wrote:

Ron, I'm really enjoying your great photography. Few people stop to
admire the beauty of wild roadside plants. Of course, on foot or
bicycle one has a far better chance of seeing them at all!

Your web page could be a good resource for identifying roadside
flora of northeastern US and adjacent parts of Canada. Adding the
scientific name of the plants would make it far more valuable, since
common names not only differ geographically, but the same name is
used to describe completely different plants in different areas.
You could also indicate whether they are natives or aliens. Not
to be too critical, but many of the plants you've photographed
would be more accurately called wildflowers than weeds. The
technical term for herbaceous (non-woody) plants other than
grasses is forbs.

Have you spotted any columbines yet (Aquilegia canadensis)? Since
you're a few weeks ahead of us here, I'd expect they'd be in bloom
there soon, if not already. They like semi-shade.

It's actually just something I'm doing between Dobermans, Annie
http://home.att.net/~rhhardin/annie.html having died of kidney failure
in April and Vicki http://home.att.net/~rhhardin/vicki.html (not there yet)
coming on Tuesday.

I'm not all that sure of the identifications in any case and willing to
change any of them ; mostly I use Newcomb's Wildflower Guide, which has
a great indexing scheme for most but not all wildflowers, the ``not all''
meaning the cases where they're in the book but you can't find them,
not that the thing isn't in the book.

He does, however, have an index by both informal and official names,
if in desperation to find out what I think I'm identifying.

I think a couple of them I identified from my copy of _Ontario Weeds_.

No Columbines; I'd surely have noticed one, but they just may not be
on one of my regular bike routes. I notice pretty big population
differences based on route.

--
Ron Hardin


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.