Wednesday, June 10, 2009

let's play name this plant!

trying to id more plants. you all were such a great help last time i thought i'd try it again!


the first 2 photos are the same plant. if i remember correctly, it had spines on the stems. the leaf pattern reminds me a bit of ginseng.
this is a bad shot. sorry. i don't even remember where it was.

i want to say this is coltsfoot but i've never seen it in person before. there are two beautiful stands of it. i asked a more experienced naturalist and he crushed me by saying 'it's probably just a weed'. his explanation was the roots were shallow and natives have deep roots. uhhh, dude, have you ever seen jewelweed? there are no rhizomes on this but i could have not dug deep enough. i brought home a plant to watch.
some sort of tree seedling?
this plant is intriguing. very soft leaves, reminds me of large flax.
another view with a goldenseal lookalike...that plant sends up stalks with white flowers. you can see it in the above picture.
porcelain berry? or just another type of grape? there is wild grape growing but it looks different. sort of hoppish looking but too large and woody stemmy (comparing to my memory from years ago). also, it just didn't look like hops to me.

7 comments:

Gina said...

Hi! A few claification questions: the one you think may be coltsfoot is it vine-like at all?

And the one that looks like wild grape, does it have tendrils (those little corkscrew things that hold the vine to things)?

Thanks!

Gina said...

OK, this is what I have so far, I am almost (98.9%) sure the last one is a variation of wild grape. The lobes on the leaves are really pronounced, but the little new leaves show the typical wild grape leaf shape. I thought it might be wild cucumber, but I looked closely at the two and I am leaning more towards wild grape.

OK off to look at the others!

tansy said...

gina - the coltsfoot one does not vine. 2-3 stems come out of a cluster with a leaf at the top. they get about 12" tall at the most and the biggest leaf was maybe 4" across. the base of the stem is purple and has a little curl coming off of it, not like a vine but rather like another stem will come from the base? i really don't know the words to describe it in botany terms.

the last one that i thought to be porcelain berry is vining like grapes, but the leaves are more pronounced whereas the wild grape growing nearby has grape leaves without the deep cuts in them.

Gina said...

The lobes are really throwing me off on that last vine. I'll need to look up porcelian berry (not familiar with it).

I think you are right on the coltsfoot. I read a bit on it today and it sounds exactly like you are describing.

I'll look through the books for some of the others.

Gina said...

Yep, definitely pocelain berry!

Gina said...

I don't know how you feel about invasives (some people prefer the theory that they are not possible), but I would yank that porcelain berry out. According to the website I looked at (gov one), they take over quickly and shade natives out. They are native to Asia.

tansy said...

yeah, i will be yanking out the porcelain berry...i just wanted to verify that's what it was before i did.

uhhh, how can invasives not be possible? those who think that must not have ever walked through a native forest that was almost completely gone because the invasives took over and completely changed the type of woodland.

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