Plant Hunting Time

Vines with trumpet-shaped, pale pink and white flowers and deep green, heart-patterned leaves wind up around the lilacs at the edge of our garden.

“Morning glories,” my wife calls them.

“Bindweed!” I reply.

Farmers who see the plant twisting around a struggling corn seedling might say, “Devils-vine.” It’s just a matter of perspective.

Discerning botanists will tell you that even the most noxious invasive plants often have a few useful, redeeming qualities. Not one to try and categorize plants as either good or bad, I like to look at it as a realtor might, as a matter of “location, location, location.”

Whether you think of a plant as a welcome abundance or a noxious infestation, it’s important to know just what kind of plant/weed you’re dealing with. For plant-hunters with an urge to do botanical identification, this time of summer is ideal. That’s because many plants are now showing distinctive reproductive structures (flowers, fruits and seeds) that make the task simpler.

A working knowledge of botanical structures and terminology is helpful. Many with whom I’ve walked Coös County meadows have been subjected to the old rhyme, “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses have nodes from the top to the ground,” as a way to distinguish the stems of these quite-different plant types. Then, for the graze-able grasses there’re those auricles and ligules (little ears and tongues) we need to know about.

Old botany texts can often be bought inexpensively at library book sales and flea markets. A reasonably-priced book I used when teaching a botany course a while back is Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon. It’s still readily available and an easy read as well.

A well-illustrated plant identification guide is also a must. My most-used, dog-eared reference, usually somewhere in my pickup, is Cornell Press’ Weeds of the Northeast by Uva, Neal, and DiTomaso. First published in 1997, it quickly became an essential tool for practicing botanists. Along with a photo of the plant in full bloom, the book also includes photos of seedlings, seeds, leaf details, and other key features. Accompanying descriptions detailing end-of-season characteristics, similar species, and habitat add to its usefulness. It seems I’m always adding more botanicals to my book collection.

An understanding of a plant’s preferred habitat can tell us a lot about it and the land itself. For instance: buttercups in a field or moneywort in a garden typically indicate wet soils and poor drainage. Conversely, yellow and orange hawkweed, or rabbit-foot clover indicate droughty, low-fertility ground. Check with your local County Conservation District office for soils maps, which will detail the physical characteristics of soils in your area.

With practice, these references can help plant enthusiasts identify the families most weeds (or interesting specimens) belong to. Are they annuals, biennials, or perennials? Broadleaf weeds or grasses? How do they spread? Answers to questions like these will give you some clues about how best to manage troublesome weeds.

Cultivating (mechanically or with a hoe) seed-reproducing annuals, such as purslane may eliminate them. Not so with weeds such as perennial quackgrass, which will sprout from the pieces of the rhizomes you spread with your hoe or cultivator. An agronomist I know calls quackgrass “the grass that sews New Hampshire soils together,” in tribute to its aggressive root system. (Note: some people still call it witchgrass, but there’s also an annual witchgrass—one of the problems arising from the use of common plant names, versus their Latin names. The Latin name for quackgrass is Elytrigia repens)

Conflicting or duplicate plant names, along with the difficulty of precisely identifying their genus and species, make foraging for wild edible plants risky business. Over-confidence can prove deadly. A family of very familiar plants—the Umbelliferae , or carrot family plants, are a good example. This same family that includes the edible garden carrot, parsnip, and parsley also includes the deadly poison hemlock, an infusion of which Socrates drank to commit suicide. Can you tell the differences between poison hemlock and Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild ancestor of the garden carrot?

For identification of potentially toxic or injurious plants to livestock, a good reference is Poisonous Plants of Pennsylvania, published by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Livestock owners should have a copy of Merck’s Veterinary Manual on hand. In addition to plant descriptions, it offers information on symptoms, poisonous principles, and more. I’m often surprised at how many plants cause problems for livestock.

My general outlook on pasturing animals safely is to look at ways to improve the stands of cultivated grasses and clovers necessary for proper nutrition, discouraging anything else in the field through good management practices.

If you’d like to see how one farmer has worked hard to accomplish this, join us up here in Coös County Wednesday, August 10, for an afternoon-in-the-field Pasture Meeting. Call 788-4961 for more information.

by Steve Turaj, UNH Cooperative Extension Agricultural Resources Educator