Narrow It Down to Fringed Loosestrife

June 29, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:  Again the morning chores -- almost can do them now without thinking, although there are snags: a bug in the coffee water which I have to spoon out; Squeak turns a nose up at her cat food even though I’ve nuked it for the recommended 10 seconds.  By the time Mway and I are on the path, it’s a little before 9.

State of the Path:  Since I’m going to have to take Mway for a walk again this afternoon, probably after doing some work, I decide to just take the main circuit.  There’s more dew on the weeds than there has been for a while; my pants get fairly splattered.  I look at the Canadian thistle, growing up in competition among the yet unflowering goldenrod.  (Actually, looking through Audubon, I see there’s various types of thistle – Canada, bull, nodding; I don’t know exactly which kind mine is; maybe I’ll try to figure that out someday).  I observe a grape vine that’s growing up over a small maple tree at the edge of the maple grove.  The grasses at the seeps in bug land still lean over the path, and I have to wade through them again.  The raspberries, which seemed so numerous a week ago, don’t seem as much now, but they might be obscured by other weeds growing over them, and I don’t feel like walking through briars looking for them.  The path along the creek is easily passable, but then it becomes choked with weeds again at the swale from bug land and through the red willows.  Beyond the ridge around bug land, near the St. johnswort, a fly starts buzzing around my nose, and persists in doing so as far as the clearing.

State of the Creek:   On the way to the creek, Mway stops several times to sniff at blades of grass; my thought is that she’s catching a scent of a mammal, perhaps the raccoons.  When we reach the tree stand, I feel nervous about approaching the bank of the creek, and I see that even Mway hesitates for a moment.  But when the chalky brown water below the maple tree comes into view, we both see there are no raccoons there.  As Mway is splashing around in the water, I suddenly notice a new wildflower growing up amidst the multiflora bushes that chokes the creek.  It has a five-petaled yellow flower and dark green, smooth, elliptical leaves, and it’s as tall as my waist.  I don’t see anything in Audubon that matches it.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, after fetching the “pro-quality” stick several times, Mway wants to play “Put it down.”  I don’t feel like it and yell out “No we’re not doing that,” words which in Mway’s mind mean the same thing, and we end up playing “Put it down” several times.

Addendum:  After I come home from work, I rest for an hour, then take Mway out about 4:30.  I bring along the Audubon with the hope of identifying the new wildflowers I saw down by the creek.  At least this time, as I’m leafing through the book, I’m standing in the shade.  I go through the yellow flower section one time and don’t see anything I like (while I’m doing so, I hear a great crash through the weeds somewhere on the far side of the creek, a sound I identify as a deer being spooked by our presence).  Then I realize that most of the flowers are drooping down with the bottom sides up, so I turn one over and realize, as I didn’t before, that its pistil is largely red.  So I begin leafing through the book again, and I begin to narrow the candidates down to some kind of loosestrife.  The petals seem to look to me most like whorled loosestrife, but the leaves are not right.  But then I come to the picture of fringed loosestrife, and while the picture doesn’t look quite exact, I read in the entry that the flowers rise “on stalks in the axils of opposite leaves with leaf stalks fringed with spreading hairs” -- all true of what I’m looking at.  Then I read that the flowers are “usually pointing outward or even downward” [emphasis mine].  The only thing I read that bothers me is that the flowers are “minutely toothed” – okay – and “coming to a sharp point” – not okay – at least in my judgment.  My flowers seem to taper to a point.  Then I start walking along the creek, and not too far down, I see some more of the same flowers – and these, for whatever reason, look exactly like the picture; I figure that the flowers down by the tree stand may be wilted, so distorted a little.  Later, at the crest of the skating pond, I see even more fringed loosestrife growing, and also some on the other side of the ridge around bug land.