Mystery Plant: 'Tall coarse weed' is really wonderful

A flash of brilliant red-purple: one way that nature tells us to say good-bye to summer … and this summer is on its way out, although slowly!

Its leaves are dark green, long and pointed, with saw-tooth margins, and a bit hairy. As with all the members of the aster family, this plant has its small flowers congested into heads. A broad, extensively branched panicle of heads arises at the top of the leafy stem, which can sometimes get to be 8 or 9 feet tall. The stems often lean over. The individual heads are surrounded by a series of small bracts, and each bract has a sharp, needle-like point.

The flowers themselves, which may number 40 or more per head, are all tubular: There are no flat “ray” flowers that you see in the heads of sunflowers, goldenrods, daisies or asters (which are also “composites,” a shorthand way of referring to members of this very large, fascinating family.) At the base of each flower is an ovary, which will eventually form a one-seeded achene, a variation of a sunflower seed. Atop the achene is a double ring of short, tawny, pinkish bristles (this is the “pappus”), the inner bristles long and slender, and the outer ones shorter and stumpier.

What a marvelous display this plant makes while in full bloom: surely one of the most intense shades of red-purple we can see in nature. The species is common and easily seen growing in damp woods and meadows, and especially along stream edges, from New England down to the Florida panhandle. Sometimes it occurs in really big patches.

Our Mystery Plant has 12 closely related species in North America, but there are hundreds more in its genus in South America, Africa and Asia.

Here’s something else! From 1842-73, Harvard University boasted one of America’s most gifted and influential botanists, Professor Asa Gray. Gray published a number of very important botanical works. The reason I am telling you about Gray is this: Within his 1872 book, he dismisses our Mystery Plant as “a tall coarse weed.” Well, harrumph. I think it’s wonderful.

(Answer: “New York ironweed,” Vernonia noveboracensis)