The Traveling Weeds Of America

There have been many different species of European centaureas roving about in many States of America over recent times; Centaurea maculosa has gone wild on Martha's Vineyard. Several centaureas now roam the moister parts of Montana, coming into bloom just as the clematis passes from the star-flowered to the fluffy-seeded stage. Lilac-lavender C. leucolelpis is on the loose in New York State, where it foregathers with Michaelmas daisies, carrot and clover—a wild-tame colony often joined by a refugee mauve-pink scabiosa. Long ago lavender- pink Centaurea nigra landed on Gaspe, moved slowly south, and is now one of the few tame-wild plants on Mt. Desert Island.

There it is especially lovely, found flowering in wet spots with the large purple, fringed orchid, Habenaria fimbriata. And in many places that gad-about, cornflower, C. cyanus, invades fields of varrow and lupine. Most of the composite vagrants in the Southwest are Africans. Several of the cape-marigolds, Dimorpliotlieca, have fled from gardens, the annual ones as well as charming perennial, D. ecklonis, with large white flowers having gray-blue centers.

Near the tourist desert town of Palm Springs, stalwart Venidium fastuosum has left the sandy lots where it was sown and made for the wide open spaces; it has not got far, but it makes some vivid orange blotches on the outskirts of the city. One day in May I was plantsnooping in the San Bernardino Mountains and was puzzled over a sheet of yellow above me. It was not the place for any of the lowland daises, I thought, and all wrong for Californian poppy. When I reached the patch, surrounded by gilia, lupine and phacelia, millions of South African Ursinia pulchra blooms looked up at me, just as though they had always been there among the Californian wild flowers.

Sometimes I think I will let my horticultural activities go into reverse and have a garden made up only of escapes. Among those that would gladly accept space on my hillside is the large, purple-flowered, everlasting sea-lavender, Statice perezii, from the Canary Islands, which used to be grown by Japanese florists near San Diego, and which still flourishes in abandoned places on the outskirts. Near it will go a New Zealand daisy, low-growing shrubby Erigeron mucronatus, to give me almost everbearing fluffy mounds of white flowers tinged with lavender. There will be tall, plumy clumps of European pampas grass, which, on the Monterey peninsula, coasts down from gardens above roadside banks and lands in the ditches below.

By: davidbunch

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