Plant identification is an area of study to which the tutor should devote more time.  He does have background in it….

Growing up, I lived in several farming locales.  While I don’t now, I follow several traditions thence.  I maintain a compost pile, for instance.  I hand-weed my lawn, lime it, and put ripened compost on it.  I watch the changing ecology of the lawn, and never pollute it with chemicals.

Many farmers I knew practiced mixed farming; you might call their way of life subsistence agriculture. Perhaps because of the variety of crops they cultivated, they took interest in plants generally.  Whether it was the kind of tree in a meadow or the variety of flowers in a neighbour’s yard, they would know.  They steeped the community with that knowledge.

Decades later, I’d do well to take more active interest in the plants around.  I know many of the trees, both indigenous and introduced, but I’m weaker with the other plants. An example is one in my side yard:

I first noticed the plant in the lawn a few years ago.  It looked familiar from my days in the Maritimes. I pulled it up, but the following year it was better established.  This year it’s very prosperous.

I don’t call the plant a “weed”; instead, I decided to look it up in a field guide.  Perhaps by identifying it I could find out what kind of soil it likes.  Maybe it enjoys a deficiency I should correct in my lawn.

Well, using a field guide can be a bit challenging when you don’t do it often.  Like anything else, familiarity is key.  I had an idea of a couple of  families to which the plant might belong, due to its unique appearance.  An hour in, I still hadn’t found it.  Finally I was reduced to thumbing page-by-page through the guide, hoping for a lucky stumble. It came.

From the guide, I believe the plant to be yarrow, of the aster family.  The leaves are fern-like, pinnate, and alternating.  The ecology makes sense; generally the plant is found in well-drained clearings. Furthermore, it grows among many dandelions, which also are of the aster family (as I found out from the guide).

Looking from page to page, I recognized numerous plants I’ve seen out in the woods and in disturbed sites around town.  It’s easy to imagine how familiar a person could get with the local flora just by making regular use of the field guide.

I’ll be talking more about plant identification in future posts.  I also hope to do a follow-up on the soil conditions in that part of the lawn that make it more attractive to yarrow than grass.

HTH:)

Source:

Pojar, Jim and Andy MacKinnon.  Plants of Coastal British Columbia incl. Washington, Oregon, & Alaska. Vancouver: BC Ministry of Forests and Lone Pine Publishing, 1994.

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.