Opinion : The lesson of Curlyweed and the Butterfly Ball

Scenes like this cause a city fellow to wish he knew more about what he sees in the country.

Yes, it's a weed!

A common grass in Iowa...

Do you see the potato leaf hopper in this photograph?

A weed, although a pretty one.

A couple photos of the elderberry plant.. good (they say) for jellies and jams.

Almost every day, I confront the painful reality that I am a city boy trying to pretend I am something else.

I love living in the country; I just wish I knew what it was doing.

From the exasperating and embarrassing mistakes like getting stuck in the mud in my own driveway to the memorable attempts to remove weeds with matches, I realize too many times that I am living in a world that is foreign and unfamiliar, even though I have lived in Iowa all of my life.

All I have to do is take a walk and I realize just how much I don’t know.

There are countless things growing in our pastures and wooded areas. I am keenly aware that I do not know what they are.

Fortunately, for the clueless ones like me, there are people who can explain for us what we wish we would have known sooner.

I recently went for a walk with my camera, taking photos of the unique plants, trees and flowers that are growing here.

I sent them to Mark Pingenot at Trees Forever, so he could explain what they were. I sent him photos with names I gave the plants – highly unscientific names like Curlyweed, Butterfly Ball and Weed1pinkmiddle. Well, go ahead and laugh. But the weed is curly and there is, indeed, a butterfly on the ball of flowers. And the weed had a couple of pink things on it.

Like he has before, Mark patiently explained what he saw in the photographs, and what people who know about plants actually call them.

The butterfly ball is actually a common milkweed; the butterfly on it in the photo is a Great Spangled Fritillary. The weed with the pink stuff is called a cup plant, which can be invasive. Mark said the weed has some insect visitors, including aphids and a pink potato leaf hopper. I had to ask him to explain where to find it, but now I do see that the pink spot on a leaf is indeed an insect.

Mark explained that the plant that I thought was a mint is an invasive weed, while the purple thing I called a weed is a mint. He explained that the patch of weeds I did not see last year is made of sweet clover, which only comes up every two years (in plantspeak, the word is biennial). I took a few photos of trees: Mark explained which ones were good (black walnut), which ones I should not have growing so close to my house (boxelder) and which small tree was, umm, actually poison ivy.

There are some cool things growing, like the Ohio spider wort, a pretty violet colored flower. There is also a large black-eyed Susan right outside my front door. But mostly now, I have more weeds and thorns – at least by volume – than flowers. I am trying to change that.

It was Mark who told me last year that the small plant with the purple and white leaves is a showy orchid, something native and rare. But most of what grows here is non-native and not-so rare. That’s because the city folk in the federal government decided that multi flora roses from Japan – once used to keep prisoners in jail – would be great for fences. Problem was, the roses did not know where the fences stopped at the pasture began. There also honey locust trees which have the kinds of thorns that may have been used in the crown of thorns mentioned in the Gospels – and also, I have been told, have at times been used for nails. Having stepped on a couple, I can believe that.

Some experts in the federal government – hopefully not the same people in government who decided that multi flora roses were a good idea – have created a database of plants. You can see it HERE. Or you can contact someone like Mark.