I follow quite a few gardening related blogs, websites and social media feeds and I’m constantly learning new techniques, questioning the validity of horticultural practice and discovering new plants and products. I love it when something pops up unexpectedly, or an answer to a question I had never thought to ask suddenly appears.
On Sunday both happened within minutes. Instead of just looking through my normal Facebook feed, I clicked around and selected ‘Most Recent.’ Up popped an entirely different set of posts: pages that the Facebook algorithm would not normally make visible to me without specifically searching for it. There was news from friends I thought had dropped off the face of the earth, only to realize they had simply dropped off the list of people Facebook thinks I should see. Likewise pages from organizations and groups I actually DID want to hear from – including one of the pages that help people identify plants.
The first post was from someone in northern California who wanted the ID of a plant I see often around here. A type of thistle (I thought) that has beautiful mauve flowers followed by a striking seed head. Turns out it’s not a thistle at all, but rather it’s called Dipsacus follonum, more commonly known as Teasel (or Teazle). This is an invasive biennial native to Europe, Asia and Northern Africa but naturalized throughout most of North America. The first year’s growth produces a rosette of glossy deep green leaves that are covered in soft spines (it’s thought the plant may be carnivorous). In the second year a spike is sent up that produces one to many thistle-like flowers. Tiny seeds spread readily and although it’s generally considered a weed, I find it very easily controllable either by mowing or pulling. It’s an important winter food source for the European Goldfinch and, to my eye, it’s quite beautiful. Here it is in my garden (after blooming) a few years ago.

A bit further down on my ‘Most Recent’ feed, from the same group, was someone asking to ID a lovely blue flower I had in abundance two years ago. The flower is similar to Forget-Me-Not (Myosotis) but grows on a one to two foot high stem and lacks the splash of yellow in the eye of the flower. I had tried to ID this plant when it popped up with no luck, until this morning, when there it was: Cynoglossum amabile, with a common name Chinese forget-me-not. I think they appeared in my garden after I spread seeds that had been distributed by some forgotten charity. Here they are – such a beautiful blue, eh?

So there you have it. Two plants identified and one lesson re-learned: remember to more regularly switch my Facebook feed to Most Recent!
Well, those are two that I do not know, and that does not happen very often.
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Thanks for the tip on ‘most recent’ – I don’t use FB all that often, but wondered why I stopped seeing posts from certain folks. I’m not too pleased with the program for all its machinations!
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It’s like it, a computer program, thinks it knows us better than we know ourselves…..hmmmm
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Scary…
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Very informative and helpful! I’m intrigued that the teasel may be carnivorous. Something to investigate in the future…
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It seems to be an emerging field of study so far signs point towards it being an ’emerging’ , evolutionary speaking. .. http://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/9/20/evidence-of-carnivory-in-teasel
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Thanks for the link! While I always approach these studies with a healthy dose of “correlation does not indication causality,” the presence of more abundant and larger seeds does seem to show that there is some sort of advantage to the function of trapping insects. #themoreyouknow
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