somebody was hiding in there. He dug out and killed a Shorttail Shrew, Blarina brevicauda, see photo above.
After the tress were cut and I raked the area of sticks and leaf debris, I could smell urine, like that of a mouse nest. If there were other shrews in that place they will probably go elsewhere without the shade of the trees. If not, the cabbage will be ok because these little mammals eat insects and invertebrates, not plants.
A certain visitor might miss the trees though. One day a couple weeks ago I saw what I first thought to be a large stick lodged in the middle of a tree. It had been windy, but I didn’t think it was that windy to have thrown a stick that far from the big oaks at the edge of the woods. When I recognized that the stick was now pointing up instead of down, I realized it was not a stick.
That stick just moved! Photo taken 23 May 2011.It's a black rat snake! Perhaps it was searching for a shrew-meal. Photo taken 23 May 2011.Tiny yellow flowers at the branch tips of Sargent Crabapple. Photo taken 3 May 2011.A doe and young buck (on right) graze the long grass and weeds behind the Sargent Crabapple trees that were still flowering. Photo taken in the afternoon from the deck on 14 May 2011.
Leaves develop after the crabapple flowers. Its blooming period is about two weeks long. The leaves are small and cute. They occur in triplets with lobed edges and make a beautiful display in the fall.
Beautiful reds, oranges and purples in the autumn foliage of Sargent Crabapple trees. Photo taken 15 October 2010.
In a way it’s kind of sad to see the trees gone now, but I am looking forward to our fall cabbage crop. If you are looking for a small tree or a big shrub to fill in an area, you might want to give the Sargent Crabapple a try. It’s a pretty tree of a manageable size that gives rise to dainty flowers in the spring and colorful fall foliage. Join the Arbor Day Foundation for the cheapest way to get TEN flowering trees for only $10.
This rainy year produced some spectacular flower displays. One that we see in the forest is called Deerberry, Vaccinium stamineum. It’s a member of the Heath Family, Ericaceae, as are the blueberries and huckleberries, and it’s also native to the eastern United States.
Small deerberry shrubs at the edge of the woods are 2-3 feet tall. Photo taken 13 May 2011.
The foliage looks a lot like that of the lowbush blueberry, but the flowers are distinct. Each bell-shaped flower is white to pinkish-white with many stamens that protrude beyond the edge of the short bell. The five lobes at the edge of the bell do not flare outward as the blossoms of the blueberries do.
The flowers are arranged in loose clusters where each blossom dangles just below a small leaf on the main stem. This ‘leafy-bracted raceme’ is a character worth noting to identify deerberry.
Three leafy bracted racemes are present in this closeup of deerberry flowers with their long stamens. Photo taken 13 May 2011.By holding up a branch of the deerberry, you can see how the flowers dangle below their stem. Photo taken 13 May 2011.Mass blooming of deerberry. Note how the flowers are tucked behind the new growth of light green leaves. Photo taken on 23 May 2011.
(Click on any of the photos to see larger images.)
Deerberry blooming at the edge of the woods on 23 May 2011.
We made an interesting discovery this year in our wooded acres on the mountain ridge. A lot of undergrowth is present near the wood’s edge. That’s not too surprising because the deer population has a lot of choice of what to eat around here in the country. We see them crossing our property as they go into or out of the crop field next door, so to speak.
We did plant some goldenseal one year that didn’t flourish and I blamed their lack of growth and eventual disappearance on the local deer population. Perhaps so.
Anyway, I was surprised that we had these little low-growing shrubs flower this year. In overall appearance, these shrubs look similar to the deerberry that we’ve seen flower many times. This year was the most spectacular display of deerberry blooming so far!
I’m told by the local farmer that they call the plant “huckleberry”. It’s like a wild low-growing blueberry. Indeed, Newcomb’s description for the Early Low Blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium, fits it like a glove. Peterson’s Medicinal Plants Guide calls this species the Late Lowbush Blueberry with its blueberry fruit ripening in August or September. Our lowbush blueberry is probably the early variety as its fruit was already turning from light green to pink in late June before turning blue.
Pink lowbush blueberry fruits. Photo taken 26 Jun 2011.
Flowers dangle in clusters at the tips of stems. Urn-shaped with five flaring tips, blueberry blossoms are typically white with shades of pink. The flowers of huckleberries and blueberries are very similar.
Leaves of the blueberries, Vaccinium spp., are soft to the touch and no where as near as leathery as the leaves of the Box Huckleberry, Gaylussacia brachycera.
Lowbush blueberries are about a foot tall, with green stems that terminate in oval-shaped, pointy-tipped leaves. Flower clusters are borne on the green stems between leafy side branches.
Green stems support several flowers clusters in between the leafy stems. Photo taken 13 May 2011.Flower cluster of lowbush blueberry showing blossoms of different ages. The petals of the early flowers have fallen away, while others are blooming or not yet opened. Photo taken 13 May 2011.Flowers of a Duke Blueberry, V. corymbosum, are quite similar to the lowbush blueberry, except that these highbush blueberry blossoms are pure white. The stems attain their woody character with age. Photo taken 13 May 2011.
A week or more later, other huckleberries were seen blooming in the woods. Some of the flowers were more pink than white.
Pink cluster of lowbush blueberry flowers. Note that the flower clusters arise on the previous year's new growth, which has become woody. Photo taken 23 May 2011.
Fruits are small and ripen into the familiar blue berries in early to mid July. One can just see the remnants of the flower blossom’s five tips on the bottom of the berry.
Huckleberries ripening from green to pink to blue. Photo taken 2 July 2011.Huckleberry or Lowbush Blueberry fruit gets bigger as it matures from pink to blue. Photo taken 4 July 2011.
I tasted the lowbush blueberries, but I didn’t think they had much flavor, at least not compared to the highbush blueberries we planted a few years back. We’ll leave the small berries for the birds and chipmunks in hopes that they’ll leave us our delicious blueberries.
A weed that I’ve enjoyed seeing, until they had a population explosion in the vegetable garden recently, is the yellow oxalis or sour grass.
Yellow oxalis is also known as Yellow Wood Sorrel, which is the common name used for two closely related plants, Oxalis stricta and O. europaea. Both plants are native to the eastern United States. The outward difference between the two species is in the way the seed pods are held. The seed pods of O. stricta have a sharp angle in their stems, while those of O. europaea are not bent. Photos in this post are of O. stricta.
The leaves are like shamrocks, so sometimes we call it that. Each leaf is made up of three heart-shaped leaflets, joined at their bases.
By June the earliest flowering oxalis will set seed. Seeds develop in their candle-like spikes, which are the pieces to eat for a sour treat, although the foliage tastes sour too.
Yellow oxalis plant developing its candle-shaped seed pods. Photo taken 9 June 2011.Close up view of sour grass seed pods. Photo taken 9 June 2011.
While pulling out weeds we often uncover toads. The little ones we find in the springtime are actually cute!
A garden visitor we like to see - they eats lots of insects - American Toad, Bufo americanus. Photo taken 9 May 2011.
Flowering plants number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands actually. Indeed, the huge variety of types of flowers is one thing that draws me to them…the seemingly infinite arrangement of colors, shapes and sizes.
Sometimes I find a flower that is more of a curiosity than anything else. Take for instance these tiny little flowers that come out in early spring. You can find them appearing in flower beds and walkways, along roads and in lawns.
To find out what these little plants are, you’d need a weed book, I guess. The flowers are so tiny as to disappear from view in a short distance. With blossoms that are 1-2 mm across, these posies won’t appear in a wildflower book for their flashyness. Not exactly eye-catching, unless you’re on the ground with them.
Those that we see in the lawn near the garden have a tiny blue flower with four petals. In the center of the blossom is a white ring that surrounds a couple of light-colored stamens. The flower looks like it belongs to the Speedwell group.
The plant has a sprawling habit as it sends out hairy, maroon runners in all directions. The broad, spade-shaped leaves along the runners are scalloped on the edges and lie opposite one another. Where the runners terminate, the leaves become less broad and they’re more tightly packed together. Flowers appear singly in the leaf axils. Photos taken 3 May 2011.
Tiny blue flowers appear at the end of maroon-colored runners.Tiny blue flowers magnified 3X.
Right next to the tiny blue flowers were a bunch of tiny white flowers. These little curiosities appear in the lawn each spring.
The tiny white flowers seem to be a form of speedwell also, with opposite leaves that are jagged or notched. The leaves are similar to those of the tiny blue flower, except drawn out or stretched into thinner, oval shapes. The white flowers have fours petals and occur at the leaf nodes, not terminally. Overall, the tiny white flower plant is taller and has more vertically rising stems than the tiny blue flower plant.
Stems grow vertically in the tiny white flower plant.Notched, oval-shaped leaves are stemless on this yard weed.
So, it’s just a curiosity I have about these little plants. I suppose that ants or flies would pollinate the tiny flowers. Plenty of them get pulled out of flower beds or mowed down by the lawnmower, but sometimes they come back.
It turns out that the tiny blue flowered plant is called Corn Speedwell, Veronica arvensis. I came across its picture when looking up Blue-Eyed Grass in the Audubon Field Guide to Wildflowers. Corn speedwell is not native to America, nor does it appear to have edible or medicinal qualities.
Northern Downy Violet is a native spring flower that we see popping up all over the lawns here on the mountain ridge. The front and back yard were virtually covered with these light to deep purple blossoms. They are most common in areas with the least amount of grass or weeds growing. Northern Downy Violet is known as Viola fimbriatula, although in the past I’ve called it Downy Northern Violet.
From late April to early May violets bloom en masse in open areas adjacent to woodlands in central Pennsylvania. Lots of rain made it a beautiful violet bloom time this year.
Look for violets in woodland settings with open areas that receive sunlight or have partial shade. Old lots, waste areas and fields may be good areas to find them, too.
Large Northern Downy Violet plant with many blooms. Photo taken 3 May 2011.
Very small plants may be no bigger than two inches square. Others can be six inches in diameter, but more commonly the entire plant is 3-4 inches in diameter and just as tall. These little violets may have a single bloom or up to a couple of dozen blooms.
Violas in general have irregular-shaped flowers with five petals and a short spur that may or may not extend beyond the flower stem. In the Northern Downy Violet the spur is a short one. The two upper petals are somewhat plainer than the three lower petals. All are similar color, ranging from light blue to deep purple in individual plants, and most have veins of deeper purple color. The two outer lower petals are bearded – you can see some fuzz on the inner white parts of these petals.
Downy northern violet flower with two lower lateral petals bearded and a short spur as seen on upper flower. Photo taken 26 April 2011.
The softly hairy leaves give this violet the moniker “downy”. Leaves are toothed and blunt or rounded at the tips and somewhat arrow-shaped. The base of the leaves may have notches with some being more exaggerated than others.
Toothed leaves with notches at the base and blunt tips. Photo taken 26 April 2011.
Flowers rise above the foliage at first, then as the plant continues to grow the leaves may grow taller than the blooms.
Mature northern downy violet with many leaves and blossoms. Several flowers have yet to bloom. Leaves without notches at base. Photo taken 26 April 2011.
In same general area we also see the Common Blue Violet, Viola papilionacea, and Arrow-Leaved Violets, V. sagittata. The arrow-leaved violets seem to bloom slightly later than the northern downy violets, and both precede the common blue violet. All the blue violets are done blooming here by the end of June.
to tackle the job. Each tree had a spread of 10-12 feet. They took up too much space in the sunny spot, so they had to go. If the root ball had spread out like the limbs did, we could have had a fish pond if I bothered to dig them up instead of cutting them down. Too late!
for the Early Low Blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium, fits it like a glove. 
calls this species the Late Lowbush Blueberry with its blueberry fruit ripening in August or September. Our lowbush blueberry is probably the early variety as its fruit was already turning from light green to pink in late June before turning blue.
. Corn speedwell is not native to America, nor does it appear to have edible or medicinal qualities.
