As spring slowly approaches, I am finding myself drawn to the ditch at the Hutcheson Ferry end of Piney Woods Church Road. Every visit, I am rewarded by the sighting of another new wildflower to photograph. There is a catch, though: none of the flowers is showy (henbit being perhaps the most dramatic of the bunch, with its flashy, orchid-like blooms), and all of them are minute, with flower heads a few millimeters across. These flowers belong to a group known as the ruderals: wildflowers of waste places (such as roadside ditches). They are nearly all non-natives. Hoary bittercress, for example, hails from Europe, and is common throughout the eastern United States. Of course, unless one is prone to kneeling on the lawn in late winter armed with a magnifying lens, the flower might an unfamiliar one. In this photograph, the blooms are surrounded by long, narrow seed pods, called siliques, which will ripen and then pop open upon being touched, sending a new crop of seeds on their journey. Later in the season, this annual will develop a basal rosette of pinnately lobed leaves; despite “bittercress” in the name, the leaves are edible raw or cooked.
