Plant Story--Burdock, Arctium, Burs, Vegetable, and Velcro

Burdocks are plants you recognize for their seed pods or leaves. Oh, they have pretty enough pink-purple flowers, much like thistles flowers, but the seed pods have spines with hooks that stick tightly to clothes or fur, and the leaves are very large.

burdock, Arctium

Plant Story--A Small Weedy Alyssum, Alyssum simplex

Wanting to get out as the weather warms, I frequently walk Colorado foothills trails in April and May. Conspicuous there is wild alyssum, Alyssum simplex. 

All the little yellow flowers are wild alyssum, Alyssum simplex

The Familiar, the Introduced and the Native

Lilacs always remind me of my childhood in New York and Ohio,
but they are not native to North America

Each of us spends only a few years as a child and wherever we happened to be often is learned as "home." Lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) were on the property where I grew up. I had no idea they came from Asia in the 1800s.

Rarely do we consider what "home" was like fifty years or two hundred years before we grew up there.

And yet, for North America, likely you wouldn't recognize home if you went back very far in time.

Homogenized World--Attractive and Useful Tropical Plants

I wrote recently that the wonderful trees of any particular location in the modern tropics were drawn from all over the world, many of them in the 16th century as Europeans explored and colonized.

The same applies to smaller plants

Pineapples (Ananas comosus, bromeliad family, Bromeliaceae), popularly associated with Hawaii, are from Central America and the Caribbean.

Visiting Kauai

eroded hills of Kauai

This spring, we spent most of a week on Kauai, Hawaii.

The north- and east-most of the major Hawaiian islands, it is the oldest. The 10,000 foot mountains it once boasted now reach only to 5243 feet. But that doesn’t make them inconsequential. In fact, erosion reduced the mountains without considering humans. Kauai has canyons and valleys that are not--just simply are not--accessible. The only way in or out is by helicopter. In good weather. Wow, an island of 552 square miles (one third the size of Long Island, New York, 1,401 sq. miles) with  places you cannot hike or climb to.