#smartweed

[sayjoisme84]

Fall flowers.

🌻 Sun flower

Pink snapdragons

🌼 Yellow calendula

Pink smartweed

[bonefall]

howdy, super enjoying clanmew day! hope its not bothersome but I wanted to pop in and talk about two of my ocs' name translations-

thunderchase > krrakapaoha "thunder will-travel", better translated as "will seek out thunder", in reference to her bold daring attitude - it's supposed to evoke the image of running directly into a storm! her name could also be translated as stormchaser or thrillseeker. the boldness of her name is in contrast to her sister's name, which is...

pickerelstripe > kishkiseek (kishki is a claymew word shhh) "chain pickerel with thick stripes". could also be translated as.... uh, pickerelstripe. her name's supposed to be rather dull, especially next to her sister, which plays into some major self-worth issues - it doesn't help that their dad's the leader and christened them with these names.

theres some other fun names I have too but a lot of them involve my own words and i'd feel bad flooding your inbox with stuff from my dialect aha

No no feel free to go on, I love everyone who's submitted a dialect and it's good to see you around. Chop up snippets of your lore and send them in as like... "tidbits" and I'll shout out your sideblog every time, if you'd like. I need to fix up the masterpost tonight to bring more attention to the specific blogs that run their own, btw, thinking out loud.

GO LOOK AT THEIR DIALECT, Claymew, on their sideblog @pickerelstripe

But anyway! Onwards!

Pickerel isn't here in the UK, but there is a very similar sort of flower. Pickerel is a US waterplant, with a rising purple flower that pokes above the surface of the water, but in the UK, there is the very special,

THIS IS ITS ACTUAL NAME,

Smartweed.

[ID: A picture of the real, actual, existing plant, smartweed. It is a clustered, corncob-like pink flower that rises on a stalk out of the water.]

It's also called amphibious bistort, which Clan cats agree with. It's from the same cultural "classification" of flowers as bistort, hyacinth, and loosestrife. At some point I would like to make a "clan culture" guide to how they sort flowers, but for now, the words to know are these;

Tower (Flower) = Swahr A generic term for a tall, compound flower or several flowers that grow around a central point, usually without thorns (which excludes teasel by definition). Typically purple or pink.

Smartweed (Polygonum amphibium) = Yarpow A semi-aquatic flower which can count as a "reed" in Clanmew. A welcome, beloved pop of pink at the waterside, though Clerics occasionally grapple with a recurring falsehood that burning it will make a cat smarter. It doesn't. It just causes smoke inhalation. Where does the falsehood come from? RiverClan perpetuates the rumor as a mean joke against other Clans. Word comes from Brain + Light Pink (the color 'blush', in Clanmew).

[faguscarolinensis]

Persicaria hydropiperoides / Swamp Smartweed at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC

[bethanythebogwitch]

Native wildflowers collection pt 2

Continued from part 1

Wild white indigo. These grow seed pods and then break off and tumbleweed around to spread their seeds.

Blazing star. There are several species of this and I think this one is prairie blazing star

Culver's root

Daisy fleabane. This was burned and the ashes were used as a flea remedy.

Joe Pye weed

Elderberry. You can chop up the branches of this, put them in the ground, and as long as there's enough water, they will grow into new bushes.

Wild petunia (left), wild geranium (right), and wild hyacinth (bottom). I like them more than the ornamental cultivars

Showy tick trefoil. These seeds are easy to collect. Walk through the prairie for a while and you'll have a few hundred stuck to your clothes.

Tall bellflower

Heal-all

New England aster or aromatic aster. I don't know how to tell them apart. Usually purple, but sometimes you find a bright pink one.

Evening primrose

Wild onion

American bush clover

Rose mallow (left) and halberd-leafed rose mallow (left). The latter gets smaller flowers and different shaped leaves.

Tall boneflower, which is a name I'm totally using for an undead plant in D&D

Great blue lobelia

Smartweed. These are absolutely tiny.

Spring beauty, a cute little spring ephemeral

Bloodroot. These are cool, they have giant rhizomes and bright red sap.

Wild violet. These are usually purple, but sometimes you find a yellow one

Trout lily.

Virginia bluebell

Trillium. You don't get as many of these around here as we'd like because the deer go absolutely wild for them

Woodland phlox

Wild hawthorn

Continued in part 3

[aisling-saoirse]

Airboat in floating mat, Lake Okeechobee - February 20th 2024

[drhoz]

#1831 - Persicaria x?- Knotweed

Another one from Lake Richmond, where it was growing around the end of the thrombolite-viewing boardwalk. I took some to the AgDept along with some of the other weeds, since the herbarium didn’t have any Persicaria from that locality, but their closer look turned up a bit of a surprise. 

“The Persicaria from Lake Richmond has Ocreas (stem bracts) that have  ciliate  margins (P. hydropiper character), Leaves also have ciliate margins. Flowers are white/green, in distinct clusters not dense and overlapping as in normal P. lapathifolia BUT leaves have scattered yellow glands underneath (not dense) and this is a defining character of P. lapathifolia. I wonder if this is a form of lapathifolia or a hybrid with P. hydropiper (within this species range), it could have come from a garden or who knows where.”

If it is a hybrid, lets hope it doesn’t have the kind of hybrid vigour that turns it into a major weed. 

Persicaria is a cosmopolitan genus in the Polygonaceae, known as knotweeds and smartweeds. It includes annual and perennial herbs with taproots, fibrous root systems, rhizomes or stolons. The stems are often erect but may be prostrate along the ground, and some species protect themselves with prickles. The stems can be strong enough to support themselves, twining and climbing.b The flowers might be white, greenish, reddish, pink or purple, groewing in an inflorescence as here.  The fruit are seed-like achenes - where the fruit wall (pericarp) encloses the solitary seed so closely as to seem like a seed coat - and might take a number of shapes, including a disc or a sphere (the ‘seeds’ on the outside of a strawberry are also achenes).

As for the two species implicated above, lapathifolia is also known as pale persicaria, and a weed in Britain and Europe. Other common names for the plant include pale smartweed, curlytop knotweed, and willow weed. It grows near water and in disturbed ground, rubbish tips and verges in many parts of the world, and the form of the plant varies widely depending on local conditions. 

P. hydropiper on the other hand grows in damp places and shallow water in Australia, New Zealand, temperate Asia, Europe, and North America. Common names include water pepper, marshpepper knotweed, or tade. Cultivated varieties are eaten in East Asia for their pungent flavor.  Most animals do not eat wild water pepper which has much higher amounts of the flavor compounds, but some insects do. This led to a Japanese saying "Tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki" (蓼食う虫も好き好き "Some insects eat water pepper and like it"), which may be translated as “There is no accounting for taste” or “Some prefer nettles.”

[meatcrimes]

smartweed (genus Polygonum)

[crudlynaturephotos]