Weeds I’d Be Happy To Grow

As I’ve mentioned in my weekly diet updates, I like to take a half-hour to 45-minute walk every day during my lunch hour. There’s a short path through a small wooded area in the middle of the business park, and I’ve walked it almost every day for… gee, probably seven or eight months now. I feel like my day is incomplete without my walk through the woods.

Since this is the first year I’ve walked the path in the early spring, I’m seeing all kinds of new wildflowers and plants I never noticed before. They all just melded together into a fantastic wooded greenness. Now, though, after walking in the winter and seeing everything bare, the new growth is really catching my eye. Especially flowers and things with splashes of color or unusual shape.

Now, I figure that if these plants are growing in the woods with no help from Man, they must be native to the NW Ohio area and able to thrive on their own in a shady environment. That’s pretty much a definition of my back yard: shady and neglected. 🙂 If I could identify these plants, and could procure seeds or seedlings (I’d rather not remove them from the walking path), I could very likely grow quite the kick-ass wildflower bed along one of our hedge walls. Assuming Aaron wouldn’t nix the idea due to his allergies.

I wish I could do a reverse Google Image search: plug in an image and have it search for images like it, or a definition of what I photographed. But alas (and alack), the only thing I can do is take pictures of the pretties and post them for my good readers to help me identify.

For pretty pictures of weeds wildflowers, read on…

There were several great groupings like this, with multiple colored flowers growing together just off the path. The yellow and the white flowers appear to grow about four inches tall, maybe a little taller. The leaves on the yellow flowered plant are heart-shaped, while the leaves on the white flowered plant seem to be long and grass-like, from what I can tell.

Here’s a close-up of the white flowers. They appear to have pink… stamens? The sticky-outie pollen parts. Those are pink.

These are so funky. They grow almost a foot off the ground, and their leaves grow outward and make this odd umbrella shape, almost. They seem to grow all together, and it makes for an expanse of this glossy hovering ground cover. Most of them look like they have seven leaves to me, but I could be mis-counting them.

Some of these light purple flowers have grown to be twelve inches tall or more.

These grow even taller, though. Someone in my office claimed this was ragweed. I suppose people with allergies would know. These have been sighted growing by my house… before they got mowed, that is. After seeing a large stand of them growing by my work, I’m inclined to think that these look cool in small groups, like five or six, but not giant fields, and not just them by themselves.

Not two days ago, these plants bore inch-long trumpet-shaped white flowers on thin stalks. Then it rained, and they all went away. Even without their blooms, though, this is a very fascinating ground cover. It makes a kind of texture, almost — which, I suppose, is one of the purposes of ground cover.

Take my word for this: up until yesterday, when it rained, these were cute little bell-shaped white flowers. Not my favorite of the bunch right now, but they were awesome. Strings of them would hang off of their stalks, next to the five-petaled white flowers I mentioned before. The different shapes of white flowers were interesting to me.

Don’t worry, I didn’t touch it, whatever it is. It’s some sort of creeping vine or ivy or something like that, with groups of five glossy reddish leaves. It tends to climb on the fallen trees in the park/woods, as in this photo. The different color of foliage was what really caught my eye; I’m not sure how I feel about creeping ivy vine-y type things, though, especially ones I don’t know. I remember enough from sixth grade outdoor education to know enough not to touch a tree without looking, in case there’s a creeper creeping up it that will make you all itchy.

And that was my trip through the woods today. If you know what any of these plants/weeds are, please leave a comment and berate me on my ignorance. Then tell me what they are, and if any of them should be living in my yard.

In other gardening news, I need to move my rose to a sunnier spot pronto, according to the resident Garden Guru at my work. I’m not willing to move it into the front yard, where anyone who happens by will be able to see my obvious neglect… but sunny spots are hard to come by in my back yard. I’m going to hold off on transplanting the rose until I can get reference photos of my back yard on uncloudy days in morning and midday — I got the evening pics today. I hope I can look at the pictures, then, and decide upon a good spot.

I also hope my rose isn’t grafted. If it is, I’m fucked and need to go buy a new rose. If I decide it’s worth trying again.

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  1. Realized during today’s walk that I missed a different variety of low-growing purple flower. Maybe I’ll take the camera again tomorrow and try to get some more pics.