Hi All,
I found a patch(about 20) of this plant growing up through wood chips.I'm in zone 7a. Does anyone know what it is? I was going to cover some knotweed that is growing nearby with black plastic and wanted to know if I should cover these plants as well.
I also posted to the plant ID forum but so far no one responded.
Thank you,
Adele
Here is a picture of its roots
I dont know what it is, did you ever get an answer? Now you've got my curiosity up! :-)
I've been waiting for an answer on this as well. I can only say I haven't got a clue. When I don't know what something is, I just let it be until it grow enough that I can identify it, which is what I would do with this. You can always pull it up later if you decide to, can't plant it back later.
Karen
I was going to say Ajuga but then I wasn't sure as it came up in z7. Does it grow there?
well, if it IS a foe, its a pretty one!
I was going to say Ajuga too. Does it flower? Ajuga is zone 3-9.
She needs to come back and tell us.
Ajuga does flower, but it's not an especially showy flower. I think it's grown for the foliage color.
Karen
Hmm...I have ajuga in my front walkway garden, but the leaves on the plant shown above don't look quite as crinkley (cabbage-like) as the ones I've seen on ajuga plants. Then again, ajuga has several different cultivars with different foliage colors and perhaps one of them has a smoother leaf? Tough to say.
Here's a picture of some ajuga foliage (burgundy glow cultivar). And yes, it does flower. Mine produce pretty flower spikes (about 4-6" high) in lavender blue. Not overly showy, but nice all the same. :)
uh oh! now I have to go buy another plant! lol! I love the colors of the ajuga KaylyRed. What cultivar is yours?
The one pictured is "burgundy glow." I also have "bronze beauty," which is my favorite. It's such a pretty little shade plant. Even my husband, who isn't much into gardening, commented on it and said, "You should get more of those next year."
I'm hoping the plants will spread and take care of the "more of those" part for me. :D
Adele,
Don't feel bad that you didn't get an ID from anyone on the ID Forum. I have a darling little wildflower that I tried to get an ID on. I had several replies but alas, none of them were correct. Doesn't really matter, I guess. I collected its seeds and will be planting more of them this year.
Like I said, I would just keep it until I had a reason not to. It's a pretty little plant, sometimes that's good enough. I have another plant that I can't ID either. It is some kind of perennial that had tiny blue/purple blooms on it last year. The butterflies loved it. It is already leafing back out this year.
Karen
KaylyRed: shade loving :o( I have no shade here :o( maybe once my trees grow and fill out....
Karen, try posting your pix again, lets see if I can help...
Anjl
Hi Anjl,
I've looked and looked on the AL Wildflower pages, USDA pages, and anywhere else I can think of. I've not found anything even close. It's very low growing, about 2" high. The little leaf branches are only about 4-6" long. It does appear to be in the pea family. It was suggested that it might be a type of vetch, but I've looked at all the photos of vetches that I could find. None of them are like this, although I did find a couple of them that had a slight similarity.
Karen
Here is a pic:
The flower does resemble a sweet pea. Is the flower white, or a pale pink?
Does it set seed, or come back from tubers?
The flower is a pale pink, two-toned. It sets seed in long, flat pods, kind of like a pea pod. The seeds are medium brown, very round, a little smaller than a B-B. When the seeds pods are mature, they pop open, and each half forms a curl and turns brown. The flower is about 1/2". The seed pods are about 1 1/2" to 2" long. It is very drought tolerant. It was growing in full sun on my property. But on the neighbor's property I found it in deep shade.
Karen
Here's a closer pic of the flower and the seed pods.
and its not a trailing sweet pea? the flower looks like a sweet pea, or butterfly vine. does it branch out like a vine? creeper?
No, it doesn't vine or creep. Just very flat to the ground, but the leaves all kind of come from the center out, and the flowers come up from the center. After I found them I started watering them so these are fairly healthy. I thought the flower looked like sweet peas, but then the rest of the plant is wrong for that. I keep thinking I should be able to Google for wildflowers or something and it would pop right up. So, far I've found plants that are a little like this, but nothing that will fit, either the growth habit is different or the leaf is wrong or something.
The ones on the neighbor's property were not getting water at all, so they were very tiny with the leaf branches maybe 2-3" long and only two or three to a plant, and they were all single plants not several plants together. I figured they were just managing to hang in there with the drought we were having last summer.
Karen
Here's another pic. I think there are about 3 plants in this one. This patch of them was about 14" by about 10". The close-up photos make them look larger than they are.
Glendalekid: I have something very similar to that in a woodsy part of my back yard. I'm pretty sure mine is a species of polemonium (Jacob's Ladder). There are, as I understand it, about 25 different species and quite a few grow wild.
Of course, take this for what it's worth--I'm a complete garden newb. But that might be one plant to look at in your identification search.
Hi KaylyRed, glendalekid, oneanjl, kwanjin, and Carolyn22,
If you said it was an ajuga, then you are probably correct. I'll have to wait until it flowers but I've been told it was an ajuga.
Thank you for your interest and support.
Glendalekid, Good luck, I hope you ID your plant soon.
Adele
Diggerrette,
Thanks for letting us know.
I have to tell you, I have a book on wildflowers that I wanted to look it up in - do ya think I find it?
Carolyn
Who knows? But, I think that would be great if you would look it up.:)
glendalekid--seems to me you started a thread for yours in the ID forum a while back? You might try bumping that up again, could be some of the wildflower experts weren't around last time you posted but maybe they'll see it this time around.
Can't be a Polemonium by the way...it's obviously in Fabaceae family, and Polemonium is not. The leaves have some similarity but the flowers are not the right shape.
I did look on the USDA plants database for members of family Fabaceae that occur in Alabama--unfortunately a lot of things don't have pictures and I don't have time to go through and search the internet for pics on all of them (and many of them may not have a lot of pics out there anyway!). But I have a couple genera you might consider exploring further: Desmodia, Galactia, and Tephrosia. And I still think Vicia is worth considering--I know you haven't found one that's an exact match but there are a number of them that occur in AL and I haven't been able to find good pics of some of them, so I don't think you can completely rule it out.
diggerette,
Let us know what it looks like when it blooms. I think it will be very pretty.
KaylyRed, Carolyn22, and ecrane3,
Turns out this family of plants is the third largest, after orchids and sunflowers, 18,000 described species -- hey, no problem narrowing that down. I did find a couple of sites with a bazillion photos, so I'll go through them one by one. In the vicia group there was one I thought was it, but it has hairy leaves and this one has smooth leaves. Most of them have flower clusters instead of single flowers or the leaf is totally wrong or the flower is the wrong color.
Thanks for the suggestions. I appreciate it. Whatever it is, it's not common around here.
Karen
I don't think you have to look at all 18000 species...the USDA database is usually pretty good about knowing what grows in the wild in any given state, so you could skim through their list of 800 (that's what I did to come up with the list of the couple genera I thought you should consider). There are a number of genera that can be eliminated right off the bat, and what you're left with is a fairly manageable number if you don't mind spending some time doing research. Here's the list of Fabaceae the occur in Alabama (I don't always trust their county by county plant occurrences to be accurate, so don't rule something out just because they don't list it for your county...but on a state by state basis it's usually pretty good) http://plants.usda.gov/java/stateSearch?searchTxt=fabaceae&searchType=Family&stateSelect=US01&searchOrder=1&imageField.x=41&imageField.y=8
ecrane3,
Thanks for the link. I can check it against the long lists of photos I found. I was just amazed that there were 18,000 species -- I figured I could skip the ones in places like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Isle of Skye.
Karen
I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than 18,000...the family is big enough that it's split into 3 sub-families (which if you look in Plant Files, they are listed by the sub-families of Papilionaceae, Mimosaceae, and Caesalpinaceae) and each of those is a pretty big family by itself. If you find another site that splits things out, yours is in Papilionaceae so you can elimiate some others based on that. The USDA database unfortunately clumps them all together in Fabaceae still.
I did see that some of the sub-families were mostly shrubs or even some trees, which mine is not. So eliminating part of that will definitely narrow it down, too.
Karen
