"Oh, this is beautiful!" I sighed. My fiancé had brought me out to his property in the neighboring state
several months before we married. It was wintertime, and little black
birds were feeding on some grain that he had set out in feeders, on top of
a thick layer of white snow. "There are hundreds of tulips buried
underneath that snow," he mentioned, pointing towards the feeders, "In the
spring it will remind you of home."
"Home" was Holland, or The
Netherlands, where I grew up. After an extensive period of traveling, I
ended up in Idaho, eventually met my husband and moved to his home on
almost six acres, in the state of Oregon. The little black birds, I later
found out, were quail, the grain was cracked wheat, and as he had
mentioned, hundreds of tulips emerged this spring from under that snowy
cover. It was a gorgeous sight! Being raised in a country that is one of
the largest flower-producers in the world, I loved anything that bloomed,
blossomed or simply grew out of a tiny seed; so as soon as the weather
allowed, the dogs and I went exploring beyond that large strip of flower
beds in the backyard to see what else was growing on our acreage.
It had been several years since
any livestock had lived on the property. Both the pasture and the
wooded area behind our house proved to contain an amazing wealth of new
flowers and plants, many of which I had never seen before, but were
oh-so-pretty! Beautiful purple flowers on high spikes mingled with
reeds on the side of the irrigation canal, lovely strands of white and
pink morning glory covered large patches of pasture, and all along the
driveway we had hardy green groundcovers with cute little yellow flowers.
As the days grew longer and the weather warmed up, more and
more plants and flowers would appear, sporting the most interesting
leaves, flowers and colors. One of my desires was to create a
butterfly garden on our property, and I was delighted to see nature had
provided such a colorful and diverse start.
|
 Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) amidst cat-tails |
However, I wasn't so enthusiastic
about those odd stalks that grew all over the property, sometimes in
clusters and sometimes by themselves, with large silvery leaves and
little, clustered star-shaped flowers. They didn't look pretty, and they
didn't smell nice as far as I could tell, so my practical mind and
attitude went to work and I spent the whole day yanking these odd
intruders out of the soil. Besides being offensive to my sight, they were
also excreting a milky substance which was surely highly poisonous! As to
prove my point, that night I broke out in a rash which first sent me
searching through our bathroom drawers for an anti-itch cream, and then
onto the Internet to find out what this horrible plant could be, but most
of all, how to get rid of it for good!
The search proved to be an
eye-opening, and horrifying, experience. Typing "noxious weeds" into the
search bar took me to the USDA national database with a large listing of
all noxious and invasive weeds, by state.
(http://plants.usda.gov/cgi_bin/topics.cgi?earl=noxious.cgi)
As none of the scientific, nor
common names, meant anything to me, I decided to click on each listing
separately and look at the photographs included, to see if I could
identify this plant. And as I viewed and read about each weed, my heart
sank deeper and deeper. The groundcover that graced our driveway turned
out to be Puncture-vine (Tribulus terrestris), a weed that grows burs so
hard it can puncture bicycle tires (imagine what it will do to your foot!). The purple spikes at the edge of the irrigation canal are Purple
Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). It aggressively pushes out plants with
nutritional value for wildlife but offers none itself, and the "Morning
Glory" is none other than "agriculture's twelfth most serious weed
species", the infamous Field Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) which seed
can remain viable in the soil for fifty years. But worst of all, the milky
stalks I had been removing from our acreage, were part of the one plant
that would feed the butterflies I so longed to provide for, the common
milkweed (Asclepias syriaca).
