Roses of Sharon produce flowers all through the summer and fall, and the flowers each produce a pod of seeds like this. Thus the bush spreads in the city. Its favorite habitat is along fences and among hedges, where the lawn mower won’t get it; in fact, it is very good at taking over entire hedges gradually, until the hedge is nothing but Rose of Sharon. To be fair to the plant, Rose of Sharon makes a very good hedge with very attractive flowers, so you may just want to let it take over.
These are the grape vines that take over whole lots and smother large trees. When they get to tree-smothering size, they produce thousands of these little grapes, which are intensely flavorful and quite tart. They sweeten a bit after a frost. The grapes hang on into the winter; these were hanging on a huge vine in Beechview in late November.
Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis glandulosa var. brevipedunculata) is another one of those beautiful ornamentals with a plot to take over the world. It was brought into this country for the delightfully subtle colors of its berries. Birds love them, and the vine is distributed everywhere. Here it was fruiting at the lower edge of the South Side Slopes. Above: before a hard freeze; below, after.
Some of the brightest and purest reds in the fall come from Virginia creeper, or woodbine. It is a beautiful vine all summer, but when its glossy dark green leaves turn fiery red in fall, it can light up whole tree trunks in the woods. These vines grew (and fruited) at the edge of a small parking area on the South Side Slopes.
Autumn colors in Bird Park, a stream-valley park in Mount Lebanon.
We’re used to English Ivy, that beautiful and enthusiastically invasive European import, as a solid mass of dark green leaves.
But it is a flowering plant, of course, and therefore it has flowers. After many years, when it has reached a certain height and maturity, it will send forth a multitude of stalks bearing clusters of clusters of little green flowers with a heady scent, something like linden-flower tea, that attracts insects of all sorts to pollinate them. Curiously the flowering stems bear leaves that no longer grow in the familiar lobed ivy shape; instead they are unlobed, rather diamond-shaped, or like an aspen leaf, and larger than the leaves on the rest of the vine.
Tithonia rotundifolia, the Mexican Sunflower, is a fine garden flower if you have some room for it: it can grow six feet high and spread just about as wide. Tall flowers in hot colors are fashionable again, but old Pa Pitt never cared for fashions in flowers. He just likes big bright annuals.
Urban weeds are different from suburban or rural ones. Petunias often escape and pop up in cracks of sidewalks. Usually these volunteer seedlings have smaller flowers than their hybrid ancestors, and often in more washed-out colors. This flower was blooming from a concrete stairway on the South Side Slopes.
