In praise of weeds

Dandelion. Photo credit: David Hepworth

If you can eat, breathe, or exist, thank a plant. Plants often get the short end of the stick when it comes to Things Humans Are Interested In. They’re not all that cute (some might surprise you), they don’t talk (at least not to us), and all in all, compared to your average smart phone or polar bear, seem pretty boring. Yet all the organic carbon on this planet ultimately comes from plants.

From your windowsill miniature rose to the predatory bird of paradise in your backyard, all plants are busy wrenching apart water and carbon dioxide molecules, stripping them of hydrogen and carbon atoms to make organic hydrocarbons (plant sugars). Humans can’t do this. Your Android can’t do this. My fuzzy gray cat can’t do this. Only plants (and algae) do this. Almost every food chain everywhere on the planet starts with plants. 

I’ve taken you on a number of virtual nature walks (woods, trees, poisonous plants), but now I’d like to introduce you to the most common and least loved plants of all: weeds.  Weeds are one of the ways I first started to interact with the natural (naturalish?) world. I’ll be fond of them until / unless I start trying to grow things on purpose.

I grew up in my mom’s postage stamp sized garden in northern California. She wasn’t a fastidious gardener (still isn’t), and I was short (and still am), so I paid as much attention to crawling weeds as I did the taller stuff. At that age, I didn’t recognize a distinction between wanted and unwanted plants. Sorry, Mom. I’m responsible for your dandelion explosions. <Poof…>

The names and details came later. Many of them surprised me, since the books that I had first read about these plants led me to expect something…bigger. Grander. Less common. But the more I learned, the more interested I was for their own sake. Here’s a virtual garden of weeds I grew up with. What weeds are in your yard?

Sorrel (genus: oxalis)

Woodsorrel. Photo credit: Pellaea

I thought these were shamrocks for the longest time. One of their alternate names is actually False Shamrock. I wonder if you’re still lucky if you find a four-leafed oxalis? The most common type of sorrel I know has tiny yellow flowers, but among the shade of the redwoods, sorrel has big heart-shaped leaves and tall pink flowers. Oxalic acid gives sorrel a tart flavor. In large doses, oxalic acid causes kidney stones, so if you’re trying to keep yourself alive after the zombie apocalypse, don’t eat too much sorrel. Nice accent on a salad, though. (Note: don’t forage near roads or where plants have been heavily sprayed, like most lawns.)

Clover (genus: Trifolium)

Clover. Photo credit: Public Domain Photos

Clover flowers make nice daisy chains. I cleverly figured this out for myself while sitting in outfield during the softball unit of PE each year. (This should tell you something about my athletic prowess.) It also flavors honey and feeds cows. Red clover increases cows’ milk output, but too much clover can lead to fatal cow bloat. Burr clover has pointy spurred burrs that stick to clothing and fur, so watch out.

Scarlet Pimpernel (genus: Anagallis)

Scarlet Pimpernel. Photo credit: Rictor Norton and David Allen

Instead of crushing on boy band members as a teen, I crushed on well-dressed fictional gentlemen in cravats, including the Scarlet Pimpernel. After reading the book, I hopped online to see what a scarlet pimpernel looked like and was devastated to find that it was neither scarlet (salmon…maybe) nor impressive (flowers are usually smaller than 1/2″). In fact, this was the same unheroic weed that had taken over one corner of my mom’s yard years earlier. My mom was similarly unbelieving when I pointed it out to her on a walk many years later. Despite my disappointment, I still think scarlet pimpernels are pretty. But should anyone be looking for an emblem under which to subvert the French government, may I suggest the star glory instead?

Rattlesnake Weed (genus: Euphorbia)

Rattlesnake Weed. Photo credit: David~O

This one grew in the mortar between bricks, which says something about its tenacity. The stems are filled with a sticky, milky sap that is intensely bitter. Bitterness is often an indication that something has toxic alkaloids. Good thing I never took more than a lick! A tea made from rattlesnake weed was an herbal remedy for snake bites, but you probably don’t want to take a chance on it. Euphorbs are characterized by toxic milky saps that can blister, so although nothing ever happened to me from playing with rattlesnake weed, handle with care. As a rule of thumb, don’t eat a wild plant that has milky sap. And if you taste any plant that is bitter or makes your mouth tingle, put it down at once!

Purslane (genus: Portulaca)

Purslane. Photo credit: Frankenstoen

I recently found out purslane was edible, so this summer, when my mother was ready to weed her garden, I asked her to save the purslane for me. I tried it with scrambled eggs and mushrooms. It wasn’t bad, though a little slimy. The technical term, I believe, is ‘mucilaginous.’ Most importantly: I didn’t die! Purslane is a succulent with a slightly tart edge and interesting texture. If you’re going to eat it, don’t harvest from areas subject to spraying (either from pesticides or dogs).

Pineapple Weed (genus: Matricaria)

Pineapple Weed. Photo credit: ArranET

This small plant with rounded yellow flowers and lacy leaves didn’t grow in my mom’s backyard, but it did grow at my school. When I learned the name, I figured that the flowers look maybe a little (if you turn your head to the side and squint?) like upside down pineapples. But actually, if you pinch a flower open, they have a pleasant, fruity smell that has a hint of pineapple to it. Pineapple weed is related to chamomile, although more bitter, and if you’re in a pinch, rubbing the plant on your skin is supposed to repel insects.

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Even recognizing that weeds are a tremendous agricultural problem with no good solution (till and you degrade the soil; no-till and you have to use herbicides), I feel a certain admiration for these hardy, unwanted plants that survive despite the harshest conditions — no water, poor soil, herbicides, insects, fierce competition. They’re continually evolving resistance to our most powerful herbicides and other ways to kill them.

We city dwellers often bemoan the lack of nature in our immediate surroundings, but I dunno…maybe it’s just that we don’t pay enough attention. Do you know what weeds grow around you?

Weed identification resources:

• UC Davis weed gallery
• Colorado State list of common weeds
• University of Vermont common weeds of Northeastern US
• Almanac.com’s common garden weeds 

Also, this is what I’ve been up to lately.

Want to feel connected to nature? Go field sketching.

3pm at the barn. It’s at least 90 degrees in the sun, and I’m sitting under a willow tree by an overgrown pond, waiting for my friend as she visits with her horse and does mysterious things (not sure I really want to know what it means to ‘clean his sheath’). It’s a parched, dusty, yellow afternoon. Out on the pond, invisible frogs make thrumming noises that sound more like generators than croaks, an egret (or perhaps a crane or a heron — I don’t know my birds) stalks on long legs, redwing blackbirds swoop from above, and hundreds of blue and red dragonflies shimmy a few inches above the water. I am sketching to pass the time.

This is one of the plants growing by the pond. It’s called little mallow (Malva parviflora), and you probably have some near you.

Caption: ‘Mallow – edible but slimy’

(Here’s a real photo of little mallow. Nope, I definitely don’t have a future as a botanical illustrator. Oh well.)

As my friend Emily puts it, sitting quietly outdoors is a great way to reconnect with nature. 

I’m not a spiritual person, but field sketching is one way I connect to the world around me. I wouldn’t be an environmentalist if I didn’t have that appreciation of all the weird and wonderful things that call Earth home. I also like sketching because drawing switches off the noisy, word-oozing part of my brain, and lets me see without the filter of language. It doesn’t matter that I’m not particularly good at it. Every time, I rediscover how interesting everything is when I pay enough attention. And, while you’re being still, you might just see some other things you wouldn’t have seen.

So…I have a challenge for you, if you care to accept: go outside and draw something this week. I think you’ll come away with a different understanding of the ‘ordinary’ things you rarely really look at.  If you like, send it my way and I’ll post it here with a link back to your blog.

I talked to Emily, a science illustrator, for her top field sketching tips, and here’s what we came up with.

• Be able to identify poison oak / ivy / sumac and know whether it grows in your area. You’ll be sitting while drawing. Picking the wrong spot is definitely capable of ruining your spiritual experience. Or any experience, for that matter.
• Pack a picnic and go with a friend (if you like company).
• Find a comfortable spot first. Then choose something to draw close by. While some things are worth discomfort, that’s not the point of this particular exercise.
• Pick a good subject. Something stationary and relatively small, like a plant with countable leaves, is a good place to start.
• Insecure or uptight about your drawing skills? Emily recommends a little alcohol to loosen you up. (I haven’t tried this personally.)
• Don’t worry about the results. No one expects you to turn out fabulously detailed and precise sketches. It’s one of those journey-not-destination things.

Have you gone field sketching lately? Or do you feel inspired to go now? I’d love to hear about your field sketching experiences and see your drawings. 

Meet the Poisonous Plants In Your Backyard

Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis). Pretty, delicate, toxic. Image credit: Leo-seta.

Sadly, the internet tells me that there’s no such thing as a toxophile or toxicophile. If there were, I’d make a blog button for it. (Other suggested blog buttons for my site: Anti-Social Media Expert — thanks, Karen — and Evolutionary Dead End. Alas, I don’t know how to make buttons.) Anyway, what I mean to say is that I kind of have a thing about poisons. And by thing, I mean that people who look too closely at the books on my bookshelf might decline an invitation to dinner.

This is what comes of reading too many Agatha Christie books at a young and impressionable age.

Plant poisons are my favorite. I’m always taken aback by how elegantly and creatively nature addresses the problem of being eaten. Plants can’t run, so instead they wage chemical warfare on their predators. The Indian bean tree, for example, produces a nectar with a compound that only affects cheater species that steal nectar — but not pollinators.

And plenty of plants are well-protected not just against insects, but also bigger animals, like humans. There are lots of them, and they’re all around us. I’ve pulled together some of my favorite common wicked plants, a number of which are probably in either your backyard or a backyard near you. Welcome to my virtual poison garden!

(And for crying out loud, teach your kids to respect plants. I sampled my way through my mom’s garden as a kid and got lucky she didn’t have anything really poisonous. Although I guess that could explain some of my peculiarities.)

Nerium oleander. Image credit: heatheronhertravels

Oleanders are, in a sense, perfect garden shrubs. They’re drought resistant, have nice foliage, and produce lovely symmetrical pinwheel flowers that smell nice. They’re also among the deadliest of common garden plants, possessing a number of cardiac glycosides that affect heart function and can cause death. Even honey made from oleander nectar is toxic. (Most deaths by oleander, however, are intentional. By anecdote, a number of seniors have ended their lives by drinking oleander tea because it was readily available in their nursing home garden. That story makes me sad.) Interestingly, oleanders are also being investigated for therapeutic uses in treating cancer. The dose makes the poison.

Viburnum lantana. Image credit: Bosc d’Anjou

Lantanas have peppy colored flowers and nice leaves, but that’s about where the good news ends. They’re invasive in Australia, Hawaii, South Asia, and Southern Africa because 1) birds like the fruit and spread the seeds; and 2) the leaves are toxic to most species. Lantanas, especially the unripe berries, contain pentacylic triterpenoids that cause liver problems and phototoxicity in grazing animals (including small children).

Digitals spp. Image credit: Salt Spring Community

Foxgloves are an old garden favorite. The name has an odd etymology that doesn’t actually involve small reddish quadrupeds (Wiki can tell you all about it). Another name for this plant is deadman’s bells. Foxgloves contain cardiac glycosides and have actually been used to treat some heart conditions since the 18th century. My grandmother, who has had congestive heart failure, is on a synthesized form of digoxin. However, cross the [narrow] therapeutic threshold and foxgloves can cause nausea, halos, delirium, irregular heart rhythms, and death. All parts of the plant are toxic, not just for humans, but also for dogs and cats. Even drinking the water that cut foxgloves are sitting in can be deadly.

Conium maculatum. Image credit: jkirkhart35

I doubt anyone plants poison hemlock on purpose, but it’s a common weed in fields and pastures. It’s quite a delicate looking plant, a spindly 6′ tall with dainty little white flowers. Purple spots or streaking on the stalks are a dead giveaway, but it resembles plants that are edible or medicinal (Queen Anne’s Lace, wild fennel, parsley. Socrates is probably hemlock’s most famous victim. Hemlock contains a highly toxic compound called coniine, which paralyzes the muscles, including the heart. It doesn’t take much to cause death — 100mg of the leaves, root, or seeds.

There are many, many others: nightshades, sago palms, castor bean, angel’s trumpets, water hemlock (as if one deadly hemlock weren’t enough), buttercups, dieffenbachias…just more proof that nature’s chemicals aren’t necessarily safer than manmade ones. Which poisonous plants do you have in your garden? 

OK, I think I’m done poking my naturalistic fallacy in the eye with a sharp stick now. If you’re interested in the topic, you might enjoy:

• Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart
• Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants by Lewis S Nelson, Richard D Shih, and Michael Balick
• The Poison Diaries by Colin Stimpson
• The Poisoner’s Handbook  by Deborah Blum (not plant toxins, but a great read)

Virtual Nature Walk: Spring Edition

Last summer I took you on a virtual plant walk of my favorite preserve, the Fremont Older Open Space. Unfortunately, by July, things are pretty dead in California — dead enough to make you suspect that the ‘golden’ part of our ‘golden state’ moniker is a euphemism for dried up and brown.

Totally different story in early April. Oceans of grass up to my knee, budding leaves, and damp soil underfoot that sinks just the right amount when you step on it. It’s impossible for me to be there and not think that I’m an amazingly lucky person to be alive on this planet right now. This feeling is the single most important factor in why I am an environmentalist. We’ve absolutely got something worth protecting in this small blue and green planet.

Want to join me on a virtual nature walk? Just a warning: I am neither a botanist nor a photographer. But if you don’t mind wandering around with an amateur naturalist equipped with a cheap camera, come along! We’re going to sneak in the back entrance of the park this time. The trail starts in a wooded, damp area with lots of early spring vetches (no flowers yet), clovers, and blackberry brambles. Almost immediately, we come across this little guy (actually, slugs are hermaphrodites, and this one, at 7″, isn’t exactly little):

According to Wiki, the Pacific banana slug is the 2nd largest terrestrial slug in the world. Also my college mascot at UC Santa Cruz!

There’s a bizarre tradition of licking banana slugs, which apparently causes numbing due to toxins in the slime, but I’m thinking that I can live without that particular experience. (Also, it’s not good for the slugs.) So we leave it alone and continue up the path. It’s a beautiful morning, all clean air, cloud shadows, and bright light.

As we head up the incline, puffing just a bit, we pass by some coast live oaks with their dark, shiny leaves, plenty of California sagebrush on sunnier slopes, some toyon bushes (also called California holly), distant blue blossoms, and lots of other stuff I don’t know the names of yet. Ask me again in another year. Kevin likes this back entrance to the park because it gets straight to the point — up a steep hill and into the heart of the park. I think I might prefer the gentler entrance myself.

Right, then. At the top of the hill, we swing a right on to the Hayfield Trail, which overlooks lush green hills that are currently covered in wild oat grass. When the wind blows, it sounds like the ocean. The grass is just starting to go to seed; in another few weeks, it will be drying out and dead. In the meantime, it looks lusher than the nearby golf course.

Springtime in the California hills wouldn’t be complete without a couple of these, of course. Our iconic golden poppies are late this year due to the delayed rain, but they’re the usual eyepopping shade of orange. Apparently they’re late risers: it’s almost 10am, and they’ve yet to fully unfurl. I recently learned that golden poppies are not true poppies, but they’re perfectly suited for survival in California, being self-seeding, drought-resistant, OK with poor soil (like on highway shoulders), and easy to cultivate in gardens. There are fewer of them this year because of our weirdly dry and warm winter, but more may come up later.

Continuing down the path, we pass a couple of magnificent old coast live oaks. These rugged trees have deep roots to survive the yearly May-October California drought. The coast live oak also has small, glossy leaves to conserve water — the more surface area of the leaf, the more water the tree loses through evaporation. Live oaks, as the name implies, do not shed their leaves in the winter. California’s live oaks are being threatened by Sudden Oak Death. If you hike in more than one park, be sure to rinse off your shoes so you don’t carry the disease from one area to another.

Feeling a little warm? Let’s stand in the shade of this oak for a few minutes before going on. (Just a note: compressing the soil around trees, i.e. walking on their roots, can damage root systems, especially if lots of people do it. These trees are located just off the trail, but unless I really want to take a better look at something or use a treefinder key, I usually don’t approach.)

We’re passing through several types of mini ecosystems even in a relatively short walk. The fields are turning into dryer, warmer chaparral. On both sides of us are lots of shrubs with attractive glossy leaves that start off reddish when young and then turn bright green. Can you guess what they are?

Remember, unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing, don’t touch anything with leaves of three. The same compound in poison oak that causes allergic reactions, urushiol, is also found in poison ivy, poison sumac, cashew nut shells, and mango skins (in much smaller quantities). I don’t know if I’m sensitive to urushiol or not, and today is not the day to find out. Poison oak is an important part of this ecosystem, by the way: birds and other animals rely on its berries for food. Just because we thin-skinned humans can’t touch it doesn’t make it a bad plant.

As we round the hill, the air becomes noticeably warmer and stiller. There’s a drop off to the left and something like a cliff face to the right that seems to have created a microclimate. This is my favorite plant along this stretch:

These spiky purple flowers, with their unusual arrangement (several flowers are spaced out along a single stalk like meatballs on a skewer) are a type of local sage, also known as chia. They will produce lots and lots of edible chia seeds after they’re done blooming. If you pinch a leaf, you’ll be able to smell the characteristically pungent odor associated with sages, which are actually in the mint family.

We also see lots of manroot just beginning to form its big spiky seed balls, more feathery sagebrush, and a whole lot of mystery plants. A number of the small elderberry trees are just putting out their flat flower umbels. I’m pleased that the swarms of midges that plague this stretch in the summer have not yet arrived.

At the end of the warm stretch is a shady grove of eucalyptuses. (There are lots of different types; I have no idea which these are.) Eucalyptuses

 are Australian transplants that just can’t get enough of California. The unusual seedpods, spicy fragrance, and strippy bark were so much a part of my childhood that I was surprised to learn that these trees were non-native and invasive. This park has never made any claims to be a pristine native habitat, and honestly, the shade slips deliciously over us after the warmth of the hill.

We have one other major stop on this walk, and that’s Maisie’s Peak, 1100 feet above sea level. Alas, the view isn’t all that impressive. Up this high, you can see miles of suburbia at the boundaries of greenness, the cement quarry on the other side, the Moffett Field hangars all the way out, ribbons and ribbons of gray highway stretching into the distance. The wide open space seems like it goes on forever when you’re in it, but it ends all too soon.

Heading back, I see some flowers I have never seen before. (You’d think that in 12+ years, I’d have seen everything at this park, but it all changes so quickly and there are enough trails that I’m sure I miss a lot.) These big 1.5-2″ four-petaled flowers have me stumped. This is where Google images and my gads of flower guides come in. I’ll let you know when I have an answer.

This was an easy walk, no more than 2-3 miles, so we leave feeling energized and ready to take on the human world again. I hope you enjoyed our excursion!

I don’t think you need to love plants and wild things to be an environmentalist, but it’s a core part of why I care about this planet. Do you have a favorite hiking spot? What’s growing there  right now?