by CKR
I’ve got a bunch of them blooming in my yard (click to enlarge). They have been for some time now. But this week brings some new ones.
Two years ago, I sowed some seeds from a mixture for the edge of the mountains. I mixed them with some soil, raked the soil in this area, distributed the soil-seed mix, and smoothed the area with the back of the rake. There was some mulchy organic matter in the area, and I pulled that back over the seeded area. Then didn’t do anything else, and this is what I’ve gotten!
It’s been wetter than usual the past year or so, and that helped. But I’m trying to increase the vegetation on my lot to decrease erosion. I have a number of microclimates in my lot, from the partly-shaded edge-of-mountains area here to an almost-Sonora-desert spot where my agave is doing nicely.
The darker ones are Rocky Mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus), and the lighter ones are pink wild snapdragon (Penstemon palmeri). I’ve watched them grow, the leaves obviously nothing that was in the yard before my planting. I was pretty sure of the Rocky mountain penstemon, but the light green toothy leaves were a mystery to me until this year, when I saw a photo of them at a nursery. I hadn’t heard of pink wild snapdragons before.
Both are perennials – hooray!
They, along with the cultivated snapdragons, are members of the Scrophulariaceae family. And there was another member of that family in my yard.
The roundish, almost-succulent leaves clustered in a way that looked almost like a sedum. So I let it go. Who knows – it could have been from those seeds I planted. I think I noticed it last year, but this year it quickly threw up a flower stalk with bright yellow flowers. Little snapdragons, like the butter-and-eggs (Linaria vulgaris) of my childhood. Not good; toadflax is an invasive. (Although I do love that name!)
But the leaves were totally different. More googling found it: Dalmatian toadflax (Linaria dalmatica). Both toadflaxes are part of the Scrophulariaceae family too. Another invasive, and this page says it has a deep taproot. So I went right out and pulled it. Not a particularly strong root. I got it before it went to seed.
Here’s a little bonus. I only saw them because of the bright yellow flowers. The entire plant can’t be more than two centimeters tall. Probably not Scrophulariaceae; the leaves, flowers, and their arrangement look more like a legume. They are probably wild; I don’t recall planting anything in their area, but I’ve never seen them before. I’ve counted five or six plants, very likely taking this moist-year opportunity to set some seeds.
BTW, more rain today, like yesterday and Saturday. Lovely humid weather for my plants.