Mesic Soil – Tendrils

Such great fortune to have Mother Nature as my landscape architect up here in the mountains. She provides me with such wondrous plants to enjoy. Like native Golden Ragwort (Packera aurea). I just have to help her out with things such as the removal of exotic species invasives. Which I have to admit is not at all a small price.

While reestablishing a long abandoned trail in the woods I’ve come upon an impressive expanse of Golden Ragwort. Needing to get from one side of it to the other I found myself apologizing to the plants I was tiptoeing across. I can only imagine the wonderful sight they will be when they are in bloom.

Right now they’re in bud. Quite fancy, even at this early stage. They’ll mature from a deep rich purple to a yummy luminous yellow. Those yellow blooms perched upon flowering stalks perhaps as much as two feet tall.

If you’d like to plant Golden Ragwort in your formal garden it grows well in mesic to wet soils in sunny to shady locations. It’s a plant that will outcompete many weeds that will show up and I wouldn’t suggest it be in a garden with bashful plants who will be lost in the shuffle.

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A spring ephemeral, a perennial native to eastern North America. Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata).

The “toothwort” of its name is thanks to the appearance of its rhizome.

The Cutleaf Toothwort likes woods with mesic soils covered with lots of leaf litter. This certainly must be the description of the woods where I live. Many of these plants greet the spring each year up here, including a few spots where colonies have formed.

Buds protected by four pale green sepals open to reveal four barely pale pink petals. At the center of each flower is a style with a sphere topped stigma which are surrounded by stamens with green filaments of varying lengths topped by yellow anthers.

Many different pollinators visit these blooms. Fruit of the Toothwort is a slender pod about an inch long containing a single row of tiny seeds.

When the invasive, Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), starts growing in the area of a population of Cutleaf Toothwort its numbers soon decline. A good reason to fight those invasives.