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Wild Plant IDs - Texas Blackland Prairies

 
Posts: 18
Location: Grimes County, Texas | Zone 8b
3
forest garden fish bee
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Hello all, I am hoping to get assistance in verifying the identities of the various wildflower and plants that are thriving on my property in the Blackland Prairies ecosystem of Texas. In the interests of centralizing my future ID requests, I am going to keep adding my ID requests to the end of this thread as I find them; this should allow anyone in my area to reference this thread for all their plant ID needs (at least hopefully, as info is added over time by knowledgeable folks). I also intend to include a post-ID information dump for each plant, showing what uses the plant has, how it should be planted, likes/dislikes etc. so that I and others can refer back when planning out our wild gardens.

First up, a plant that is all over my land, and that I really hoped was some variety of Comfrey. I'm certain after doing some research that it is not, but I can't positively ID it based on web searches - I'm leaning towards a Milkweed variety, but the stem coloration and leaf arrangement (particularly the veins that all seem to run lengthwise from the base) are throwing me off. It would be nice if it was a Wild Quinine, but the leaves are not serrated. No plants have flowered yet, so I took pictures of the 5-pointed buds for now. I'll update if they bloom before this is resolved.
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Full Plant
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Flowerbuds
 
pollinator
Posts: 134
Location: Denton, TX United States Zone 8a
35
goat hugelkultur purity dog forest garden fish trees tiny house woodworking
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Looks like Plantain to me, though what species I'm not sure.

Here's the pfaf page for it.
 
Posts: 18
Location: Zone 9A
1
duck building homestead
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I use the following  site often. It's hard to guess the name put if you hold your mouse over the name of a plant a small picture pops up. Its not perfect but helps sometimes. http://rangeplants.tamu.edu/collection/brush-and-weeds/
 
Riley Walker
Posts: 18
Location: Grimes County, Texas | Zone 8b
3
forest garden fish bee
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Those were two great web resources there from Cody and Rodd, thank you both - and Cody nailed it as a plantain!

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center had a page for this particular species, the Groovestem Indian Plantain, which I'm very confident is a match for my mystery plant. See the attached image below, and tell me that's not the same!

To narrow it down, I had to study up on garden-speak using a simple graphic of leaf morphology over at Wikipedia - a few google image searches eventually got a hit on the Lady Bird Johnson image.

Case closed on this one, thanks again for the assistance - I'll have another new ID query up after my weekend visit to the property...
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Riley Walker
Posts: 18
Location: Grimes County, Texas | Zone 8b
3
forest garden fish bee
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This is going to get to be a big post if I keep adding plants that are new to me - every time I walk my land, I find something that's a mystery!

I'm pretty sure the first picture below is a dogwood, and we have a few of them growing as small trees in a copse. The remaining two pictures are a plant that grows along my driveway - sparse, growing individually, in amongst wildflowers. Any ideas?

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Dogwood
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Mystery
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Mystery 2
 
I think I'll just lie down here for a second. And ponder this tiny ad:
GAMCOD 2025: 200 square feet; Zero degrees F or colder; calories cheap and easy
https://permies.com/wiki/270034/GAMCOD-square-feet-degrees-colder
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