Guerrilla Gardening and Escapees

There is a fine line between guerrilla gardening and escapees. I think this pulmonaria is probably an escapee from the neighbour's garden but I don't know how the lone daffodil below got there. Yesterday I checked out the bloodroot and trilliums I guerrilla gardened. The bloodroot is slowly establishing itself but the trilliums are not having a good year. It seems like someone (looking at you Rabbit) is eating the flower buds. There were only two trilliums in flower yesterday while I recall seeing seven flower buds earlier this spring.

The other day I was checking out a bit of raspberry that I had planted back in 2009 on the north side of the berm. It had never amounted to much as it never overcame the grass in that area, but I was surprised to notice right by the rasperry plant some yellow trout-lily leaves poking through the grass. There isn't any yellow trout-lily on the berm east of Ben-Franklin Park but these guys must have come along for the ride when I took the raspberries from a ditch south of Barrhaven.

I was attacking the patch of dog-strangling vine today, when I happened to notice a Baltimore Oriole feeding in the poplars above me. The patch of dog-strangling vine at the end of Newhaven seems to be surviving my regular attacks on it. I don't believe I have let it set seed since I noticed it a couple of years ago yet the patch is surviving just fine either from the seed bank or from growing back from the roots.

Another rare visitor to the berm I saw last week was a little raccoon. We both froze when we spotted each other and had a bit of a stare-off until he decided that I wasn't going to get out of his way and meandered off into the trees.

In flower

• Dandelion
• Daffodil
• Pulmonaria
• Bloodroot
• Trillium
• Violets
• Garlic Mustard
• Yellow Rocket

Prickly Lettuce

Prickly lettuce flowers

The Prickly lettuce plant looks quite similar to a sow-thistle before the flower heads start to appear, the big difference at that point is the row of spines down the midrib of each leaf. Once the flowers start to emerge it looks quite different, as instead of a few upright dandelion-like flowers they have several nodding pannicles of buds that once they flower stand upright in a wide spray of flowers and seed heads(see picture at bottom). The flowers close-up shop early in the day so when I usually come by in the later afternoon they are all closed up. I had to go out to the test-plot area at midday on purpose to see the actual blooms.

Prickly lettuce leaf with spines down the rib

According to the wikipedia article, this is the closest wild relative of our cultivated lettuce although it doesn't look very similar. It is supposed to be edible, but has a milky white sap that is quite bitter. I wouldn't put it in my salad.

Sow-Thistles

I've been meaning to find out the identity of these tall dandelion like flowers for years. They are a very common road-side flower and on the way up to the Laurentians last week the roadside was covered in them. The one in the above photo is growing in the experimental area beside Hunt-club, but there has been a patch of them by the 2011 planting area for years. They don't seem to spread easily into established grass or meadows as they haven't expanded into the 2011 planting area since the mowing stopped

Flowers of Smooth Perennial Sow-thistle(Sonchus arvensis) with Sow-thistle Aphids

Lower leaves of the perennial sow-thistle

As can be seen in the top photo they grow quite tall. There is another shorter spiny annual sow-thistle species that is less than a meter tall and has smaller flowers. A whole bunch of it is growing in one section of the experimental area but it has already finished flowering so I didn't get a picture. A picture of the leaves is below.

Leaves of the Spiny annual sow-thistle(Sonchus asper)

Black Medic

I've never been exactly confident on my identification of this common lawn plant as Black Medic(Medicago lupulina) since my guide book doesn't give a good sense of its size and there is another common flower that is very similar but with flowers that are 2 to 3 times larger. So in the above photo notice the tiny syrphid fly; those little guys are a bit smaller than mosquitoes. Around here, this is a "weed" in lawns that thrives where the grass doesn't do well, like by the sidewalk in my lawn. As it's green and can be mown, it is welcome in my lawn any time.

I finally took the time to go through and figure out what it was using the web. There are 3 species of hop clover that are very similar to black medic. Since it isn't the right time of year to see the seedpods the identifying feature that nailed it for me was the tiny spike at the end of each leaflet on Black Medic. A couple of websites pointed this out as a way to distinguish black medic from its look-alikes. The look-alike I find around here (that really doesn't look very similar when you compare the real thing side by side) is Hop Clover(Trifolium aureum). Below are close-ups of the two flowers

Black Medic (Medicago lupulina)

Hop Clover (Trifolium aureum)