September 11: A salute to bitterweed

Bitterweed is a scrubby little flower. It grows in dense clusters of dwarfish gold, daisy-like blooms in the worst places you can find. Cracks in pavement. The edges of roads and sidewalks. Construction sites, wastelands. Dry, sandy, rocky ground, in the middle of the most drought-prone season.

It tastes terrible. Cattle know better than to eat it, but sheep will do so and can poison themselves. It supposedly will even make bees' honey taste bitter.

Bitterweed is a survivor. It's not the prettiest flower, and it's well-named, but I'm very fond of it for the way it grows where almost nothing else can.

September 12: Beautyberry

I never really noticed this plant, Callicarpa americana, which I first learned as French mulberry, until I visited a swamp in Louisiana. It doesn't have particularly interesting leaves or flowers, but once the berries come on it's unmistakable. Round clusters of pink-purple berries form along the stalk right where the opposite leaves sprout, or even right along the whole stem like a growth that looks like it's overtaking the leaves completely. And so you get a shrubby stand full of these balls of color you don't see anywhere else in the local natural environment, at least not in the fall.

I do see them in my home area now—there are a lot in the landscaping at the zoo, but I also saw a few small ones at the edge of the woods near the farm last weekend. These are apparently native, though there are a lot more species of beautyberry that are native to Asia.

The leaves contain a chemical called callicarpenal (named after the plant) that has been found to repel mosquitoes -- but the old folks have known that for ages.


American beautyberry


American beautyberry, pink variety