Archive for November, 2010

Queen of White

November 18, 2010 at 9:45 pm · Filed under 1, Wildflower Books, Wildflowers: White ·Tagged , , , ,

Queen of White . . .

Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota, blooms along the Hudson River Park path near the intersection of 14th Street and the West Side Highway. (photo taken 11 18 2010)

Cross-country running is the outdoor activity to which I am most closely attached. Most of my writing has focused on the fly fishing I do and, to a lesser extent, the use of the mountain bike as a mode of transportation to and from angling destinations. Running has always been a personal activity, a lone wolf exercise that allows me time spent in the moment, time when I can exert myself most intensely and put my values of persistence and perseverance to a tangible, physical test. My vehicle is myself.

A daily run also guarantees me active engagement with the outdoors. An autumn morning spent in the open air can provide a variety of peak experiences. Park lawns covered with colored leaves and paths lined by fading wildflowers can inspire the amateur naturalist as well as the amateur athlete. This is how I found a flowering species that had eluded me all season. I discovered the plant in full bloom while on a run that unwittingly followed the kind of path described by the poet Robert Frost in his collection Mountain Interval.

My habit is to trace a route south along the Hudson River toward the World Financial Center and then return, finishing at the piers parallel to the West Village. This week, with a new desire to run the hilly lawns on the north side of the Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex, I headed north for the first time on the Hudson River Park path. This decision quickly took me to the very northwest corner of the area I had mapped out for Wildflowers of the West Village. There, near the intersection of 14th Street and the West River Highway, the white theme continued as I found blooming examples of the most distinct white wildflower of all: Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild carrot, Daucus carota.

Earlier in the autumn I described my stumbling upon Poison Hemlock, which has a superficial appearance to Queen Anne’s Lace. I had confidence in my identification because the plant’s umbels were irregular, lacked a purple floret at the center, and did not age into a bird’s nest shape. The much more common Queen Anne’s Lace could not be found, despite hours of searching; I concluded that the neighborhood’s gardens and parks were tended too regularly for mature, blooming examples to appear.

Ironically, it was a pier that allowed these examples to reach the flowering stage. Pier 54, which used to be the home of the Cunard Line, has fallen today into marginal use, primarily as an outdoor space to screen films in the summer. The stretch it occupies between the Meatpacking District and Chelsea Piers complex holds onto the grizzled industrial character that the entire area had before a redevelopment in the 1990s that is managed now by the Hudson River Park Trust. The green lining to this situation is that the edges remain free of regular maintenance, and cutting, and along one iron fence I found the Queen Anne’s Lace in bloom.

The wild carrot is a biennial European immigrant from the family Apiaceae. The plant can be distinguished by its tri-pinnate leaves that resemble the ones found on store-bought carrots. The flower begins as a tightly-knitted umbel supported by a wide bract that ends in slender, sharp green tips. As the bloom opens, it undergoes a change from a pale red wine color to the bright white of the mature form. There is often a single purple floret at the very center of the flower head. As it ages, the entire structure shrivels into a bird’s nest that ultimately breaks off the main stem and becomes a tumbleweed of sorts.

The umbel of Queen Anne's Lace is a pale wine color before it opens. (photo taken 11 18 2010)

Queen Anne’s Lace is quite common along fields and roadsides in the American northeast. My experience shows that it is much less common in the urban area of Manhattan, but the search did provide me with another good reason to just do it, to take the road less taken, and go for a run.

A single Queen Anne's Lace plant often displays different flowering stages at the same time. (photo taken 11 18 2010)

– rPs 11 18 2010

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The Mare’s Tale

November 9, 2010 at 6:45 pm · Filed under 1, Wildflowers: White ·Tagged , , ,

The Mare’s Tale . . .

Mare's Tail, Conyza canadensis, stands along Greenwich Avenue. (photo taken 07 25 2010)

The popular names attached to common wildflowers are occasionally less than flattering. Disgruntled farmers and frustrated gardeners appear to have coined the names of several species. One good example goes by the “nom de bloom” of Horseweed: a native annual, rarely if ever seriously considered or appreciated, which almost everyone has seen growing beside the road or sidewalk.

Here is a story about Horseweed; a plant that has the less frequently used, yet more attractive, equine name of Mare’s Tail.

Conyza canadensis, as Mare’s Tail is known in the Latin, is another late summer and autumn representative of the vast Asteraceae family and more closely resembles the immigrant Fleabanes than the native Asters. Mare’s Tail has a ubiquitous distribution in North America and an inconspicuous flower; a combination that has kept it under the wildflower radar. Most appreciated species are often the rare or the showy.

Mare’s Tail is one species that has actually emigrated to become established in Europe. The reason for this stems from its medicinal properties. Eighteenth century doctors were introduced to the plant by Native Americans and its seed was sent to England and France. The oil derived from the plant, called oil of Erigeron, was found to slow bleeding and serve as a useful medicine for that common ailment the British call piles. Mare’s Tail is still cultivated commercially here in the United States. Major production is centered in the states of Michigan and Indiana, and oil of Erigeron is available for purchase online from several herb purveyors.

The plant itself is a late bloomer of sorts. Mare’s Tail sprouts from seed and anchors itself with a shallow taproot. The young plant begins as a basal rosette that rises on a straight hairy stem, which carries a very busy alternating series of serrated lanceoalate leaves. Before the plant flowers it resembles a living, green, upright Christmas garland. Dozens, if not hundreds, of these deep green boughs varying between two and eight feet in height will line a section of road or fill a vacant lot.

Mare's Tail in the early flowering stage also displays the dense green garland of the main stem. (photo taken 07 25 2010)

The festive theme can be used to describe the mature plant as well. The flowering phase, viewed with a little imagination, gives the Mare’s Tail a pointed silhouette that looks as much like a Christmas tree as a horse’s caudal appendage. The tiny flowers are colored a modest off-white and go to seed in the manner of most daisies: a sphere of pale parachutes; miniature ornamental balls hanging at intervals along the extended boughs.

Mare's Tail flowers and goes to seed in the manner of other daisies, fleabanes, and asters. (photo taken 11 07 2010)

Mare’s Tail, Horseweed, perhaps even Christmas Weed: whatever name sticks, it is also one of the Wildflowers of the West Village.

– rPs 11 09 2010

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Little White Daisies

November 5, 2010 at 11:11 pm · Filed under 1, Wildflowers: White ·Tagged , , ,

Little White Daisies . . .

Calico Aster, Symphyotrichum lateriflorum, takes in the afternoon sun along Washington Street. (photo taken 11 02 2010)

Yet another (primarily) white wildflower came into my field of study over the past two weeks: a little white daisy carried on long stems bristling with tiny alternating leaves. Open any wildflower reference using these details as a guide and the result is overwhelming: not several, not dozens, but hundreds of possibilities.

The little white daisies one encounters in the autumn are all members of that expansive family, Asteraceae, but there are immigrants, the Fleabanes, and natives, many of which reside specifically in the house of Aster.

There are over 290 varieties of Aster growing in the United States, and determining one from the other often comes down to counting petals or other minor details of stem or leaf. So it was with the specimens pictured, which after lengthy investigation I have determined to be Calico Aster, Symphyotrichum lateriflorum.

Described as a “variable species” (an understatement), the Calico Aster is an autumnal perennial, can bloom white or pinkish, and the flowers can be sparse on the stem, or tightly packed. The ones I have found fall under the former list of descriptions: bows of sparse, little white daisies supported by a smooth, somewhat woody main stem two to four feet in height. The individual blooms consist of an egg yolk yellow disk surrounded by approximately two dozen white rays.

Close-up view of a Calico Aster bloom growing along Sixth Avenue. (photo taken 10 15 2010)

Two key details helped me to pinpoint this particular identification. The first was found in the leaf – narrow, pointed, almost like a pine needle – and the alternating pattern along the stem, which resembles Rosemary to my eyes. Many of the other Aster and Fleabane varieties have more ovate toothed leaves like the cultivated garden daisy. The other clue was found in the central disk of the flower; it changes color as it ages. Younger blooms resemble an egg yolk, sunny side up, while older ones turn the color of tarnished gold. The Calico Aster, true to its name, displays these different shades at the same time.

Symphyotrichum lateriflorum is also known as Frost Aster, a poetic name, one that fits like a mitten as the chill of November nights begins to hover around the freezing point.

A colony of Calico Aster decorates an edge of Union Square near 14th Street. (photo taken 10 19 2010)

– rPs 11 05 2010

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White All Clover

November 1, 2010 at 10:17 pm · Filed under 1, Wildflower Books, Wildflowers: Red, Wildflowers: White ·Tagged , , , ,

White All Clover . . .

White Clover, Trifolium repens, has reappeared on the uncut Freedom Lawns of the West Village. (photo taken 08 16 2010)

Continuing the white theme into November, the most common white wildflower of all may very well be the White Clover, Trifolium repens, which has reappeared in New York City’s parks now that the late season lawns are being mowed less frequently.

The White Clover, source of the lucky shamrock, is a perennial immigrant from Europe. Unlike most species of foreign origin, this one arrived on purpose as a pasture crop.

A book published in 1993 by Yale University Press illustrates one of the silver lining benefits of this now frowned upon horticultural practice. In Redesigning the American Lawn by F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Beballe, two types of lawn are described: the Industrial Lawn, a monocrop of grass like that found on a golf course or ball field; and the Freedom Lawn, an organic, free-range mix of low green plants, including grasses, plantain, and White Clover.

Freedom Lawns can remain green even in marginal soil conditions and require little or no chemical fertilizer. The chief reason is clover, being a legume, can fix nitrogen, a major nutrient, into the soil in which it grows.

The White Clover sports an attractive bloom. Each flower head consists of twenty to forty florets that give the familiar cotton ball shape that attracts honeybees and human picnickers on balmy afternoons. The leaves below are trifoliate, and each one possesses a pale triangular mark called a chevron. Clover plants spread throughout a lawn on subsurface creeping runners, creating the appearance of scattered white wildflower colonies on the cultivated green.

White Clover spread on subsurface creeping runners. (photo taken 08 16 2010)

A close relative of White Clover, the Red Clover, Trifolium pretense, remained elusive until late October when I found a single specimen sporting a single pale red blossom within the confines of a Tenth Avenue tree pit. True to its general description, the plant was taller and more upright than a White Clover. Four lucky leaves were not to be found anywhere on the plant, but I did consider myself lucky to have found that one wildflower growing on far edge of the West Village. And with that, my investigation of the clover was complete . . .

A single Red Clover, Trifolium pretense, hangs out on Tenth Avenue. (photo taken 10 20 2010)

. . . Clover and out.

– rPs 11 01 2010

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