rseager's Journal

I am working for five weeks at the University of East Anglia, in my home town of Norwich, England. For the period we are staying in a flat on Whitehall Street in the western sector of the city. My work at the UEA concerns climate change in the world's Mediterranean climate regions. It's May in Norwich and plants, trees and weeds are flowering everywhere and the colors are wonderful. However, I have been looking at the weeds growing on my street. There are many I can see in people's front 'gardens' - really just a meter strip between the houses and the front wall that no one seems to bother to care for. However, I only identified the weeds growing between the front wall and the street. Most of these are growing at the base of the front wall. I ignored obvious garden-escapees. Here is what I have found so far.

Herb Robert - great name - is a lovely little pink flower that is very common in Norwich with good examples on the street.
Pellitory-of-the-wall - another great name and predictably growing at the base of the wall.
Petty Spurge - an interesting weed with medicinal use in dealing with abnormal human cell growth and specifically keratosis, a pre-cancerous skin lesion caused by solar exposure.
Purple toadflax - beautiful color and possibly a garden-escapee but seemingly very common.
Round-leaved Crane's-Bill - with delicate little pink flowers.
Nipplewort - its closed flower buds apparently resemble nipples and its leaves can be eaten if you don't mind the hairs.
Fringed willowherb - introduced here from the Americas or Asia.
Cornsalads - can't be more precise than that but there is a lot of it along the bottoms of the garden walls.

Red Valerian - a garden escapee that apparently likes environments like the base of a wall and disturbed urban environments.
Eggleaf spurge - very pretty this one and just found the one plant so far but maybe the only one flowering and making itself known.

At the time of fall some formerly nondescript plants are making themselves obvious by flowering and providing some color against the developing browns and yellows of fall and the withering and falling leaves. I noticed some color in a part of Morningside Park that I use on frequent pandemic-trips out to connect and climb the many staircases in the Park. The stretch is at the higher level just in from 113th St and Morningside Drive and extends south from between the first and second staircases downs to the top of the staircase that leads down to the ball fields. It's about 10 meters long.

Here are a good collection of asters. These tiny flowers are blossoming all over Morningside now but I also seem them all over other parks too at the moment. There seems to be quite a variety of them, with different colors. One aster, shown here, iNaturalist steadfastly refused to identify beyond the "American Asters" stage. There is also some white snakeroot. This plant is also blossoming all over the City's parks now too. Apparently it is poisonous. Also this stretch of Morningside Park, as is the case for much of the Park, has a nice collection of Asiatic dayflowers. I first noticed one of these in a quaking bog in New Jersey at the end of summer. I thought it was unusual then but now am seeing them all the time in Morningside. Although a tiny flower they catch the eye due to their lovely color. There is also some Liriope growing here with its tiny purple flowers vertically arranged along the top of stems. And then there appears to be a white mulberry trying to get going. And of course there is the pokeweed - so common but I love the look of its berries and the riot of color of the whole plant - and the prosaic mugwort, and the common lamb's-quarters too. And more recently I noticed porcelain berry which as always was beautifully colored with a nice variety of colors on each plant. Porcelain berry is also out all over the city right now - there is a whole avenue of it along the cycle path between the Riverside Park waste water treatment plant and the Riverside Drive viaduct for example. And there is an abundance of low smartweed which also is flowering all over city parks at the moment.

White snakeroot is indigenous to the east and is the cause of "milk sickness" when consumed in the milk of animals that have eaten it and apparently caused the death of thousands of European settlers (and perhaps also killed Abe Lincoln's mother) before they got to know the plant, or were told about it by native people.

Low smartweed is equally abundant in city parks with lovely purple flowers and was introduced from Asia as recently as the early 20th century. Liriope is also an import from Asia and is commonly used in gardening. The porcelain berry is from Asia and was introduced for ornamental reasons - its considered an invasive - apparently it's edible - the Brooklyn Botanic Garden says it "has the winning combination of slimy and bland" but birds are ok with it. It's in the grape family. The asters are native to North America - 90 different species of them all in all. The lovely Asiatic dayflower is described by iNaturalist as a "noxious weed" - but it is used in Chinese medicine and was the source of dyes for famous 18th and 19th entry Japanese woodblock prints so let's appreciate it for that.

Not a bad collection of plants of interest in a few largely untended yards of a park!

Note: On a trip through here December 6 I noticed that the Liriope had now produced lovely stems of small black berries. I took a photo and would add here if I could work out how to add an observation after publishing this.

Note: In January 2021 I was surprised (no doubt since I am not a botanist!) that four new plants were happily growing at this site despite it being mid-winter. These were garlic mustard, catchweed bedstraw, common chickweed and ivy-leaved speedwell. All apparently can leaf as early in the year as January. What happens if they they get snow on I don't know but perhaps must get the chance to see. Morningside Park in January is awash with ivy-leaved speedwell which I find interesting - I do not see it as abundant or barely at all in nearby Riverside and Central Parks. There were also a few plants of red dead nettle growing.

After January we had three major snowstorms that left all of these plants completely covered. Once the snow melted the plants were still there, happily continuing to grow. In March many of these flowered even as it remained stubbornly cold. Not in this stretch of Park, but nearby, I also spotted Siberian squill and periwinkle flowering in late March.

There are a couple of disused water control gatehouses for the Croton Aqueduct on Amsterdam Avenue, relics of the 19th system that first brought clean, fresh water to New York City. The gatehouse at 119th St. is still abandoned (the one at 113th St. has been incorporated enterprisingly into a nursing home and rehab facility). It sits on a pretty barren stretch of Amsterdam even though this goes through the heart of the Columbia campus.

The gatehouse presents a stone wall to the sidewalk with various places that plants can take hold in addition to the crack at the base. The wall faces west so is shaded in the morning but gets sun from midday on until the campus buildings west of Amsterdam shade it late in the day.
There is an interesting collection of plants scrapping away here. I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the assemblage with what is growing in the neglected tree planters on Broadway just half a mile away (see my previous post).

I have identified here:

Tree of heaven
Siberian elm
Prickly lettuce
Prickly sowthistle
Eastern black nightshade
Green bristle grass
Upright woodsorrel
Fireweed
Purple loosestrife
Common copper leaf
Unidentified dicots

For the plants in the dicots family, there are lots of individuals of this but iNaturalist always fails to identify exactly what it is. It's just listed as Dicots here.
The woodsorrel here is growing from a crevice in the wall and has the appealing look of hanging garden or a vertical rockery.

I was struck by how little overlap there is between what is growing here and what is growing in the wild tree planters over on Broadway. Nightshade, wood sorrel and Siberian Elm are the common ones. Siberian Elm in fact seems quite adept at growing in these small scale wild environments. This is the only place I've noticed the common copper leaf.

The introduced plants here are the tree of heaven, the prickly lettuce, the prickly sow thistle, green bristle grass (related to foxtail) and purple loosestrife.
The native ones are the nightshade, wood sorrel, fireweed and common copper leaf.
Richard Mabey informs that loosestrife got its name since when used on horses it can calm them down, so loose their strife!
You have to admire the tree of heaven - its everywhere, so called because of the rapidity with which its branches reach to heaven, its pretty much the official weed tree of New York City.

The purple loosestrife seems out of place. It was introduced from Europe and is meant to prefer stream sides and apparently is all over the banks of the Hudson further north. This does not seem a well watered site however. It's very pretty.

On September 27th I was walking home one evening after parking the car past the Gatehouse and noticed that this entire assemblage had been weeded out from both the wall and the crack where the wall and sidewalk meet, and done very well so absolutely no plants remain at all. I'm glad I was able to record what had been able to grow in the moments between human intervention.

At the end of my block on the southeast corner of Broadway and 112th Street there are four tree planters that have been left neglected. Three no longer have trees in them and one has a youthful tree. All four have been taken over by whatever plants have been able to make progress on this abandoned land - some 3 square meters each. The four have a quite different collection of plants.

I wondered how exotic the plants would be. After all, these are located right by a ton of restaurants, food stores and take out places and could conceivably be accidental receptacles for all sorts of seeds. Maybe a tomato plant? However there seems little or nothing that might have originated from some discarded food stuffs or packaging.

I identified the plants with iNaturalist and some googling

The most southern planter has been essentially taken over by just two plants. There is a black locust on the east side and a huge black nightshade, full of berries, on the west side. Two horseweeds are also there.

In second most southern of the four planters I have identified the following plants:
Spindle
Eastern black nightshade
Giant foxtail
Fragrant bedstraw
Woodsorrel (a community member suggested this was upright yellow woodsorrel)
Fringed loosestrife (a community member disagreed that that was correct!)

In the planter to the north it is totally different. This one has been taken over by a giant bush of white sweetclover with nothing else. The bush is about 5 feet high and probably ten feet in circumference!

In the most northern of the planters there is a quite different plant community. I identified - two were corrected due to input from another iNaturalist person (thanks!):
Robin's plantain
Common dandelion
Common wrinkle-leaved goldenrod
Horseweed
Siberian elm
Upright yellow wood sorrel
Hedge bedstraw

The oddity here is a baby Siberian elm trying to make a go of it. These grow in Riverside Park which is just one block away so it is not too surprising to find this here.

The collected assemblage is a mix of native (e.g. wood sorrel, horse weed, black locust) and introduced (e.g. foxtail, white sweetclover, spindle) plants, about equally split. Most are considered troublesome weeds.

So, why did the four adjacent and near equally neglected planters end up with such different plant communities? Nothing here seems to be related to seeds spread by people from discarded food. There seems limited overlap between the planters. I wonder how it is the communities develop differently.

This is a fairly typical abandoned meadow on the edge of the Catskills with poor stony soils. I have simply identified the plants that are taking over the fields and the farm buildings area. Milkweed, wrinkle-leaved goldenrod, Japanese barberry, mugwort, deer tongue, Japanese knotweed, wild carrot, black swallow-wort, great mullein, sensitive fern, spotted knapweed, St. John's wort, Deptford pink, hedge bedstraw are what I have identified so far. I hope I am right. I am entirely new to this. Though a scientist, the atmosphere, ocean and climate are my domain, not the living world! However, I have been thinking that people like to identify the rare and striking plants but often do not know the common plants (call them weeds if you want) that are everywhere around us and often quite unimpressive. I read Richard Mabey's book Weeds and decided to observe and identify these common, humble, unassuming and often unwanted plants. Because of the pandemic and the shutdown of life in NYC we decided to spend July in the Catskills and the abandoned meadows are just a mile away from our cabin. I identified for all of July. Some of the plants became identifiable only in the later days as they flowered. It's notable how many of the plants, maybe most, are not indigenous to North American but have been introduced from Europe and Asia. There is a road that crosses the meadow and like all the roads here it is lined with chicory and its beautiful blue flowers, but only to one meter or some from the road. I wonder why chicory does this?