Rose Campion

Day 248: Good old Rose Campion! Even though the Barren Wasteland could use some serious weeding, Silene coronaria rises well above the tangle of old grass, last year's Rudbeckia stalks and the yarrow I've been totally unsuccessful in eliminating. I don't do much to the Barren Wasteland these days, preferring to let the tall "volunteers" hide the sins of my neglect. The Rudbeckia tends to get out of hand and the ones closest to the sidewalk interfere with trips to the garage. When I get tired of detouring around them, I yank a few. They re-seed and repopulate readily, negating any feelings of guilt I might have about removing them. The Rose Campion is another story. I would encourage it to spread, but it doesn't seem to want to expand its territory. But then, the Barren Wasteland is about survival, and any flowering plant which doesn't have plans for world domination is welcome there.

Rose Campion

Day 269: Rose Campion (Silene coronaria) is one of the survivors from the various packages of mixed wildflower seed I've thrown into the Barren Wasteland over the years. Those "regional" mixes often include species which may be considered invasive in certain areas of their specified "region" (an example would be California Poppies, included in almost all blends for the Pacific Northwest), and they often include non-native, non-aggressive species as well. I have found that Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susans) will quickly dominate any space, so every few years, I pull out the older plants, leaving a few to keep the colour going. Rose Campion has never been a problem, although it's spread within the confines of the Wasteland itself. Pink or not, I enjoy its bright eyes, borne on stems two feet or more in height, with soft, fuzzy, silvery foliage. I always allow it to go to seed where it stands since it is so well-behaved.

Rose Campion With Hoverfly

Day 260: I can't count the number of times I've seen a Park visitor freak out when a "bee" hovered in front of their face, to then be disbelieving when I try to explain that the insect in question is a hoverfly, a bee-mimic and harmless. The combination of yellow and black stripes pushes the panic button in most people, and not without good reason. This of course works in the hoverfly's favour, keeping it from being snatched up by a bird. Besides not having a stinger, hoverflies (aka "flower flies" or syrphid flies) differ in appearance from bees in several ways, most notably that they possess only one pair of wings. Bees and wasps have two. Adult Hoverflies are known to suck "honeydew" from both aphids and scale (another insect pest), and Hoverfly larvae feed primarily (and voraciously!) on aphids. "Flower flies" are important pollinators, so count yourself doubly lucky if you have syrphids such as this specimen of Eupeodes fumipennis in your garden.

Tomentose

Day 108: Botanical word for the day: tomentose, i.e., a covering of fine, woolly hairs. It derives from Latin "tomentum" which, to my great amusement, means "cushion stuffing," although today's cushions are largely stuffed with polyurethane foam. What advantages would there be for a plant to have evolved tomentose foliage? Several, as it turns out, the first being that the woolly surface is more difficult for insects to navigate and thus they tend to avoid tomentose leaves. The matted hairs of the tomentum (here used in the non-cushion sense) also insulate tender surface cells from frost and wind. They also reduce the rate of transpiration and reflect harsh sunlight. Harking back to an earlier point in this discussion, an article in a recent issue of Scientific American suggests that plants which have more textured leaf surfaces are affected by fewer insect pests. Scientists monitored the difficulties beetles had in traversing leaves with various microscopic surface structures and found that they took longer to cross a given distance on a textured leaf than on a smooth-surfaced one.