r/nativeplants

Here’s a photo of a wildflower, growing on some skinny little island the Atlantic’s been gnawing at for years and hasn’t finished off yet. The petals were so easy to miss I’d have walked right past it if the color hadn’t stopped me. Plant identification is not my forte. I am still puzzling over why a flower that’s supposed to be pink looked blue that morning. Could be I got it wrong to begin with. Or maybe it was only borrowing its color off the ocean.

(Southern beeblossom, Oenothera simulans)

I let this volunteer plant grow to get a better ID, but I cannot figure it out. Any help is much appreciated.

This was the year I took against butterfly weed, that darling of every native plant catalog, on no better grounds than that it looked like a bedazzled poodle yapping in the flower bed. Nobody likes poodles. I want to be clear that I did not hate the plant. It only felt like hating while it was happening. It was fatigue, plain and simple. Butterfly weed had gone the way certain hymns go when they are sung too often at too many funerals. It had stopped being a plant and become a decal on a Subaru, put there by people who wanted the neighbors to know they were the right sort. I no longer saw the plant. I saw the bumper sticker.

I had raised many seedlings of the stuff from seed and gave every one away. But I still had the mature plants, well rooted and unashamed, blooming square across from the hanging chair where I liked to sit in the evening and stew. I would sit there and look at those orange clusters with a feeling that did not belong in a garden. Even the bees, I noticed with some satisfaction, gave them only the laziest attention, which I considered a point in my favor.

Several times I set out to dig them up and was turned back, as if the yard itself had opinions on the matter. It was too hot, or too wet, or my hori-hori knife had wandered off to wherever tools go when they don’t want to do the job, or the damn crows sat overhead hollering that I ought to be feeding them instead of fooling with weeds. Once I got my nerve up all the way and marched out there with intent, only to discover that a fox had taken my garden bed for his personal privy and left the evidence of it directly in my path. I retreated. The butterfly weed stood its ground, unmurdered, and I was certain it smirked.

The heat climbed and the orange wizened, and the flowers gave way to pods shaped like okra. Soon milkweed bugs covered the pods tight and blazing, and I remembered the jolt of the first time I ever came upon them years back. The orange and black stripes writhing together made the pod into a little world. It was an encounter with hidden space, which I would have sworn a second before was not there. A gate swung open, and what stood on the other side of it was myself as a grubby child, back when looking at a thing was all I wanted from it, before I’d been taught to explain a thing to death, or nail down whose it was, or figure what it was good for, or grade it against some other pointless things. For a second I could not find the edges of myself, and time layered itself upside down, blending and dispersing the old plain wonder that had been long gone. The dealings between the plant and the insects continued to breathe, ticking out something like time in their small soundless motions, and through that crack I watched the place where the vividness of life had gone, close enough to want back, too far to reach.

This summer I did not rip out the butterfly weed. The seed pods split opened last night, revealing its original ferocity. The noise fell away, the bumper stickers vanished, the online discourse disappeared, and I was just left with the quiet physics of a seed catching the wind.

I noticed my dwarf fothergillas have been defoliated by what Google has told me are yellownecked caterpillars. They are apparently generalist feeders.

So I just let them do their thing, eat my plant, so they can pupate and mature, right? It’s just the first time I’ve found such a swarm of caterpillars on any of my shrubs and I’m proud but need some reassurance too. Thanks!

The Virginia Creeper in my backyard behaves itself. It goes up the shed like a well-raised child in the Boy Scouts, never once threatening to litter the yard, and for years I mistook this good behavior for the whole truth of the plant. I had heard it called a thug by people who ought to know, and I felt a little cheated in the way you feel cheated by a dog too lazy to bite anyone.

Then I saw its cousins on the Outer Banks, and I understood what I had been keeping in my backyard was a house pet.

That day the needlelike highway near Oregon Inlet was impassable due to the flood from the previous week. The coastal plants, however, remained unfazed by the deluge. Wax myrtle, sea oats, marsh elder, all stood tall, and around them slithered Virginia Creeper. Out there the vine had no shed, no shade, nothing to lean on but naked sand. It flattened itself into a mat wide as a parking lot and held the dune together by sheer force and cackled at thunderstorms. There was nothing decorative about it. It did not care to be admired. It simply wanted to glide on.

I have never had an inclination for treating native plants like a gardening catalog or a suburban sanctuary project. Ecotype purism, “Tallamy said,” cheerful blossoms, pollinator postcards, cherry-picked narratives. The whole native plant movement started sounding like a TV church and I don’t want churches in my life. I want the brute, indifferent machinery of nature, the terrifying, gorgeous appetite of an ecosystem that doesn't care about us at all, yet somehow mirrors the exact ache of being alive.

I tried to say this to someone once. He said the vine was just a weed on a beach and walked away to take pictures of the sunset. I did not argue, and kept on looking at this glorious creeper that marched across the rolling dunes with fifes and drums, completely rewriting the rules of what a living thing needed to do to thrive.

I tried to add this on my other post about my butterfly weed. But are these monarch caterpillars?

Florida native plants, Florida native plant society field trips, ethnobotany, mythology and more! Check it out and show some love 💌 I have more botanical field trips I’ll be writing about soon with cool Florida native plants :)

https://riparianmoss.substack.com/p/tulip-poplar-linden-tree-medicine?r=obp3j&utm\_medium=ios

Hey i was wondering if anyone knows if these are ripe enough to sow. Someone weedwhacked the parent plant but I was able to rescue some of the seeds. If they arent ill get a new plant, but I thought it would be cool to regrow from seeds too

A field of iron weed I passed while doing my 3 mile walk.

They are all over the forest by my friend's cottage in northern Michigan, close to Lake Huron. I love them!

My favorite plants of letting mother nature cross our Asclepias rubra to Asclepias lanceolata. These do naturally hybridize in the wild. We let our favorite specimen parents cross to create colors never before seen. Bumblebees did the crossing but planting thousands of seeds to find a few plants was a ton of work.

I bought this plant at a local native nursery (Ohio) but now I cannot remember what she is. My apps aren’t helping either. The nursery owner was real excited that I bought it though! Also I love the minty blue color, really stands out. It’s a little wilty because pic was taken in mid day heat.

Kosteletzkya pentacarpos

Beach croton (Croton punctatus) is one of those plants that feels like it was designed by a quiet islander who really understood the ocean.

The leaves wear a coat of silvery hair, and it isn’t there for beauty though a fool might mistake it for such. It is armor, plain and mean, turning back a sun hot enough to blister the arrogance out of me. The salt wind comes off the water, and the croton just stands there and takes it.

The roots go down deep and wide, gripping sand that can’t make up its mind to settle. Beach Croton is the first thing brave or ignorant enough to set up residence in that shifting waste, and it holds the ground together, so that lesser plants can come along later and take the credit.

It is native to North Carolina, but don’t mistake that for hospitality. It’s got requirements. Sun, sand, salt. It will not compromise on a single one of them. It has made itself a kingdom out of conditions that would kill off anything with less conviction, and it wears that silver hide like it’s daring the whole coastline to say something about it.

I don’t stumble on a plant like that every day. I earned it by walking, walking, and I walked away a little changed, and perhaps a little ashamed of every soft green thing i ever thought was tough.

(Ocracoke Island, NC)

My lot has a natural shorefront. Heavy grasses and ferns. Google says this is a sand cherry? Idk. Looks old.

Behind it is elderberry I think. I tried planting elder berry and of course it died.

Spartina alterniflora

Providing vital shelter for marsh birds in Pamlico Sound, NC