Maybe I'm weird. OK, I admit I'm compulsive. I hate to pull out plants if I don't know what they are. What if they're beautiful flowers? Sometimes they're weeds, but sometimes they're not and I'm glad I've spared them.

How about you? Do you recognize these plants?

Mystery plant 1

This is a plant we found when we bought our house last fall. Not knowing what the flowers looked like made it difficult to find in Weeds of the West, and I tentatively identified as a nasty weed called leafy spurge. Leafy spurge is very difficult to kill, so I put off doing anything about it until this year.

Mystery plant 2

This plant sprouted next to our sidewalk among the Mexican primroses this spring. I wasn't aware of anything like that in that planter last summer and fall when we bought the house, but I didn't want to take the chance of pulling it out if it was a nice flower. (And as it kept growing, I started wondering if it was a shrub.)

Mystery plant 3

This spring I dug compost into the planter along the front sidewalk and planted baboon flower bulbs. These plants with the fat leaves appeared with the narrow, spiky leaves of the baboon flowers. I came very close to pulling them, but they looked familiar and not like any weed I could remember.What would have grown there before or blown in on the wind?

Eventually I realized they looked like melon plants. Again, how the heck would melon seeds have gotten there? Oh, wait—the compost! I gave them more time to see what they turned into.

Mystery plant 4

You might have to look closely, but see those huge leaves among the dame's rocket, flax, and lamb's ears?They're maybe a foot long and 6 inches across, and they have spikes at the tips of the points.

This appeared at our old house this year. We had lived in that house for 25 years, and I had never seen anything like it.


















Ready for the answers?

Plant 1

Ta da! This is no leafy spurge—it's a showy milkweed. Some people consider it a weed—I consider it a wildflower and plan to keep it. I'm glad I never got around to hitting it with the Roundup.

Plant 2

I went through my weed book over and over trying to find this plant. It kept growing but didn't get any buds. It was really out of place in that flowerbed, but I just couldn't bear getting rid of it in case it was a good plant.

Finally I recognized the purple spots on the stems in the weed book. What was it? A common cocklebur. I say "was" because I pulled it out as soon as I knew what it was.

Plant 3

I'm sure this is a cantaloupe vine. It's loaded with yellow flowers, and it's doing a lot better than the melons did in the fancy raised planters we built at our old house! I just hope no one trips over them.

Oh, the baboon flowers? They were supposed to bloom between March and June but never did. Thanks, WinCo, I'll remember that when you put your cheap bulbs out for sale next spring.

Plant 4

I'm sad to report I don't have another picture of this plant.

When I last saw it, a few weeks ago, it was about 6 feet tall and looked menacing with those huge leaves with long thorns all around them and thorns all along the main stem. On top of it were several flower buds—thistle flower buds. They appeared to be yellow. Of course I didn't have my camera with me.

I couldn't find anything like it in my weed book. The closest, with purple flowers, is Scotch thistle, but the leaves on that aren't nearly as large.

I went back 2 days later with my camera. Our sons, who are living in our old house now, informed me they had dug it up. I was stunned.

They reminded me I'd been nagging them about the weeds and had warned them about that one especially. I probably had, but being a realistically cynical mom it had never occurred to me that the plant was in any more danger from them than the prickly lettuce they'd been ignoring.

I probably missed the opportunity of a lifetime. It must be a very rare plant. Heck, maybe I could have had it named after me. Do you think laurel busch thistle would confuse anyone?