These delightful little flowers give us two or more months of solid bloom from late winter through mid-spring, and in addition to the flowers they have very decorative bronze-purple upper leaves. The only thing that keeps us from noticing them is that they are everywhere. If they were rarer, they would be loved; since they are in every lawn and sidewalk crack, they are ignored.
This plant was blooming in Beechview, where it was photographed on May 5.
For a full description, see the Lamium purpureum reference page.
A popular ground cover often found wild in the woods or even in city lawns. The cultivated varieties often have purple or variegated leaves; the wild ones have attractive dark-green leaves. These were blooming in the Kane Woods Nature Area, Scott Township, where they had their pictures taken on May 5.
For a fuller description, see the Ajuga reptans reference page.
Also called Purple or Red Dead-Nettle, these little flowers are in full bloom right now in the middle of April. These tiny flowers pop up in lawns and along the edges of sidewalks. If they were larger or rarer, they would be garden treasures; their success makes them unappreciated. These pictures were taken in Beechview on April 12 and 14.
For a fuller description, see the Lamium purpureum reference page.
One of the first spring wildflowers, Purple Archangel or Purple Dead-Nettle can take advantage of a warm period in the middle of the winter to bloom for a few days. It is a very attractive flower on a small scale; as weeds go, this one is hard to object to very much.
See the full description on the Lamium purpureum page at the reference site.
For obvious reasons, Lamb’s Ears are popular in the garden. No one can resist feeling the soft, woolly leaves, and the silvery-whitish foliage is a striking accent even when the plants are not blooming. The flowers are a pleasantly contrasting pinkish-purple. They produce many fertile seeds, and the seeds wash downhill and sprout somewhere else, and soon you have colonies of Lamb’s Ears where nobody planted them. But it’s hard to object to them much.
Gray describes the genus Stachys; in his time, this particular species had not established itself in the wild enough for him to take notice of it.
STÀCHYS [Tourn.] L. HEDGE NETTLE. Corolla not dilated at the throat; upper lip erect or rather spreading, often arched, entire or nearly so; the lower usually longer and spreading, 3-lobed, with the middle lobe largest and nearly entire. Stamens 4, ascending under the upper lip (often reflexed on the throat after flowering); anthers approximate in pairs. Nutlets obtuse, not truncate. — Whorls 2-many-flowered, approximate in a terminal raceme or spike (whence the name, from stachys, a spike).
Although Gray does not describe the species S. byzantina, no description is really necessary. No other Stachys in our area has anything like the silver-haired foliage of this plant; it is nearly impossible to misidentify.
