illinoensis

• An informal catalog of plants and wildflowers one might spot in Central Illinois. • All photos are my photos. • See something that could use correction? Let me know! I use the following tags to categorize and identify stuff: Floral characteristics: • blue/purple flowers • pink/red/orange flowers • yellow flowers • white flowers • green flowers • wee timid things (tiny flowers, or clusters tiny of flowers) • showboats (big showy flowers) • mintish (smallish, bilaterally symmetrical flowers) Distinctive foliage: • random lanceolate bullshit • ferny lookin' (finely-divided, lacey) • multi-lobed palmate • huge-ass leaves Common families: • Apiaceae (celery/carrot family) • Asteraceae (asters/daisies) • Fabaceae (bean/peas/legumes/etc) • Gerianaceae (geranium family) • Lamiaceae (mint family) • Malvaceae (mallows) • Polygonaceae (knotweeds/smartweeds) • Ranunculaceae (buttercup family) • Rosaceae (roses) • Solanaceae (nightshade family) • Vitaceae (grape family) Misc. categories: • spring ephemerals • BERRIES • native plants • introduced plants • total bastards (introduced invasives) • edibles • toxicity • fungi • animals (non-plants, often cute) • scenic natural vistas (everything else, pretty much)

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This is a mushroom appreciation post! Mushrooms are not remotely in my wheelhouse, so regarding identification: I can say definitively that they are a) Eukaryotes, and b) in the kingdom Fungi. That's it, that's the best I can do. But look at how cute the lil orange one is!!

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Heart-leaved skullcap, Scutellaria ovata (Lamiaceae) Springdale Cemetery, Peoria IL. June 2015. I feel like I'm on a mint family kick right now, so I'm gonna roll with it! Heart-leaved skullcap is a native plant with an occasional presence in most Illinois counties and, can usually be found in woodsy, lightly shaded uplands and bluffs. The flowers are bilaterally symmetrical, with solid blue-violet on top and white with speckled violet on the lower lip. The stems grow unbranched and the cordate leaves are opposite, with crenate margins and slightly fuzzy leaf surface. The venation is heavy and pinnate. I think the particular plants in these photos were only about 1.5' tall when I found them, but they can be up to 3'. The stem ends in with a raceme infloresence; some sources indicate that the stem can branch at this point and create multiple racemes, all the individuals I've spotted thus far have had the single raceme. Skullcaps have a history of use in herbal folk medicine. Wikipedia says it was used for lady-problems by Native Americans, and to "clear away the heat-evil and expel superficial evils" by the Chinese. I'm sure those have specific meanings that don't translate well to English, but I really love the ultra-vagueness and broad potential list of conditions that could be attributed to "superficial evils!"

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Motherwort, Leonurus cardiaca (Lamiaceae) St. Mary's Cemetery, West Peoria IL. Late May & early June 2015. Motherwort is a non-native member of the mint family, and it has the typical flowers for the group: small, bilaterally symmetrical, united petals. The flowers on a motherwort plant are a bit furrier than average, though. The petals are pale pink, and they're attached straight to the stem and arranged in whorls above the leaf axils. Also typical of plants in this family is the squared-off, 4-sided stem and opposite leaves, though the petioles are quite a bit longer than other related plants. You can see pretty well from the second photo that this configuration gives the plant a distinctive look. The stems are unbranched, and they grow fairly tall at up to 5 feet. They can be attractive when the flowers are in bloom and the plant looks fresh, it starts looking pretty weedy and quite a bit less cute after too long. Motherwort is pretty much everywhere and currently blooming, it's easy to spot at the edges of wooded areas and along shady roadsides. These photos were all taken within the last few weeks, when most of the motherworts I'd been coming accross were rosy-flowered and green-leaved. Fair warning: I reckon we're about a 2-3 weeks away from them hitting their not-cute life phase all at once.

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Solomon's seal, Polygonatum commutatum (Liliaceae) First four photos: Rock Island Trail Kickapoo Creek Access, Dunlap IL 5/31/15. Last photo: St. Mary's Cemetery, West Peoria IL 5/29/15. A native Illinoisan of the lily family, Solomon's seal blooms in late spring to early summer. The stem is unbranched, and the leaves are alternate and ovate, with parallel venation. Flowers are pale green to nearly white, and hang from the axils of the leaves. The flowers are replaced by berries that begin green and become blue as they ripen. It grows kind of low and hangs over, so if you spot one you may need to lift the plant to see the flower situation underneath. But enough facts. Solomon's seal is the classiest goddamn plant! I'm not being facetious; just look at it. It is refined and spare, lovely and reserved. It doesn't actually care if you don't see its flowers, it expects you to be canny enough to know and find them yourself. It's not trying to put itself out there like some kind of specious-ass, relentlessly average yellow/white aster. (I believe I've spoken previously about the asters?) It is the Grace Kelly* of wildflowers. Let us all take a moment to behold its effortless elegance, and consider the ways in which each of us in our own lives can be more like this plant which I have here anthropomorphized beyond all measure. * The question, I suppose, that naturally follows is, who does this make the asters? And the answer is quite clearly Jayne Mansfield.

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Yesterday afternoon following a serious downpour, I was on the interstate when this wicked bright, full rainbow appeared. So I did what I think what any sensible person would have done in a situation where an ethereal, ephemeral optical construct of light and water and dreams presents itself, and took about a million cellphone pics while driving. It seems my the camera was not quite up to the challenge, and was more interested in focusing on the windshield than the meteorological spectacle, but I kind of liked this photo in spite of/because of the profound blurritude.

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Birdsfoot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus (Fabaceae) Pottstown Cemetery, Peoria IL. 5/30/15. This is an introduced plant in the pea family with a crown of attractive, yellow-to-orangeish flowers. The leaflets are ovate and a little bit angular, sometimes vaguely diamond-shaped. Like many of the Fabaceae's one seems to see on roadsides, pastures, and fields, birdsfoot trefoil hails from Europe and was brought over for its agriculturally useful nitrogen-fixing qualities, or to stabilize soil in disturbed areas and prevent erosion. And, like several other workhorse European-import pea family plants, birdsfoot trefoil has invasive potential. But it's very pretty and admittedly charming, as you can fairly tell. This one is easy to spot growing on roadsides: sort of low growing, with a slightly deeper green foliage than whatever's growing around it, and the flower clusters are bright, bold yellow.

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Ohio spiderwort, Tradescantia ohiensis (Commelinaceae)

Rock Island Trail Kickapoo Creek Access, Dunlap IL. 5/31/15.

When I was out taking pictures of spiderworts for the last post, among the field of standard blue-violet flowers I spotted a couple of misfits that were a little exciting: two white spiderworts and one pink spiderwort. My understanding is that these are natural if uncommon color variants in wild populations, but I don’t know enough about spiderwort genetics to be able to say what genetic event they arise from, or if they’re hybridized from a horticultured spiderwort, or whatever the heck. The bottom photo is just a small part of the flower field; as you can see, they don’t normally deviate much from the typical coloration here.

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Ohio spiderwort, Tradescantia ohiensis (Commelinaceae)

Rock Island Trail Kickapoo Creek Access, Dunlap IL. 5/31/15.

Oh my god you guys, the spiderworts were seriously on the march the other weekend. For prairie-type plots where spiderwort finds friendly conditions and grows in substantial numbers, it’s an earlier bloomer than many other wildflowers in the same area, and it’s just a gorgeous field of green and violet-blue when they begin flowering in earnest. 

There are three or four spiderwort species found in Illinois, and Ohio spiderwort is the most broadly distributed. I’m not a pro, but when I compare photos of the different species, to my eye they all look... more or less identical? Broad-leaf spiderwort appears to have slightly wider leaves, and Virginia spiderwort seems to be shorter and possibly fuzzier than Ohio spiderwort, and the blooming periods of all three vary a bit but also overlap with each other. But in general, spiderworts look like spiderworts. They’re slender, tallish plants with long thin leaves that have parallel venation, and a cluster of flower buds at the top. The flowers bloom just one or maybe a couple at a time, and each individual flower gets about one day in the sun.

Spiderwort blooms in late spring to early summer and if you find them, really try get right up in their face. They’re cute to look at from a distance, but up close the feathery filaments on the stamens are appreciable and quite charming!

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Mock strawberry, Duchesnea indica (Rosaceae)

Lauterbach Park, Bartonville IL, May 2015.

Right off the bat: don’t try to eat the fruits, leave them for the critters. They won’t kill you or blind you or anything, they’re just flavorless and disappointing.

Mock strawberry is an introduced species from Asia that is closely related to supermarket strawberries. Mock strawberry has yellow flowers and fruits that face upward, while delicious edible strawberries have white flowers and fruits that kind of hang downward on their stem. It’s low growing, attractive, ground-cover type of plant that I see pretty much everywhere, often enmeshed in people’s lawns with ground ivy, as pictured here.

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Northern Catalpa, Catalpa speciosa (Bignoniaceae)

I don’t feature too many trees here, but there are a handful of them that I’m a big fan of, and catalpa is most definitely one. This is a distinctive tree with oversized heart-shaped leaves, which are usually a more yellowish green than the trees you’ll see around it. At maturity, it’s a tree of medium height and a stout trunk that produces these huge, showy, glorious clusters of blooms in late spring. The individual flowers are bright white and frilly, with dark purple lines and a bit of yellow running down from the lower petals to the center. If you’re seeing them from a distance, they’re not necessarily noteworthy--just big white puffs among the leaves. But take the opportunity to get up close to a low-hanging branch and see them in detail. They’re quite sexy and orchid-esque!

It’s original range is thought to be quite narrow, running along the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and in Illinois it’s native only to the southernmost part of the state. But certainly does well for itself up in the west-central, often planted as an ornamental. The flowers give way to long, slender seed pods, from which Wikipedia says the nickname “cigar tree” is derived, although maybe that’s a regionalism? It’s not an appellation I’ve ever heard for it and I think it’s kind of a stretch to compare the pods to cigars. It’s not the tidiest, given the litter from the seed pods and falling flowers, and in terms of colorful fall foliage... let’s just say it wouldn’t make it to the semi-finals in that pageant. But it’s such a happy, friendly looking tree in the warm months that it’s easy to forgive the mess during the rest of the year.

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Woodland phlox, Phlox divaricata laphamii (Polemoniaceae)

Matthiessen State Park, Oglesby IL. April 2015.

Woodland phlox is common in all but a handful of northwestern Illinois counties and is typically found in, as you might gather, woodland areas. The petals tend toward blue-violet but can be a lighter lavender. This subspecies is very simmilar to P. divaricata divaricata, except that the end of the petals on the latter are notched, in sort of a heart shape, while on laphamii the petals are more rounded. The petals form a tubular corolla, and the nectar is attractive to butterflies and certain Sphinx moths.

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Wild geranium, Geranium maculatum (Gerianaceae)

Matthiessen State Park, Oglesby IL. April 2015.

This is a native woodland spring ephemeral, common across the state. Leaves are palmate and deeply lobed, flowers have five light purple petals, and the plants often appear in colonies and clusters. It blooms for about a month in late spring to early summer.

They’re in the same family, but wild geranium looks very little like the geranium you know from Home Depot’s Garden Center and that one 3rd grade science fair project you did on evapotranspiration, which is cultivated genus from southern Africa. Wild geranium blooms for about a month in late spring to early summer. At this point in late May, they seem to be mostly finished flowering around here, but you catch a few stragglers here and there in lightly shaded woodsy areas.

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Multiflora rose, Rosa multiflora (Rosaceae)

(My friend Rachel once referred to this as “Megatron rose” because she momentarily couldn’t remember the word multiflora, and then we just kept calling it that, so in my own head I tend to use this designation.)

Multiflora rose, or Megatron rose as it is known to exactly two women in Illinois, is a thorny, sprawling invasive. Blossoms are numerous and white, and the rosehips containing the seeds are a tasty treat for numerous critters, which is partly how it spreads so successfully. It blooms in late spring/early summer and is an attractive sight, but god help you if you think you’re gonna negotiate your way through a thicket of them.

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Philadelphia Fleabane, Erigeron philadelphicus (Asteraceae)

Peoria IL, May 2015.

I’ve said my piece about my feelings on asters in general before. And while I’m not over the moon with fleabane, it’s still spring so we’re not overwhelmed with asters as we are in September, and I feel generous toward it. So I give Philadelphia fleabane a pass: it’s cheery, I don’t completely hate it.

This is a native biennial Illinois plant that favors disturbed areas, marshes, moist prairies, and ditches, which is where I came across this patch. The ray petals are faint pink, the blooms are small and about a half inch across, and the plant gets leggy when it bolts, growing to about 2′ tall.

It’s a typical aster, so, y’know. Nothing super original in presentation, but it’s alright.

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Bittersweet Nightshade, Solanum dulcamara (Solanaceae)

Peoria IL, May 2015.

Spotted on a walk through a creek/drainage ditch, this is an attractive viney member of the nightshade family, from which we receive many delicious vegetables such as french fries, hash browns, and sour cream and onion chips. (Also tomatoes and peppers too, if you’re into that kind of thing.) 

It’s a non-native invasive weed, and both the foliage and berries contain toxic alkaloids, so... don’t try foraging this one for the deep-fryer, I guess.

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Cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis (Campanulaceae)

Peoria IL. September 2014.

Despite that bold, ultra-saturated red, I find that cardinal flowers are just small enough that I tend to overlook them if I'm not watching for them. Red is kind of an infrequent hue for wildflowers around here, and while cardinal flowers aren't particularly rare, I usually do an involuntary girly squeal when I spot them.

Around here they can often be found near the river, in wooded-but-not-too-wooded spots that stay relatively moist. They grow to about 2-3 ft tall, and have serrated, lanceolate leaves. Not a distinctive foliage, but when in bloom it's unmistakable.

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Lepidoptera! Various species and various stages.

Summer-Autumn, 2014.