@FairfaxForager: Wild Plants of Fairfax County
Follow me on Instagram as I survey the wild plants growing around me and learn how to use them! The harvest season's wrapping up, but there's still a lot I'd like to try with the plants I've gathered so far.
Blog errata:
As I hope I've made clear, this blog has been a learning exercise for me. When I first started it, I was a complete newbie to foraging--and, as you'd expect, I made a lot of newbie mistakes. Here they are, for your reference and precaution, along with links to the inaccurate posts.
- 3/9/2019: I actually have no idea what species of speedwell this is. It might be Veronica filiformis. It might be something else entirely. With such a small plant, and without any flowers, it's hard to tell. And it probably doesn't matter--all speedwells are about equally beautiful and inedible.
- 3/12/2019: The strawberry-looking thing is a mock strawberry (Duchesnea indica). In good growing conditions, their leaves can get almost as large as those of true strawberries (Fragaria spp.), but don't let that fool you. They'll still bloom yellow (rather than white) and produce inedible fruit.
- 3/13/2019: I called out this mistake in a later post, but I'll mention it here anyway because it exemplifies a common ID error: making an unknown plant fit a known category. At this point in the year, I only knew the names of a few dozen types of plants (I was visually acquainted with more, I just had no clue what they were called). One of those names was "thistle", which I knew to mean a prickly-looking plant with purple flowers that grew up from a little thing on the ground. The photos of bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare) on Wikipedia looked more or less like what I remembered. Based on that evidence alone, I concluded that this little fellow was a bull thistle. It didn't even cross my mind that other, unrelated plants might grow from spiky rosettes--like the prickly sow thistle (Sonchus asper), which this is.
- 3/18/2019: I never did go back to see if those grassy things grew flowers. They definitely look like crocus (Crocus spp.) greens (which don't always bloom), but I can't say for sure that they aren't something else.
- 3/24/2019: I did call this one just a "thistle"... but I meant "bull" (Cirsium vulgare) when it should have been "prickly sow" (Sonchus asper). The owners did leave it there long enough for it to send out (not up) a stalk, but some kids came by and knocked it down.
- 4/1/2019: In case you didn't pick up on this April Fools' Day joke, there is no such plant as Taraxacum paxquietus. If only.
- 4/6/2019: Both dandelions pictured are Taraxacum officinale. That species' leaves are immensely variable: some have barely any lobes, and some are barely anything but lobe. The variance might have something to do with the amount of light the plants get or the quality of the soil they grow in. I did notice that the thinner-leaved plants tended to bloom earlier by a couple of weeks. Future research...?
- 4/28/2019: Another error I corrected later on: those vines are porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata), not summer grape (Vitis aestivalis). For cues to tell those species apart, see my post from 8/23/19. I should have known better--I was aware of porcelainberry's existence, if not its name, before this year--but I wanted to see delicious wild grapes all over the place, and because of that I made the ID fit. Don't do that.
- 6/20/2019: This plant is birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), not sidebeak pencilflower (Stylosanthes biflora). I mixed this one up through yet another newbie mistake: assuming that any given list of plants is comprehensive. One of the main resources I was using for identification at the time, US Wildflowers, hosts photos and detailed descriptions of a huge number of flowers, but (obviously) not every single one that blooms in the state of Virginia. The only yellow Fabaceae-looking flower they listed was the sidebeak pencilflower. Its leaf shape didn't quite fit the plant I'd seen, but its flowers were close enough, so I assumed that was what it was. Only when I learned of the existence of birdsfoot trefoil (a much more common and disturbance-tolerant plant) later that summer did I realize my mistake.
- 7/16/2019: This plant is most likely Chenopodium album, not C. berlandieri. As I later learned, both species' leaf shape varies; the only reliable cue to distinguish them is the surface of their seeds. C. berlandieri's seeds are pitted (hence the common name "pitseed goosefoot"), and C. album's are smooth. All the seeds I found later in the year were smooth, so I'd guess that the vast majority of lamb's quarters plants in northeastern Fairfax County are C. album.
- 7/21/2019: I'm not confident that the plant in the second photo is actually a Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus). Hard to say what it is, though--Helianthus alone is a huge genus, and there are several related genuses full of even more sunflower-looking plants. Plus, in a place as populous as Fairfax County, it's hard to know whether you're looking at a wild species or some funny-looking cultivar escaped from a garden. (In a lot of ways, wildness is more of a continuum than an either/or trait.) Anyway, I pretty much gave up on identifying most "sunflowers" any further than that category this summer--by then, I'd learned to be careful in my IDs and not get any more specific than I felt confident doing.
- 7/26/2019: Ah, the first of my butternut mistakes. As I later corrected myself, the pictured tree was actually a hickory (Carya sp). I'm still not entirely sure which one, but I'm leaning toward C. tomentosa, the mockernut hickory: the tree's leaves aren't quite as rounded as those of the mockernuts I've seen in books, but its bark (not shaggy) and nuts (~1 inch in diameter, rounded, and edible but not delicious) look about right.
- 9/20/2019: And the second butternut mistake. This tree's not a butternut either, as I learned when I finally managed to get one of its nuts de-husked and cracked. It's also some sort of hickory--maybe a mockernut x pecan hybrid? Its nuts are elongated (but wingless) and taste better than those of its neighbors. I passed a sample on to the Virginia Cooperative Extension for analysis; I'll update this when they get back to me.