(Photo taken before flowering stage. Spikes on this one.)

What the smell of rain is. Fascinating stuff.

I finally found the correct name for the weed I’ve been yanking out for weeks: storkbill. It’s a biennial in our climate, not the perennial I’d thought all this time–all those hundreds of taproots I’ve yanked out made no real difference. And yet, it is so satisfying to hear that weed riiiiip all the way out of there, gone.

Of late the plants were getting a tacky feeling to them and the Smithsonian article explains why, and why that disappears after a rain: they produce an oil under dry conditions that inhibits seed germination, which, here, would definitely be a survival mechanism for the next generation waiting for the next winter’s downpours.

Storkbill would be a marvelous ground cover, given how fast it spreads on runners and those pretty tiny purple flowers–but the spikes! All those long vicious spikes. If someone somehow bred those out of there I would replace my lawn with them. Except, wait, they’re a favorite food of harvester ants.

Out!