On Sunday I went to Jennings to see the prairie in bloom.  The colors are at their peak right now with flowering Ironweed, Culvers root, Goldenrod, Blazing star and this enormous plant, Tall or Giant sunflower (Helianthus giganteus).

There are many yellow composite flowers at Jennings and I find them hard to identify.  Dianne Machesney helped me with this one by pointing out that some of its leaves are opposite but most are alternate.  The big clue for me is that the stem is red-purple and the plant is very tall.

Tall is an understatement.   Because it’s growing right next to the trail I could easily compare it to my height.  It’s probably 9 feet tall.

And the wonder of it is this:  It grew from ground level to 9 feet in only four months.

(photo by Kate St. John)

The Lesser or Small flowered purple fringed orchid (Platanthera psycodes) is blooming now in western Pennsylvania.  Its flowers are small — only 1/2″ across — but they make up for their size by clustering 30 to 50 on the stem.

You’ll find this orchid in wet spots in the woods, in damp meadows, and along streams and seeps.

Dianne Machesney photographed this one during a Wissahickon Nature Club outing last Tuesday.   The outing honored Esther Allen who certainly would have enjoyed seeing this plant.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

This spiny flower is blooming now.  If you look closely you’ll see that its tiny pinkish-purple flowers are quite pretty.

But it’s hard to get close.  Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum or Dipsacus sylvestris) looks like a warning.  Its prickly stem, spiny flower head, and slender thorny spikes seem to shout “Stay away!”

Interestingly, the only reason this plant is here in North America is that its spiny heads were used by the textile industry.  After the flowers fade and the plant dries out the heads can be used to raise or “tease” the nap on woven wool.

Factories substituted metal brushes for teasel long ago but the plant persists in our landscape.  It’s now invasive in thirteen states, though not in Pennsylvania.

Look for it by roadsides and in waste places.  Each plant can produce 2,000 seeds so where there’s one teasel there will soon be more!

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

That’s the description in my Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide.

Various species of cranberries grow in northern climates around the world but the berries are so tart that they weren’t popular as food until European settlers learned about them from Native Americans.

This plant, Large Cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon), is the one that’s cultivated.

The shape of the flower gave cranberries their name.  The petals curl backward and the long stamens touch in front like a shooting star but if you look at the stem, flower and stamens as a whole, they resemble the neck, head and beak of a crane.   Crane-berry.  Cranberry.  

These evergreen plants bloom in acidic bogs in summer and show off their bright red berries in fall. 

Dianne Machesney photographed this one near Ricketts Glen in early July.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

We think of milkweeds as sun-loving plants so it was surprising to find this species deep in the woods in the Laurel Highlands.

Poke Milkweed (Asclepias exaltata) would not have caught my attention that day if it hadn’t been in bloom.  The flowers are a pale version of Common Milkweed with fewer flowers per cluster on long drooping stems.  In deep shade they look like lazy, ghostly starbursts. 

The species name exaltata means the plant is tall.  My specimen was over three feet high though they can grow as tall as six feet.

You’ll find this sweet-smelling flower in woods and at woodland edges from Ontario to Mississippi. 

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

In western Pennsylvania wildflower season comes in waves.

The first crest is in April when the woodland flowers bloom.  There’s a pause in May then the next wave, the field flowers, begins in late June and lasts through September.  I’ll be blogging more about flowers during this long, beautiful wave. 

Last Sunday I encountered beauty that stopped me in my tracks.  While hiking in the Laurel Highlands I came upon a sunny meadow filled with daisies and bright yellow flowers on tall stems.  Sundrops!

Sundrops (Oenothera fruticosa) flowers are 1″ to 2″ across, clustered at the top of their stems.  Each has a prominent cross-shaped stigma which the drone fly (who resembles a honeybee) is covering above, but he gives you a sense of scale.  These flowers are pretty big.

The stems are 1′ to 3′ tall and reddish, as shown below in two photos of a smaller look-alike, Oenothera perennis.

Sundrops open and close every day. They’re the daytime cousin of the common evening primrose whose flowers are very similar but the two are easy to tell apart.  Sundrops open in bright sunlight and close at night.  Evening primroses open at twilight.

It would be cool to do time lapse photography on a field containing both plants.  The flowers of the two species would wink open and shut like fireflies.

(sundrop with drone fly by Marcy Cunkelman, sundrops on stems by Dianne Machesney)

26 June 2011

In my neighborhood there’s a patch of flowering plants five to eight feet tall with pretty white umbels and lacy leaves. The patch expanded this spring and is now surrounded by a carpet of tiny plants, just like the tall ones. They smell vaguely like popcorn.

From a distance I thought this was a good thing.  The spot is a waste place that used to be ugly. But now the patch annoys me.  I’ve identified the plants.  They aren’t carrots or Queen Anne’s lace.  They have purple spots on their stems.  They’re poison hemlock.

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) is a biennial that’s extremely toxic to humans and livestock.  If eaten it kills by blocking communication between the nerves and muscles.  Death starts by paralysis and ends by shutting down the lungs.   Poison hemlock’s most famous victim was Socrates who was put to death in Greece in 399 BC when the plant was a capital punishment tool.

Poison hemlock came here from Europe and is now considered invasive in Pennsylvania and 11 other states.  At some point it was used as a sedative — perhaps that’s how it came here — but the difference between a therapeutic dose and a fatal one is so slight that it’s Russian Roulette to try it.

How do you get rid of it?  Wear gloves and chop it down when it’s in full flower before it’s gone to seed (early June in Pittsburgh). Put the chopped plants in a sealed garbage bag and let them bake in the sun to kill them. Click here and here for tips on how to identify and remove poison hemlock.

Because poison hemlock is biennial, do this two years in a row and the plants will be gone unless … If the hemlock patch has been there a while, the soil is full of poison hemlock seeds and will sprout new plants every year. Don’t pull them or use herbicide. Those activities disperse the seeds and make things worse.  With an old patch of poison hemlock you’ll have to chop it every year for a good long time.

Learn to identify poison hemlock. The purple spots are a dead giveaway.

It’s best to know what you’re dealing with.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)

Yesterday I found a patch of beautiful flowers with odd-looking balloons.

The balloons are “bladders” and the flowers are bladder campion (Silene vulgaris), an edible plant native to Europe that grows here like a weed. 

The bladders are actually the sepals, fused into a calyx.  The structure is so bulbous it looks as if it will prevent the flower from blooming but the tip of each bladder has five notches to guide the five white petals as they emerge. 

Strange, yet festive, flowers.

(photo by D. Gordon E. Robinson from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the photo to see the original)