by Hal Borland
So here are meadowland, wooded hillside, river and riverbanks, and bogland. Here are typical rural areas, among them the kind of places anyone can find, once he has quit the cities for a day, a week, or a lifetime. I have lived with them for some years. My day-to-day and year-to-year discoveries are neither unique nor particularly unusual. Perhaps that in itself will give them interest and even pertinence to other nature watchers.
Chapter 2
The Rural Roadside
A watchful walk down any country road will provide a generous sampling of the wild life resident in that region. It will also prove that man is by no means the only traveler or the only form of life that tries to dominate its environment.
WHENEVER I AM AWAY from home and want to get a quick idea of the native plants and obvious wild life of an area, I drive down a side road, park the car, and walk for a mile or so. I know I will get only a sampling along such a country road, but unless it has been groomed to death, that road will provide something of a cross section of the area. And, inevitably, I compare any strange roadside with my own country road and its uncultivated life.
There is nothing really exceptional about this roadside of mine, the one I know best because I have walked here almost daily for nearly ten years. It is just another country road casually lined with trees and bushes, with a few stretches of brushy fence rows, and with grass and wild plants reflecting the growth in the bordering fields and pasturelands. It has a variety of soils, a damp spot here and there, and a few rocky outcroppings. Until about eight years ago it was a dirt road, deep-rutted every muddy Spring, dusty every dry Summer. Then our local road people hard-topped it to eliminate the mud and dust; but aside from giving it an all-weather surface they changed it very little. It is still a typical country road.
Each Winter the snow is plowed from my road into long windrows, and a mixture of sand and salt is spread to minimize the ice. Each Spring that salt seeps into the roadside with the snow-melt, probably kills some plants, and certainly does no good to the roadside trees. But the salt is far less destructive than the chemicals which are used in some areas to kill roadside weeds and brush.
I have no intention of fighting the battle of the chemical brush-killers here, but I must say that those responsible for our local roads are wise in mowing the roadsides a few times each Summer rather than spraying them. The chemical killers destroy the roots that anchor the soil and invite costly erosion. Our old-fashioned ways here provide financial dividends in lower maintenance costs as well as preserving green roadsides properly decked in wildflowers. So the benefits are by no means all financial.
In any case, my roadside is the seedbed for most of the wildflowers native to this area as well as a host of newcomers. Today’s roads are distant cousins of the old caravan routes, which were avenues of travel for plants as well as commerce. On the old routes, the caravans carried the seeds from one place to another unwittingly, sometimes in feedstuff, sometimes in chaff, sometimes in mud that clung to plodding hoofs or turning wheels. Asian plants traveled all the way to Europe in this way, and European plants hitched rides far into the Orient. Our roads today are similar routes of travel. Going about the country, I am always struck by the presence of “alien” roadside plants. I have found Kansas sunflowers as far east as Indiana, as far south as Texas. I have found wild chicory of the beautiful blue blossoms almost from coast to coast. Winds might carry chicory seed that far, but nothing less than a tornado could distribute sunflower seeds so widely. A car or truck, however, may carry such seeds many hundreds of miles.
At my own roadside I have watched the spread of chicory for ten years. When I first came here there wasn’t a chicory plant within a mile of my house. Today chicory is common everywhere I walk along this road. Dozens of other wildflowers are constantly being broadcast in the same way and in every part of the country. But even my roadside, where the traffic is light and primarily local, is unpredictable from year to year. I can say with reasonable certainty where I will find this species or that one, and I can guess with moderate accuracy what assortment of plants I will find, say, at the foot of the rock ledge half a mile down the road or at the moist brookside half a mile up the road. But I meet surprises every year.
This past Summer, for instance, I would never have guessed that Queen Anne’s lace would spring up everywhere and mass its fluffy white blossom heads thicker than daisies. Queen Anne’s lace grows at the roadside every year, but never before have I seen such an abundance of it. The previous Summer the climbing wild cucumber, which some know as wild balsam, was everywhere. Its long green stems, light green star-shaped leaves, and sparkling tufts of tiny white bloom draped almost every roadside bush and climbed countless trees. The Summer before was a bouncing Bet, or soapwort, season. That weedy member of the pink family made the roadsides pink and white from early July till November’s hard frost.
None of these plants is rare along my road in any Summer, but I doubt that anyone could have predicted such abundance in any particular season. The variation from year to year is the result of many factors. One, of course, is the weather. But Queen Anne’s lace normally thrives in a moderately dry season, and this past Summer was wetter and cooler than usual. Another factor is the insects. Most of my roadside flowers are insect-pollinated, and there are complex cycles in the insect world. Even less understood than insect cycles are the cycles of parasites, both those that prey on insects and those which attack plant seeds. And interrelated with these factors are the cycles in the populations of birds and small animals which feed on seeds and roots and insects. All these matters are vital in the rise and fall of plant populations, especially in such uncultivated areas as roadsides.
Every year, of course, there are such obvious and predictable wildflowers as oxeye daisies, black-eyed Susans, robin’s plantain, hawkweed, the ubiquitous bouncing Bet, Queen Anne’s lace, and the various goldenrods and wild asters. Along almost any rural road I can find half a dozen species of clover—the common white that is often found on lawns, the big red that is typical of cultivated pastureland, the fuzzy-blossomed rabbit’s-foot clover, and both white and yellow sweet clover, which are weedy, sparse-blossomed plants. Common milkweed, with the fragrant bloom and host to Monarch butterflies, grows along most rural roads. So does dogbane, cousin of the milkweed and host to the beautiful little green-gold dogbane beetle. In fact, any roadside reflects the wildflower population of the neighboring areas, especially of the pastureland but in some degree that of the woods and, if there are damp spots, even of the margins of bogs and swamps.
I can always take a final census of my roadside in October by cleaning the burs and small stick-tights off my clothes after I have walked there. I seldom overlook the tall, spreading burdock with its magenta, thistlelike blooms in August, but in the Fall it comes home with me, or with my dog, in the form of fat, hooked-spine burs that catch on any passing object. Tick trefoil’s tiny pink flowers of Summer may go unnoticed, but when its minute, triangular pods ripen they are covered with spiny hairs that cling to trouser cuffs and socks. I am usually aware of nettles, even though their small purplish flowers make no display; their sharp sting reminds me where they are. But come October and their spiny little seed cases are almost as annoying as their Summer sting. And there are several varieties of grass whose seeds have beards even sharper than the beards of a farmer’s barley.
All through the Summer and early Autumn there will be common evening primroses at most roadsides with their rich yellow blossoms that grace late afternoon and evening. There may be sundrops, lesser cousins of the primroses but just as vivid yellow. In waste places there probably will be fireweed with its light magenta or pink blossoms. In my area fireweed is often called wild phlox, although it isn’t even a remote cousin of the phlox family—it belongs to the evening-primrose family and has only four petals whereas all the phloxes have five. Fireweed thrives in waste places and cut-over timber land, especially where the ground has been burned, and can be found well into the Arctic in dwarf form.
Another four-petaled roadside wildling somewhat resembling fireweed and also locally called wild phlox is dame’s rocket, a member of the mustard family. Its flowers are pink, magenta, or white. You can tell it from fireweed quite easily by examining the seed pods. Fireweed seeds are tiny and have buoyant silky floss on which they ride the wind like milkweed seed. Dame’s rocket seeds have no floss and look like mustard seed.
You will also probably find giant mullein at the roadside. This mullein’s big, woolly, gray-green base leaves lie dormant beneath the snow for weeks at a time, then show life at the first thaw. In Spring the plant sends up a stout stalk that by Midsummer may be seven or eight feet tall and will be tipped with a fat candle of closely packed buds. The buds open only a few at a time into small, pale yellow flowers that lure lesser moths and hungry bees. The plant is beautiful, almost classic in its symmetry of stalk and leaf. The woolly, feltlike leaves are its trademark.
There is also a lesser mullein, the moth mullein, that flourishes at the roadside. It grows only two feet high, has thin, smooth, notched leaves and somewhat larger yellow flowers than those of the giant mullein; they bloom in a loose cluster. I have occasionally found a moth mullein with white flowers, but this variation is rare. At dusk I have seen as many as a dozen moths, most of them the smaller brown and gray ones, clustered on the heads of a tuft of moth mullein, feasting on the nectar.
Related to the mulleins, and common at almost every roadside, is toadflax, more often called butter and eggs. It is a cousin of the snapdragon of our flower gardens, and its yellow-and-orange blossoms follow the snapdragon pattern.
If you are fortunate, your roadside will have bee balm, and if you are doubly fortunate it will be the crimson-flowered variety sometimes called Oswego tea. Bumblebees compete with hummingbirds for nectar at the tousle-headed blossoms. I grow a patch of it in a corner of my flower garden to make sure the hummingbirds find a visit here worth while. Bee balm is a wild bergamot, cousin of the mints, and its leaves are so full of sharp-tanged fragrance that if you even brush a plant in passing you will smell of it all the way home. I usually pick a leaf or two to crush between my fingers when I pass a plant, just to have that fine fragrance around me.
There are other, less vividly colored bee balms, a pink variety and a magenta one. They, too, often grow at the roadside, but in drier places than the crimson-flowered variety. Bees and hummingbirds patronize them too, but not as hungrily. Perhaps they have less nectar. I know their leaves are less fragrant.
The earliest flower of all at most roadsides is celandine, a weedy member of the poppy family and cousin of both the May apple and the bloodroot. Celandine is one of the hardiest and commonest of roadside weeds. I have seen it in green leaf in mid-January, and by early April it is in full growth. It is often mistaken, especially in early Spring, for black mustard. The compound leaves of the two plants somewhat resemble each other. And both plants bear yellow blossoms with four petals. But celandine blooms in April and May, mustard not until June. Positive identification is easy. When the stem of a celandine plant is broken it oozes yellowish-orange juice, typical of most members of the poppy family. The juice of the mustard family of plants is colorless.
Early roadside flowers also include the wild cresses, most often the one called yellow rocket. And my road has a few anemones, rue anemones; the smaller, daintier wood anemone doesn’t seem to be there at all. It may yet appear, one of these Aprils. Violets are there, of course—what rural road can endure through May without violets? There are three varieties along my road, the common violets with small, heart-shaped leaves and deep purple blooms, the marsh violet with its bigger leaves and lighter-colored blooms, and a few plants of sweet white violets in a damp spot where a brook wanders down to the road and flows through a culvert. These small white violets are the only violets I know that have a real floral fragrance. All other violets have, to me at least, only a green, woodsy smell. But the little sweet violets seem to come and go. I find them in bloom perhaps one year in three.
Coltsfoot should grow at my roadside, but I have seen only one plant. It came to bloom in early April, then disappeared and never returned. Coltsfoot is sometimes mistaken for dandelion. The blossoms are something like each other, but that of coltsfoot is a duller yellow and the blossom precedes the leaves, which never happens with the dandelion. A certain distinction between the two is the fact that the coltsfoot’s stem is solid and that of the dandelion is hollow—if you never used dandelion stems as Pan’s pipes and blew shrill notes through them, something was missing in your young life.
Dandelions grow at most roadsides, early and late. Until a few years ago they were along my roadside in only normal numbers; then, for some reason, they had a “population explosion.” Overnight they were everywhere, in pastures, hay fields, even in cornfields. And at the roadsides, of course. One field of alfalfa a few miles from here became a vast dandelion patch. The owner plowed it up, to rid it of the infestation, but the next year they were back, thick as ever. It is a pity that dandelions, essentially attractive plants with beautiful blossoms, should be so insistent in growth that they become a pest. If they were as hard to grow as garden asters, for instance, they probably would be prized as garden flowers.
Ecologists puzzle over “population explosions” among plants and animals and even insects. From time to time someone gathers statistics and tries to discover a pattern or some involved interrelationship that will explain these things. Most of the data relate to animals, and some seem to point to involved rhythms, possibly related to sunspot cycles. There seems to be one cycle of about ten years, and within it are three lesser cycles, all of which apparently apply to lemmings, Arctic hares, even Atlantic salmon. Nobody yet knows, as far as I can learn, to what extent similar cycles apply to germs, to molds, to insects, to birds, to plants, vital though such knowledge would be to all of us. It is possible that epidemics of disease are related to such cycles. It is possible that plant diseases, which affect our food supplies, follow some of these rhythms. It could be that seed fertility and even growth of healthy plants vary within these mysterious patterns. The fact is that we don’t know. All we know is that there are mysterious cycles and rhythms, and that from time to time certain germs or insects or animals or plants proliferate enormously and become, if not actual menaces to us, at least pests—a pest, after all, is something we don’t want flourishing in a place where we don’t want it. Like those dandelions in the alfalfa.
I have already mentioned Queen Anne’s lace at the roadside. There are half a dozen other roadside members of the parsley family. The roots of some are poisonous if eaten, and the foliage of several is poisonous to animals, but none is poisonous to the touch. Caraway and sweet cicely, for instance, provide seeds common on the herb shelf and their roots are edible. Cowbane, on the other hand, is seriously poisonous if eaten by animals, as its common name implies. These wild-parsley kinfolk have loose, flat-topped clusters of small blossoms, usually dull white except in the case of the meadow parsnip whose flowers are golden yellow. And several of them grow rank, six feet tall, at most roadsides.
By late Summer you will find ironweed, Joe Pye weed, boneset, and white snakeroot at the roadside, especially in damp places. Ironweed has tufted flower heads with individual purple blossoms something like small thistle heads. Joe Pye has fluffier tufts of smaller blossoms, magenta-pink in color. Ironweed leaves, you will note, grow alternately up the stem while those of Joe Pye weed grow opposite each other. Boneset looks something like Joe Pye except that its blossoms are white. You may find boneset growing eight feet tall, Joe Pye six or seven, but ironweed seldom more than five. White snakeroot, a smaller, bushier member of the same family as Joe Pye and boneset, prefers the shade at the edge of the woodland. The others flourish in full sunlight.
The roadside census, at least as far as I am concerned, is never complete. The beginner, of course, has the whole population to explore and identify, but you will find surprises even along a roadside known for years. Only the o
ther day I found moneywort at my roadside for the first time, though it must have been here for years. I probably had glanced at it and dismissed it as outsize partridgeberry, for both are trailing vines with round, bright green leaves growing opposite each other. But partridgeberry has tiny twin white flowers like miniature bluets—the two plants are cousins—while moneywort has bright yellow flowers as big as a nickel. Both species were in bloom this day, and when I saw this patch of moneywort I knew I had been half blind until that moment. But we all have our blind spots, our blind days.
One need not be blind to miss the peacock-blue anthers in the blossom of cranesbill, one of the wild geraniums-half the people I know have never seen them. But there they are, brilliant blue, in the center of that bright pink blossom. They aren’t blue in every cranesbill flower, but if you keep looking you will eventually find a flower that has them. I have never seen blue anthers in the cranesbill’s smaller cousin, herb robert, which also grows along many roadsides. Both these plants, by the way, reveal their geranium identity if you crush their leaves. They have the typical geranium odor. And the seed pods of both are long and slim, shaped a good deal like a crane’s bill, pop open from the bottom when ripe, and flip the seeds away from the parent plant.
Speaking of seeds, if you find a patch of small roadside sunflowers with several plants whose flowers have no “petals,” no orange fringe of outer rays, those plants are not freaks or victims of some insect which ate the petals. They are beggar-ticks. That is the way they grow. They are sunflower cousins, but their flowers have only the central part. When the flowers ripen the seeds have two thorny prongs and insist on coming home with you from your Autumn walk, beggar-ticks or stick-tights. Bur marigolds, which are also sunflower cousins and do have golden-yellow rays, like sunflowers, ripen into sharp-pronged seeds too, but they have four prongs and are not quite as sharp as beggar-ticks. They will come home with you too.
