Lifting its tufted seed heads into the blue, Ironweed is not as easy to identify right now as it was last summer.

In August, Ironweed is truly impressive.  Three to ten feet tall, it’s topped by 30 to 50 deep purple flowers in a cluster 3″ to 4″ wide.  Its leaves are arranged alternately on the stem — long, lance-shaped and toothed.

Ironweed grows in ditches, moist meadows and along streambanks and is the only flower left standing in cow pastures because the stem is so tough the cows refuse to eat it.  The tough stem gave it its name:  the “iron” weed.

Ironweed is a perennial plant with two native species in Pennsylvania: New York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) and Tall Ironweed (Vernonia altissima).  These are best distinguished in summer by their flower bracts but since they hybridize — and since I’m an amateur — I don’t bother figuring out the exact species while I’m standing in the snow.

Click here for more photos of ironweed in summer and winter.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Here’s a plant with two names: one for winter, one for summer.

In the summer the flowers of this perennial vine display a fringe of white pistils and stamens above four white sepals.  The vine drapes itself over nearby vegetation so it resembles a Virgin’s Bower.

As the season progresses each flower produces many fruits and each fruit (seed) is topped by a long, feathery, white streamer.  The fruits are arranged in a dense pinwheel where the flower had been.

The result, in winter, is a fluffy white ball that looks like an Old Man’s Beard.  Look for these fluffy balls in early winter because the fruits fall off and the beard disappears.

“Virgin’s Bower” or “Old Man’s Beard,” it’s called Clematis virginiana by those in the know.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

In late fall when I’m hiking near fields and roads I often see plants with big seed pods and white fluff tumbling out.  The plants are milkweed but they look quite different from their summer appearance. 

Common milkweed is a conspicuous perennial in winter because its large, warty, seed pods stand high on three to five foot stems. 

The pods are fat at the bottom, pointed at the top and split open on their long edge to reveal soft, silky fluff carefully layered inside.  Each wad of silk is attached to a flat, brown seed.  

When exposed to the weather the silk becomes fluffy and eventually flies off the plant, carrying its seed cargo as far as it will go. The pods stand high to send their bounty on the wind.  

To me one of the great mysteries of milkweed is that it looks so different in winter.  In summer it’s weighed down with large, drooping, pink flower umbels but now the pods stick up alone and there are far fewer of them than the number of flowers in the umbel.  I have read that only one flower in each milkweed umbel produces a seed pod.  (Do any of you know how this works?)

Common milkweed is a great plant for attracting monarch butterflies to your garden.  If you already have milkweed you can leave the stems standing over the winter and watch where the seeds fly. 

When you’re ready to clear them away in the spring, Marcy Cunkelman suggests you save the dried stems and put them out in mid-April for the birds to use as nesting material.  The fibers are strong and peel off in strips.  They’re quite a favorite of Baltimore orioles.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Here’s a strange plant that grows in oak or evergreen forests, the shadier the better.

Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is a parasitic plant in the Wintergreen family whose summer and winter forms look quite different.

In summer the plant is all white, almost translucent, and its flowers bend down to face the forest floor.  It has no chlorophyll and no leaves, just scales on its stem, because it lives on nutrients from fungi in the humus (leaf litter).  

Indian Pipe’s white appearance earns it the nickname Ghost Plant.  Click here to see its summer form. 

In winter Indian Pipe is brown and stands about six inches tall.  Its flower head is now a five-sided woody seed capsule that points straight up.  The scales on its stem are wrinkled and look like the remnants of leaves.

Because it’s a perennial Indian Pipe is likely to bloom in the same place next year. 

Remember where you found it.  Come back in June to see the ghost.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

A weed is in the eye of the beholder.

As Marcy Cunkelman so aptly pointed out in the comments last week, just because a plant is currently not popular in gardens does not make it a weed.  Some plants go in and out of fashion — Dense Blazing Star for example.

Nonetheless, today’s plant is truly unpopular.  It was brought here from Europe for medicinal purposes and escaped into the wild where it grows quite successfully in waste places, especially next to roads.

Common Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is a biennial that is simply Not Beautiful and for that it is called a weed.

In winter you’ll find it in two forms.  In its first year it’s a basal rosette of large, velvety leaves similar in feel to the garden plant Lambs Ears.  The leaves die in the frost but the root lives on and sprouts a stalk two to eight feet high the following spring.  Click here to see what the stalk looks like in winter.

The second-year skeleton is easy to see because it’s so tall.  Its coarse, stout, fuzzy stem has alternate leaves and is topped by one or more flower spikes, shown above.  In summer these spikes were studded with yellow, five-petalled flowers up to an inch wide.  Now they’ve gone to seed.

Common Mullein provides winter food for birds in two ways.  The plant hosts many insects that the birds consume for protein and its seeds are food for finches, chickadees and downy woodpeckers.

Watch a Common Mullein skeleton to see who eats from it.

Of course, the plant has to be there for you to watch it, which leads me to the promise I made last week that I would tell you why you should not clear your garden in the fall.  The answer is in the blog entry below this one.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Last week I promised to tell you why it’s good to keep your garden standing through the winter, but I’m no expert so I turned to Marcy Cunkelman for advice.

Here are some general principles, then her entire response below.

Why not clear your garden in the fall?  Here are some quick reasons:

• The seeds provide winter food for birds and animals.
• The brush provides shelter.
• If you leave the old plants standing you don’t have to mulch.
• Insects overwinter on the plants in egg masses, cocoons and galls.  Birds eat them.
• You will learn a lot by watching the birds find food among the plants.

Here’s Marcy’s complete answer:

Most people like to clear everything in the fall because it “looks good” all cleared up.  I don’t mulch my plants for the winter. I leave my garden standing and it protects the plants.

I will cut back some things if they break and the wind starts moving them from one place to the other.  Grasses are a good example of this, especially the heavy leaves.  After seed heads are eaten I don’t mind cutting them back BUT you need to look hard for praying mantis egg cases, chrysalises and cocoons.  This is how most insects overwinter.

If I had a problem plant with scale or aphids, I cut it back and get rid of the problem stems (do NOT put in the compost).

I am always amazed to see how birds use the plants. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I took down the goldenrod galls or missed that praying mantis egg case, I wouldn’t have seen the downy woodpecker or chickadees getting the little treasures inside.

If you do have to clear, then at least save the seed heads and keep them some place where the birds will be able to eat them through the winter.  Maybe some will seed and root and you’ll have a little “wild area” the birds and other critters will enjoy.  I have been taking seed heads and sprinkling them in areas around the yard, edges of the woods and my “meadow” so there will be a variety of plants for the birds and butterflies.

Something else I like to do, when I make jellies I save the leftover pulp and freeze and thaw it out and put it out for the birds in winter.  The fruit loving birds will eat it and it doesn’t go to waste.  I usually do this if I have a mockingbird, robins or bluebirds in the winter.  Most years the flocks of robins begin to return to the yard in late February or early March.

When I start to see the “noses” of the daffodils pushing up in the spring it’s time for me to start cleaning the beds, usually around the pond areas first since that is the most visible from the house.  I love to see the progression from nothing to at least 5 changes of season in the plants, birds, butterflies and other critters.   — Marcy Cunkleman

(photo by Chuck Tague)

The trees are bare and the flowers are gone but I won’t stop going outdoors just because the growing season is over. 

There’s still a lot to see in winter.  The herbaceous plants have become interesting identification challenges. 

Have you ever seen a brown plant skeleton and wondered what it was?  I have and I’d like to learn more, so today I’m beginning a Wednesday series on identifying weeds in winter.

I mentioned this idea to Marcy Cunkelman and she was already on top of it with a collection of photographs from her garden.  Marcy knows her winter weeds because she doesn’t clear her garden in the fall.  If you haven’t cleared yours yet, don’t do it!  Leave the flowers standing.  (I’ll tell you why next week.)

Before we begin, here are some tips that will help you identify winter weeds.  These are expanded from a great book that has helped me a lot:  Weeds in Winter, written and illustrated by Lauren Brown, W. W. Norton, 1976.  The book has pen-and-ink drawings of the weeds and a helpful key system based on these fieldmarks:

• Smell the plant.  This is a great clue.  Crush the fruit, seeds, leaves or stem.  If it smells like mint, it’s in the mint family.  If it smells like parsley or carrots it’s in the parsley family.  Smoky smell is the daisy family, burning rubber smell is the tomato family.  The list goes on.
• Look at the leaves.  How are they arranged on the stalk?  Opposite each other or alternate?  Wrapping the stem or freestanding?  Rough or smooth?  Note their shape, if still recognizable.
• Look at the stem.  Is it fuzzy? Smooth?  Shiny?  Thorny?  Rough?  Triangular?  Square?
• Notice where the plant is growing (if it isn’t in a garden).  In a swamp?  On a dry hillside?  In a meadow or a forest?  By a road?
• Are similar plants nearby?   Your individual plant may be damaged or imperfect but similar plants will provide the characteristics of the species.
• Look at it thoroughly.  Sometimes the seed pod is your best clue, as we will see today.

So, to begin.

Our first “Winter Weed” is Purple-headed Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).  Its skeleton stands two to five feet high on a sturdy, rough stem.  Its leaves are alternate on the stem, toothed, egg-shaped and very rough on both sides like fine sandpaper.  As far as I can tell, it doesn’t smell.

When the flower first bloomed the central disk was flat but as the flower matures the disk rises into a cone.  In winter the seed cone looks like a bristly thistle, but don’t expect it to look that way for long.  American goldfinches love these seeds and will cling to the stem to pick them off. 

The goldfinches already ate half of Marcy’s coneflower seeds.  Now you can see the cone.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)