Field and Roadside weeds

[MarcP]

When I saw the plant below, I immediately thought of hogweed, even though it clearly isn't. But that thought kept me from wanting to move it around for better pictures. A better idea, I thought, was to get closer by walking out in the field and photographing from different angles. Thirty minutes later as I was removing ticks from my clothing, the idea seemed less good, but at least I had photos. This plant wasn't tall and had large leaves that slightly resembled a split-leaf philodendron. I wonder if this might be cow parsnip?
Plant 1:




This plant with compound leaves is growing in mounds alongside the roadside.
Plant 2:

[Sasha]

Yup, looks like cow parsnip.

Not sure about the second one ... could be an Astragalus but it's hard to say with no flowers.

[MarcP]

Thank you, Sasha. Astragalus is a good guess and it does grow in my county so even if it turns out not to be this plant, it's one I'll watch for.
Marc

[Sasha]

Whatever that pea is, it sure looks weedy! We have a lot of issues here with cicer milkvetch (Astragalus cicer) - maybe it's that? Anyway, hopefully it'll be more clear when it flowers.

[!potatoes!]

yeah, some kind of vetch.

[watermelonpunch]

I saw an article in some garden magazine from this spring, where someone had a back yard transformed into a native plant garden (sans lawn)... and they had a lot of cow parsnip growing in a couple drifts in the picture. And I think in some areas people consider it an annoying weed.
I like all that sort of stuff that has flowers that have a flat bunch like that. (What's that called?)

I soooo hate ticks.
I ignore no itch nor strange vague irritating sensation. I strip down at the first opportunity and turn all my clothes inside out and inspect them. And it has paid off, because sometimes I have found them! (A few weeks ago I felt something on my leg... inspected my leg -nothing... then found it crawling on the inside of my jeans pant leg.)

They are wily!

It's recommended to wear long pants tucked into white socks when walking in the woods.
Not very attractive I know!!! LOL
(I only even have a few pair of white socks because they came as part of a package! ha ha)
But with the many people I've known over the years who've gotten Lyme's Disease, it might be worth it to look kind of dorky for excursions into suspect areas.
In one particular place I go... I think I'd need to wear hip wader boots or maybe a full hazmat suit to really be effective.

[MarcP]

Watermelon, since I already carry a stick and take pictures of weeds, I have a good start on looking dorky. Tucking my pant legs into long white socks would not only help me find ticks clinging to my person, but would be the pièce de résistance to my overall look. Thank you for that advice!
Marc

[rainbowgardener]

for watermelon: re the flat head flower bunches. I think the word you are looking for is umbel (derived from the same root as umbrella):

oxford dictionary:

Botany
a flower cluster in which stalks of nearly equal length spring from a common centre and form a flat or curved surface, characteristic of the parsley family

[watermelonpunch]

YEs! Thank you rainbow... I knew I'd seen a name for that,but could'nt remember. Umbel. Like that. I don't know why, I just do.

Watermelon, since I already carry a stick and take pictures of weeds, I have a good start on looking dorky. Tucking my pant legs into long white socks would not only help me find ticks clinging to my person, but would be the pièce de résistance to my overall look. Thank you for that advice!
Marc

ha ha! Then you're all set.
A stick probably comes in handy if you want to move something aside to get a better look at another plant. I should use one in the field. The kids passing by always give me funny looks as I'm taking pictures close-up of flowers in the field. I tend to sit down right on the ground to do so, because stooping is not a comfy position for me at all. These same kids are often bopping their heads & singing to music only they can hear (ipods), so I think it's kind of funny they think I'm funny.

Anyway, you reminded me of this guy's blog - which I love...
https://www.spacecoastwildflowers.com/
Many pictures are captioned with "found in the median of..." whatever parkway... And I picture him in the median of a road taking pictures of the ground (as in the profile picture on the right of the blog).

[MarcP]

[Anyway, you reminded me of this guy's blog - which I love...]

I agree, he does have a nice blog. I'll have to explore it more when I'm not so tired.
I use a stick to poke around because it's too easy to overlook poison ivy. Here is a photo I took the other day at what seemed like an idyllic spot at the far end of the CC golf course, near a picnic table.

[rainbowgardener]

Nice picture. Poison ivy sometimes does have that shiny, poison green, evil look about it.

Monday I was walking through the woods at Shawnee Lookout park. It was making me nervous, like "what if I fall off the trail?" because there was so much poison ivy, big healthy stands of it, farther along so it was a nice dark green, not the poison green of new leaves, sometimes sticking out into the trail. Seems like it is one of our commonest natives. There were a lot of other nice wildflowers though, cleavers and mayapple, jack in the pulpit, columbine, sweet cicely, and others.

[MarcP]

[ It was making me nervous, like "what if I fall off the trail?"]
Rainbow, that made me laugh out loud because it reminded me so much of myself. "What if I trip and fall in the creek? What if one of those old trees falls on me and I'm trapped like in Saki's 'The Interlopers'?"

[watermelonpunch]

This thread is so fantastically more than just roadside weeds.

I think those things too. What if I fall in my MIL's pond? What if I step on the rake and it comes up & hits me in the head?
Oh wait, all of my concerns are about being clumsy! LOL

It seems I'm not allergic to poison ivy. But I still don't trust it. I've gotten allergic reactions to things later that years ago were not problems. So I keep worrying that the NEXT time I wind up exposed - then I'm going to be in for it!!

Ah, but I'm behind... I have recently started working somewhere with LOTS of plants... LOTS & LOTS OF plants! And on my lunch breaks I've been taking pictures. But I've been too busy to get them sorted to post for help identifying!

AND, I finally found out what the unidentified weedy bushes I've found in the field, and roadside in my neighborhood... None of the neighbors I asked knew what it was, but said it'd been a weedy problem around here for years... the head honcho where I work told me they are called Knotweed... and since he had to deal with them at work, he now notices them roadside whenever he sees them!

The topic came up when I told him about some bindweed I saw ... and he asked if I was talking about what people call "mile a minute"... and I hadn't heard that before... he hadn't heard "bindweed" before... but he'd described it as "arrow like"... which sounds like bindweed.
Is mile a minute the same as bindweed or a kind of bindweed? Online I see bindweed, and then I see "japanese bindweed"... but it's confusing.

Oh, and just to totally tangent this thread...
On my (25mile) commute to work, which is almost completely through winding country roads, I have seen TONS of what I believe to be dame's rocket, on the roadside in a few places.
I do NOT remember seeing purple flowers in such quantity in previous years.

[rainbowgardener]

mile a minute weed and bindweed are both aggressive invasive vines, but they are not the same and mile a minute is worse, more like kudzu:

mile a minute (aka devils tail, persicaria perfoliata)


https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ht37mfCsqyI/U ... ll+(1).jpg


https://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/img/pepe2.jpg


field bindweed (aka wild morning glory Convolvulus arvensis)


https://www.ksda.gov/includes/images/pla ... eed245.jpg

mile a minute leaves are almost just like triangles and it has less conspicuous flowers. Bindweed leaves are truer arrowhead shapes with the tails and have trumpet flowers like domestic morning glory except smaller and less colorful/ showy.

[MarcP]

Watermelon & Rainbow: To complicate matters, apparently there is another vine called wild buckwheat. I'm fairly sure I will know bindweed if I come across it, but I'm not sure what the difference is between wild buckwheat and knotweed. I've tentatively decided that what I have growing on my property is wild buckwheat. This is a photo I took last summer.



I drove up to the corner today to take pictures near the park. On the way back I found this (below) growing along the road. I don't know for sure if it's Convolvulus arvensis, but's definitely some kind of bindweed.

[watermelonpunch]

Here's what I think is bindweed:


(w/ garlic mustard I believe... under a pine tree)

Apparently there have been reports of Mile A Minute somewhere not far from where the photo was taken.

So which is it? Is it obvious?
I don't think this looks much like a triangle, it's distinctly arrow-like.
And, it's more arrow-like than the bind weed I've seen at home.

I think it's definitely not buckwheat.
Though I can't be sure about my bindweed at home, because I've never seen it flower. (I ripped it out last year before it got flowers because I thought it was ugly and annoying.)

[watermelonpunch]

RE: Knotweed

Something else entirely. Though it has leaves that are VAGUELY heart-shaped.

It's not a vine, it's a bush.

I would liken its growth habit to a large scale St John's Wort or Hardy Hibiscus bush.
For example, the knotweed, you can cut all the stems right to the ground, and the next year, the bush quickly grows to its original size with new branches.

I don't know why the big cheese I was talking to had that come to mind, I think because of the vaguely heart-shaped leaves. But it was just happened to be in the conversation of invasive plant species & problems with them, and he showed me a picture of knotweed and immediately recognized it as my unidentified bushes around my neighborhood.
I can't find a picture of mine :/ I thought I took some but I can't find them now.

But this is how the bush looks at the base:



The stems are seemingly hollow, but they have to be chopped almost individually... I do it with a hand clipper, and then with a hand branch clipper for the tougher parts.
My husband refuses to use the hedge trimmer on them, because a) most of them are beyond the property line and b) the one that's not is close to other things, and c) he thinks it could actually stress the trimmer in some detrimental way, and he sees the hedge trimmer as solely for use on our evergreen juniper bushes which he likes to trim in kind of an artistic way ... though he hasn't gone as far as making a topiary sculpture yet, but I expect someday to come home & find our junipers trimmed to look like Hello Kitty or something. LOL

From what I was told by the head honcho where I work, who has had to manage eradicating some of these bushes, it is nearly impossible to remove it by completely uproot it. It had to be eradicated in some areas with some kind of chemical herbicide treatment after having cut the bushes down to nearly nothing - this was in an area where the bushes were obstructing human use of the immediate area (and a potential hazard of some kind), and though I didn't ask about the particulars, it sounded like this was the final last resort that actually worked after unsuccessful previous attempts.
One of my neighbors last year said that she had made several unsuccessful attempts over the years to remove the bushes by uprooting. Her conclusion was that it doesn't work, and you just have to keep cutting them down, cutting them back a couple of times a year. I should specify that she had said that it was incredibly difficult to uproot them, and then the effort was all for naught.

[JONA878]

Have to agree on the difficulty with Japanese Knotweed.
Over this side of the pond it's a weed that has to be notified if found as it is costing local councils a whole packet of money trying to eradicate it.
As said..the only way is to hand cut and treat with glysophate until it gives up. This can prove difficult if it is near a water course to avoid pollution.
The roots go on down to a tremendous depth so digging it out is virtually impossible.
We also have the same problem with another weed that was introduced as a novelty garden plant and escaped...The Giant Hog Weed.
This looks like a gigantic Cow Parsley..growing to several feet in height and with a flower head a couple of feet wide. Hollow stemmed the children started to use them as pea-shooters..only to find that the sap burnt the skin badly.
They too like to grow near water so are proving a nightmare to remove.

[MarcP]

I thought I should do a follow up on the vetch since it has blossomed. From this flower it looks like it's probably crown vetch.

[Mr_bobo_]

Reynoutria japonica is name of 'big plants' above...

...and this little nice pinky flower is from plant: Coronilla varia...

[watermelonpunch]

I thought I should do a follow up on the vetch since it has blossomed. From this flower it looks like it's probably crown vetch.

Never seen this before but that's one fantastic interesting picture!!!