By JIMMY ROGERS
Credit: Jimmy Rogers
In the heat of summer, when there’s hardly any gardening worth doing, we can seek out wild spaces and draw inspiration from them.
Roadsides are an easy place to appreciate high summer flora. You’ll easily find the Maryland state flower, black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta or fulgida). Its black centers, yellow petals and short stalks make them easy to identify. If a flower’s center is yellow and the plant is tall and has large leaves, it’s likely either false sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides) or one of our true sunflowers (Helianthus species). All of these are excellent garden plants that you can try picturing in your own space before planting in the fall.
If you see rows and rows of chest-high plants with broad leaves, there’s a good chance they’re dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum). The immature plants look very similar to common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), which is also found on roadsides. Up close, dogbane has multiple branching stems, while milkweed only has one. Also, milkweed has a fuzzy stem and leaves, while dogbane’s are smooth.
Zipping by in a car, look for the flowers, which differ greatly between these two species. Common milkweed has a ball of pink flowers, while dogbane has a scattering of small white flowers. Both species spread aggressively and can add a pop of wild meadow to an otherwise orderly butterfly garden. Dogbane likely makes a bigger impact, ecologically speaking, as it can support moths important for our birds.
Each year, I look along the highways for drifts of bearded beggarticks (Bidens aristosa), growing tall with many yellow flowers, small leaves and narrow stems. Some have found their way into both my garden and our HOA meadow, so I can enjoy them close to home, too.
Among the tallest roadside plants is Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium species), which can grow well over one’s head. Look for these in wet meadows and roadside ditches. Their crowns of purple flowers occur at the pinnacle of high summer.
If you see goldenrods (Solidago species) and heath asters (Symphyotrichum ericoides) blending together under a power line, you can safely assume it will do the same in any of your hot, dry garden beds. Keep in mind, too, that no one is amending that power line cut with compost or fertilizer. Most likely your own soil will grow these plants just as well without amendment.
Driving by a sound barrier covered in vines, there’s a good chance you’ll see red trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) flowers cascading from the top. Trumpet vine can be difficult to manage, but if you have a large, wild space, it makes an excellent hummingbird feeder.
Periodically along the roads you will see a stand of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) as either a bush or a tree. The leaves resemble those of black walnut — pointed, and running down on both sides of each stem. The giveaway is the cone of fruit, which is large and red. Summer foragers prize these cones, as it can be washed to make a kind of pink lemonade. This hyperlocally produced beverage is on my list to try sometime this year.
The areas I’ve described here are often called disturbed areas, because humans routinely cut the foliage and cause erosion, or otherwise break up the soil. Our roads, construction sites and landscaped areas continuously disturb the areas we see most often as we travel, so the plants growing there tend to be pioneers, striking out to reclaim the soil before it washes away. We typically see most of these as weeds. Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis), for example, prefers disturbed areas, and most gardeners would consider it too tall and aggressive for a residential garden.However, if left to its own devices, in a few years it will struggle to hold its footing once the next wave of natives moves in.
If you’d like to see an undisturbed meadow ecosystem, you’ll need to find a rare place called a remnant meadow. These are sites where trees do not readily grow and humans have, for whatever reason, not yet destroyed the unique population of native plants growing there. For a good local example, you can visit the serpentine barren at Soldier’s Delight Natural Environment Area in Owings Mills. An uncommon mineral make-up has left the area with thin soils and prone to erosion. The area boasts an extremely high variety of both common and rare native plants, including rare milkweeds, asters, goldenrods, lobelias, St. John’s worts and violets. To a certain extent, these environments act like a window into a pre-Columbian past.
If you visit a remnant meadow, old growth forest or any other place with rare plants, remember it is illegal to take, plant or grow them. Only qualified ecologists are allowed to sample these plants, and only to conduct research or restoration activities. Appreciate this sliver of the past in place — in season and undisturbed.
