Site icon Margaret Coombs

Wisconsin Wildflowers, Late June

I am a neophyte at identification and am out of practice at photography. Here is what I saw yesterday.

Sidewalk view

After consultation with my wildflower book and online resources, I decided that this is bittersweet nightshade. It’s an invasive plant, but the flowers are pretty. I found it twining around the burdock next to the sidewalk in an untended, wild property (assuming that I identified burdock correctly).

I was delighted to find the blossoms and to see them through the camera. But my appreciation always declines when I learn that a plant is nonnative and invasive. What did this land look like 150 or 200 years ago? This question propels my quest for wildflowers, as they are the remnants of that earlier time, when plant life was diverse, and the inhabitants here knew how to coexist in a way that did not threaten the future.

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