- agrimony (Agrimonia gryposepala) (rose family) - I’ve always liked this one’s name. Its leaves were sticky beneath and had a pleasant smell. I guess I should take the name to mean it has hook-nosed or, more generally, curved sepals, but I didn’t look carefully.
- rough bedstraw (Galium asprellum) (madder family) - This and the following were growing right near each other and the agrimony, along the wood border at the back of the big lawn by the public dock. I’m pretty sure I’d seen this before, but I hadn’t quite straightened out the distinction between it and cleavers.
- marsh bedstraw (Galium palustre) (madder family)
- blue vervain (Verbena hastata) (vervain family) - I would venture to guess that verbena would be the more recognizable name these days, what with lemon verbena cropping up in herbal teas and such. This plant’s leaves had an ill smell - something like bittersweet nightshade, as best I can recall.
- tall nettle (Urtica procera) (nettle family) - I remember getting stung when I was a kid by what was assumed afterward to be a nettle. It was fiercely painful. I let this one brush the back of my hand and got a genuinely painful but by no means overwhelming immediate sting and protracted burn. One little white lump, so I suppose I only got one stinger in me.
- common St. Johnswort (Hypericum perforatum) (St. Johnswort family) - This is easily distinguishable from the following by the size of the leaves, which I failed to pick up on last season. Even that was better than the previous season, when I somehow failed to notice any of this common weed at all.
- spotted St. Johnswort (Hypericum punctatum) (St. Johnswort family)
- stout blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) (iris family) - “Stout” is a strange kind of translation of “angustifolium”, which would normally come out something like “narrowleaf”, but stout is what Newcomb’s calls it. This one’s stem/leaf was, in fact, stoutish (over 1/8 in.)
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July 13th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Nice tag. But where’d you get the Latin? Horace has in the Arse Poetica: “et idem / indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.” Is this a case of “Those oft are stragegems which errors seem; / Nor is it Desi nods, but we that dream”? Is this another immortal Latin line from the pen of Desultor?
July 14th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Disordered Dez, his mind adrift in schemes
Knows not his nods, esteems his days all dreams.
Horatius’ verse forsooth he’s erewhile seen
(And “dormitavit” puts forth “nodded” clean.)
But now, “nutavit” ’s got a happy look,
And could (who knows!) have life inside some book.
Perhaps Dez jokes by nodding with “nutavit”.
Perhaps he parrots ’cause one time he saw it!
In short, this is probably an error which a stratagem seems, and you, sir, are much in the wrong to class my lines with those of the immortals:
Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations
By wits than critics in as wrong quotations.