Took a back-roads route from Iowa City last Thursday, and found all these. Plus there's another post with more flowers coming up tomorrow Tuesday. As always, if you know the identity of the one NOID, let me know in comments.
All of these will be bigger, clearer, and more detailed if opened in a new window.
When I took this picture, I was pretty sure it was a Queen Anne's lace, Daucus carota. Then as I got to looking at it afterward, I was thinking that it seemed awfully full for Queen Anne's lace, and maybe it was some other, related plant. Now I'm kind of leaning toward the Daucus theory again, but I'm unsure. Open in a new window to see the odd insect sitting right in the middle of it all.
I've taken photos of fleabane (Erigeron sp.) before. It's not a big thrill, and this particular batch looks kinda ratty (it's been windy a lot lately) but I feel obliged to include it for the sake of completeness.
Hadn't ever really noticed these NOIDs before: they're pretty tiny, and the plants look like hell (which you can kind of see from the foliage I didn't crop out), but when you get up close enough, the flowers are very nearly attractive. Not quite, but very nearly.
I have yet to take a picture of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) flowers that didn't also include a ton of bugs as well. I think the common name should be changed to "pink orgyflower" or something similar. Interesting greenish, non-metallic bee in the top right.
I think this is a Rosa arkansana, prairie rose, in which case it is the official state flower of Iowa. If I'm wrong, then it's most likely a multiflora rose, Rosa multiflora, in which case it is a noxious invasive weed. Thorny son of a bitch either way.
Red clover, Trifolium pratense. I can't imagine any readers not knowing this plant, but I've led a sheltered and exclusively North American life thus far, so maybe they're news to someone. These are everywhere here, all the time. I also really like them.
Michigan lily, Lilium michiganense. We have orange daylilies all over the place here -- in some spots they're lining both sides of the road for a couple hundred feet. I remembered my grandmother having Michigan lilies along a slope to one side of her house, but was beginning to think I must have confused them with daylilies, because I'd never seen any around here that weren't obviously cultivated: I was pretty sure that hers hadn't been deliberately planted.
Now that I've seen this bunch, though, which was just sitting in the middle of nowhere along a road, with no house or other structure nearby, I feel a little more confident in saying that no, what she had really were Michigan lilies (which she called tiger lilies). 'Cause apparently they are around if you look for them. Just not to the same degree as the orange Hemerocallis.
Asclepias tuberosa. OMG guys I love these. We had had them at work last year, but sold out before any flowered, so I never got to see.
I've been noticing little flashes of orange low in the grass along Highway 218 for a couple weeks now, but of course we're always going by too fast to get a good look, so I wasn't sure what they were. The batch I finally took a picture of happened to be conveniently located near a gravel/highway intersection near Lone Tree, where we had to stop anyway.
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13 comments:
Asclepias was pretty easy for me to grow from seed. For the price of a pack of seeds, you can be wallowing in them. And they will self-sow, too.
Nice pictures. I also love Asclepias tuberosa. So pretty. I had trouble germinating seeds, so I bought nursery plants for my garden.
I also think that the first plant is Daucus carota. I've got a lot of it in the weedy areas of my backyard, and the flowers can be quite variable in fullness. Late last summer, I made a very pretty umbellifloriferous* bouquet of white Queen Anne's lace, red and pink Achillea millefolium (Yarrow) and Foeniculum vulgare 'Purpureum' (Bronze Fennel) which has yellow flowers. Both the fennel and yarrow are purposely cultivated (now those are easy to grow from seed) but possess weed-like vigor.
*made up word
Wow, those lilies are gorgeous! Our wild lilies (Lilium martagon) aren't nearly so pretty!
Queen Anne's Lace has a dead give away black dot in the centre. No dot, it's not Lace.
Re: NOID--
I think what you have here is a vetch of some sort, perhaps crown vetch, but the picture is not definitive. The pea-like flowers and the mid-rib leaf crease are the best identifiers.
Check out the "Legume Wildflower Page" http://home.att.net/~dudemarshall/legume.htm
The dark dot in the center of Queen Anne's lace is common, but not universal.
And in this case was covered by a bug, too, so it could have been any color.
Hm, did the rose have the frills at the end of the petiole and five leaflets? While a Weed Warrior, I was taught to identify the multiflora rose from others based on that--five-ish leaflets and the frill at the base of the petiole, near the stem. I can't find a good Google picture of the base of the prairie rose leaf, but the internet says that Rosa arkansana have more than five leaflets. I can't tell in your picture, but if five leaflets and frills: multiflora rose. More leaflets, probably prairie rose.
Multiflora rose has tiny white flowers in a (relatively) large inflorescence. Your rose definitely isn't R. multiflora.
I love Asclepias tuberosa, too. I wonder why it's so hard to find the red strain in commerce--that's my favorite. I don't often see any form of the species along the roadsides any more.
I've never seen wild true lillies growing in the kind of massed profusion in which you can find the fulvous daylily, which incidentally has now been designated (by the US Park Service) an invasive exotic plant, even though it's sterile.
Likely you have Queen Ann's Lace, but if the stems have purple blotches all over, it's poison Hemlock.
Korina, late to the party
Why couldn't your grandmother have had actual tiger lilies (Lilium lancifolium (=tigrinum))? They're one of the most commonly planted non-native lilies and escape across the eastern U.S.
efloras.org describes how to tell them apart from our native lilies (like Lilium michiganense):
http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=1&taxon_id=200027720
They might well have been L. lancifolium. As far as it goes, the ones in the picture might well be L. lancifolium too, as far as I know. They've been gone for twenty, twenty-five years now (grandma herself has been gone for ten), so I couldn't go back and look. I'm just guessing. Lancifolium does sound like it's maybe more likely.
I didn't guess lancifolium to begin with because I either wasn't aware of it, or because the pictures I found of it originally didn't look like the pictures I'd taken.
She may well have had L. lancifolium, we have some by a cottage in SW Michigan which were probably planted in the 30's or 40's, HOWEVER the lilies in the photo are definitely L. michiganense. I have yet to come across them in the "wild" but I have them in my garden.
Dave in Detroit
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