Wednesday, September 19, 2018

What are these plants?


Can anyone help me identify some plants that are in bloom this month? 

The first one is some kind of perennial sunflower that's absolutely invasive. It started out as a single 2.5 inch pot my mother bought and is now in three locations on the property ( I only planted them intentionally in one spot, they've come up where I must have thrown ones that were weeded out).  The plants are well over my head, probably 7 feet tall.


Garage and shed for scale. They're huge.

They spread by means of a rhizome? tuber? that is tiny, about the size of a finger - it looks like what you'd see from a wild daylilly.


Here are the flowers. They're very pretty.  The stems are slightly sticky the way larger sunflower plants are.

The other mystery is this flowering shrub


They're tall too, maybe 6 feet, and grow in mounds.  They are prolific here in areas that have poor soil (like alongside railroad tracks - gravel with little soil).  These railroad tracks are nearly always running along waterways.  The plants themselves are in dry ground but maybe they like the increased humidity?


Here's a close up of the leaves and blossoms. They flower in sprays along the length of the branches.  For the last month these have been covered in honey bees and other pollinators. 

Can anyone help me identify these?


7 comments:

  1. I think the yellow flowers are jerusalem artichockes and the tuber is edible, but they are very windy sometimes called fartychockes.

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    1. Haha. I love the term "windy", it sounds so polite. ;) It DOES look like that plant but the tubers are really small, I wonder if it's a more wild type?

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  2. I think the white flowers might be Silver Lace Vine that bloom in autumn and can run rampant so used to cover old structures etc.

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    1. Kris thank you so much! I did an image search for that and came up with Japanese Knotweed - that's it! It's apparently super invasive but the bees LOVE it. The site even mentioned that it is common along railroad lines.

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  3. If it has a taproot too, it might be Mexican sunflower. Lynn

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  4. I think the yellow flower is coreopsis. I remember it from my childhood home where it grew very tall. lepidilla

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