Plants Archives - Page 3 of 5

American Bellflower

Updated July 22, 2024

There’s a lot of purple showing in the mid-summer landscape. On a bike ride along our favorite bike trail, we stopped to investigate. What are those beautiful blue to purple flowers growing along the side of the trail? My Picture This app says they are American bell flowers. Once we’ve identified them on the trail, […]

Plants

Contrasts: White Avens and Blackseed Plantain

Updated June 24, 2024

We fenced the yard for the dogs last summer and that necessarily created some new disturbed soil. This soil welcomed the seeds of a couple of native plants, and they’re growing happily against the fence. One is white avens, and another is blackseed plantain. They’re not new to Owl Acres, but they have claimed a […]

Plants

Low-growing Aunt Lucy has deeply lobed leaves and tiny with flowers. This plant is about to be kicked out of its home to make way for a tomato.

Brown Thumb Gardening: Aunt Lucy and Bedstraw

Updated May 20, 2024

There’s a little square cut out of the sidewalk near the front porch that was intended to hold flowers. It’s had tomatoes, herbs and other things in it, and just now it is full of Aunt Lucy. I’ve never heard of Aunt Lucy until my garden app (Picture This) identified it as such. Aunt Lucy […]

Plants

Tender leaves and delicate, white flowers of Garlic Mustard belie this aggressive invader's ambition of world domination.

Invader’s Arsenal: Garlic Mustard

Updated April 29, 2024

One of the earliest plants we see in the spring is known as garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata). It is a member of the mustard family. It gets its name because all parts of the plant taste like garlic. Deer won’t eat it, and other native herbivores such as rabbits, geese, opossums and native insects don’t […]

Plants

This year’s leaves and last year’s stalk at the base of a tree in the north fencerow. As a perennial, Motherwort is one of the first plants to green up in the spring.

Medicine for Moms: Motherwort

Updated April 8, 2024

On a windy day in early April, we took a walk-about in the yard on Owl Acres to see what was happening. The weather had been erratic, getting warm, then cold, then warm again. It rained, snowed, and blew a gale for several days. For the most part, winter was hanging on, with last year’s […]

Plants

Dark green leaf of Virginia Creeper. Also called Five Leaf Ivy, the hand-shaped leaves are made up from 5 smaller, sawtooth-edged leaflets attached to a common petiole.

A Banquet for All: Virginia Creeper

Updated December 7, 2023

There’s a pile of it in the southeast corner of the yard. It’s growing on the fences and climbing the barn. We knock it back, ruthlessly severing it with the weed eater. And it comes back with a vengeance. It could be mistaken for poison ivy—we have plenty of that around here. But a careful […]

Dark purple berries of pokeweed hang in an inviting drupe from a plant in the ditch next to Owl Acres.

Red is for Poison: Pokeweed

Updated November 6, 2023

It was a beautiful autumn day. The walnuts had turned yellow, and the maples sported orange and red. The elms were still green, and several plants with berries were inviting the birds to feast in the ditch. It was a perfect morning for a walk with the dogs, so we headed out with Dave, my […]

Plants

Standing upright against the blue sky of late summer, the (in)famous Ditchweed, aka Iowana, aka Hemp. Hand-shape leaves made of 5 to 7 long, saw-tooth leaflets. Seed clusters run along rambling branches that stand out from a beefy stem.

Up in Smoke: Hemp

Updated November 2, 2023

It’s standing in the ditch with its scrawny arms outstretched. At its center, the pole-like stem is about an inch thick and slightly faceted. It rises above my head. Its leaves have gone from robust hand-shaped to curled and dried fragments entangled with clusters of little seeds at the ends of each branch. The seeds […]

Plants

Stinging nettle color plate from a book published in Germany in 1885. Shows the plant and details of leaves, stem, seeds and stinging hairs. Upcoming post: a critter that eats this stuff.

Ouch: Stinging Nettle

Updated October 23, 2023

When I bought Owl Acres 20-some years ago, the place had been significantly overgrown. Although it had been regularly mowed, around the buildings where the tractor couldn’t get to, the weeds grew thick and happy. My initial efforts at learning about those weeds ended abruptly when I grabbed a stalk of stinging nettle. That stuff […]

Plants

A fist-sized bunch of the papery cones of Common Hops ripens in the road ditch in front of Owl Acres

IPA Anyone? Common Hops

Updated October 19, 2023

Clancy, our nine-month-old golden retriever, loves to pick things up and bring them to me, or pick them up and eat them, depending on what he has. So the other day when he came bearing a rattly branch of something-or-other, I took it away, identified it as the hops branch we’d brought home from a […]

Plants