Time for another celebration of a common weed, which one of my flower guides deigns to call “troublesome in lawns”. For a couple of weeks now, I have enjoyed the English Plantain (Plantago lanceolata) lining much of Piney Woods Church Road. I particularly relish the architecture of the leaves, with their parallel ribs. The flowers themselves are (even by my open-minded standards) rather nondescript — absolutely minute white blooms crowded together on a cylindrical head, with only a few flowers blooming at any one time. Besides the deep blue of the sky (several days without rain now, and several more lie ahead) and the gray of the roadbed (recently regraded and regraveled), most everything I see — apart from the occasional cow — is some shade of green. A solution, at least for today, is to convert the Plantain image into black and white instead.
