It's a little early for the Saturday photo, but I'm away this weekend and I hope you won't mind.The blue flowers of chicory are everywhere these days along with overgrown red clover, a grass which my mother called wild oats but which surely isn't, and tall, yellow-flowered plants whose name I haven't discovered.
The flowers have transformed vacant lots and the unused land along the railroad tracks into wild gardens. They aren't wild flowers, as such, though. In almost all cases they are escapes from gardens, plants native to somewhere else which have successfully found a niche for themselves here. In some cases they are so successful they crowd out the local flora.
I have conflicting feelings about these escapes. Certainly the way purple loosestrife doesn't let anything else grow is dangerous for a varied ecosystem. But I give chicory and clover high points for gumption--and charm.
P.S. Just discovered that the grass is wild barley--wild oats is something quite different.
5 comments:
Like your blog!
The flowers that nature provides free of charge are just as beautiful as the ones we plant, and a lot more hardy.
Tall yellow flowers... perhaps you mean the golden glow coneflower?
http://bit.ly/bjSHu
If so, you'll be happy to know it's native to Southern Ontario.
We just drove back to Montreal from a holiday in the Laurentians this morning. It was a delight seeing large patches of different coloured flowers, chicory included, growing along the roadsides.
/krys
I am reminded of a comment made by Philip Fry about his Old Field Garden in Eastern Ontario, to the effect that like our country gardens are frequently enriched by transplants for elsewhere. All he asked was that they make an effort to fit in http://www.oldfieldgarden.on.ca/
He was speaking in French before the Société Art et jardin here in Montreal and he apologized for his (actually quite good) French:
You can say something is "vachement drôle" in French which is quite different from "drôlement vache" and it often is hard for an Anglophone, who would never say that something was "cowly funny" to remember the difference.
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