A garden favorite that sometimes makes itself at home here, especially in the city. This plant was blooming on a bank in Beechview in early June. Feverfew is named for its supposed fever-reducing effects, though modern science has looked for those effects and failed to find them. The cheery flowers are like generous clusters of small daisies.

Botanists often place this species in the genus Tanacetum with the Tansies, but it is most familiar under the name Chrysanthemum, which is where Gray puts it:

CHRYSANTHEMUM [Tourn.] L. OX-EYE DAISY. Heads many-flowered; rays numerous, fertile. Scales of the broad and flat involucre imbricated, with scarious margins. Receptacle flat or convex, naked. Disk-corollas with a flattened tube. Achenes of disk and ray similar, striate. — Annual or perennial herbs, with toothed, pinnatifid, or divided leaves, and single or corymbed heads. Rays white or yellow (rarely wanting); disk yellow. (Old Greek name, Chrysanthemon, i.e. golden flower.)

C. parthènium (L.) Bernh. (FEVERFEW.) Tall, branched, leafy; leaves bipinnately divided, the divisions ovate, cut; rays white. — Escaped from gardens, and naturalized in some places. (Introd. from Eu.)

Golden Ragworts are attractive flowers, a bit like a yellow aster, that bloom in the middle spring, just after the tulips in your garden. The heart-shaped basal leaves and the pinnately lobed (rather fern-like) stem leaves are distinctive. They like a somewhat shady location; these were blooming in early May beside a wooded country lane west of Cranberry.

Gray (with help from J. M. Greenman) describes the genus and the species:

SENECIO [Tourn.] L. GROUNDSEL. RAGWORT. SQUAW-WEED. Revised Bt J. M. Greenman. Heads many-flowered; rays pistillate or none; involucre cylindrical to bellshaped, simple or with a few bractlets at the base, the bracts erect-connivent. Receptacle flat, naked. Pappus of numerous very soft and capillary bristles.— Ours herbs, with alternate leaves and solitary or eorymbed heads. Flowers chiefly yellow. (Name from senex, an old man, alluding to the hoariness of many species, or to the white hairs of the pappus.)

S. aureus L. (GOLDEN R. ) Stems erect from rather slender rootstocks, 3-8 dm. high, at first often lightly floccose-tomentose, soon glabrate; lower leaves long-petioled, ovate-rotund to slightly oblong, 1.5-8 cm. long, two thirds as broad, crenate-dentate; stem-leaves lyrate to laciniate-pinnatifid; the uppermost sessile, amplexicaul, often bract-like; inflorescence cymose-corymbose; heads radiate; rays yellow; achenes glabrous. — In wet meadows, moist thickets, and swamps, Nfd., s. to Va., w. to Wisc., Mo., and Ark. May-Aug.

 

As the specific name vulgaris implies, there is nothing unusual about Groundsel; but even for this opportunistic bloomer, there is something unusual about seeing flowers and ripe seeds in early February. Groundsel can take advantage of a very brief break in the weather to bloom, and the warm winter this year has given it the chance to burst into bloom all over.

Gray describes the genus and the species—but we should not take what he says about the blooming season too seriously.

SENECIO [Tourn.] L. Groundsel. Ragwort. Squaw-weed. Heads many-flowered; rays pistillate or none; involucre cylindrical to bellshaped, simple or with a few bractlets at the base, the bracts erect-connivent. Receptacle flat, naked. Pappus of numerous very soft and capillary bristles.— Ours herbs, with alternate leaves and solitary or corymbed heads. Flowers chiefly yellow. (Name from senex, an old man, alluding to the hoariness of many species, or to the white hairs of the pappus.)

Annuals (rarely becoming biennial); stems leafy to the Inflorescence; heads medium-sized, 1 сш. or less high during anthesis.

S. vulgàris L. (Common Groundsel.) Low annual, 1-6 dm. high. corymbosely branched, glabrate, leafy to the inflorescence; leaves pinnatifid and toothed, 1-8 cm. long, 0.6-3 cm. broad; calyculate bracts (bracteoles) of the involucre distinctly black-tipped; rays none; achenes hirtellous. — Waste grounds, common. July-Sept. (Nat. from Eu.)

Our broad modern highways seem to have been the making of this plant around here. It likes the median strips of interstate highways better than any other environment, and its grey-green leaves topped with dusty white flowers make it a decorative companion to the goldenrods that often grow in the same places. The plant above was growing along the side of a highway near Rostraver; the one below in a vacant lot in West Mifflin; both were blooming in late September.

Flower heads. Rayless, white, borne in layers of flat-topped clusters.

Leaves. Dark greyish-green; lanceolate; the upper ones entire, the lower toothed past the midpoint; with three prominent parallel veins. Often there are two smaller leaves where the petiole meets the stem.

Stems. Straight and study; greyish-green, paler than the leaves, often with a brown cast toward the base; much branched.

This plant apparently hybridizes with E. serotinum, and is easily confused with it, probably even on this site.

Gray describes the genus and the species:

These beautiful flowers, close relatives of the garden Bachelor’s Button (Centaurea cyanus), seem to be found almost exclusively along railroads. We have three pictures now of this species, each beside a different railroad; this particular plant was part of a colony growing by the railroad viaduct that separates the South Side Flats from the Slopes, where it was blooming at the end of July. (The other two pictures are here and here.)  The color is variable from purple through white, but this purplish pink is by far the most common color.

Gray describes the genus and the species:

CENTAUREA L. STAR THISTLE. Heads many-flowered; flowers all tubular, the marginal often much larger (as it were radiate) and sterile. Receptacle bristly. Involucre ovoid or globose, imbricated; the bracts margined or appendaged. Achenes obovoid or oblong, compressed or 4-angled, attached obliquely at or near the base; pappus setose or partly chaffy, or none. Herbs with alternate leaves; the single heads rarely yellow. (Kentaurie, an ancient Greek plant-name, poetically associated with Chiron, the Centaur, but without wholly satisfactory explanation.)

C. maculosa Lam. Pubescent or glabrate, with ascending rather wiry branches; involucre ovoid-cainpanulate, in fruit becoming open-campanulate; the outer and middle ovate bracts with rather firm points and with 5-7 pairs of cilia at the dark tip; innermost bracts elongate, entire or lacerate; corollas whitish, rose-pink, or purplish, the marginal falsely radiate. Waste places, roadsides, etc., N. E. to N. J. (Adv. from Eu.)