Butter-and-Eggs or Toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) is a kind of wild snapdragon that came from Europe as an ornamental and made itself weedily at home. These plants were growing out of sidewalk cracks on the South Side Slopes. Note the two different color phases: one with bright orange centers, the other a more uniform primrose yellow.
Love-in-a-Mist, prized for its blue flowers that seem to float in an airy cloud of foliage, grows seedpods that are almost as decorative as the flowers. Children are delighted by the rattling of the seeds in the puffy pods, which make good additions to dried bouquets. The view above is from directly over a pod, showing its hexamerous symmetry.
The ubiquitous Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is very decorative in flower, but its seed heads are also picturesque in their way. The umbel of flowers closes up into a something very like a bird’s nest, where hundreds of bristly seeds develop to produce the Queen Anne’s Lace for the year after next (it’s a biennial, so it flowers the second year).
Morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea) came here as ornamental garden flowers and have happily adapted to the life of a weed. They are, however, one of our most beautiful weeds, and not many of us resent them. These were blooming in Beechview at the end of August.
Roses of Sharon are literally weeds in the city, though often planted as ornamentals. The colors are quite variable when they grow from seed. These were all volunteer seedlings that grew into prosperous bushes.
Balsam (Impatiens balsamina) is one of those old-fashioned garden flowers you don’t see too much anymore. Here are some fine examples from a garden in Beechview.
Camera: Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3.
It had been raining all day, but in the evening there was enough of a lull for old Pa Pitt to get out and take these pictures. The daylilies are all unnamed varieties from a planting of mixed hybrid seedlings.
Camera: Canon PowerShot A590 IS.
This American native is one of our most beloved garden flowers. It blooms most of the summer, and it tolerates a wide variety of conditions. Butterflies love it, too. You can often find it growing wild around Pittsburgh, but it is currently one of the most fashionable garden flowers. This is a semi-wild specimen: it was a volunteer seedling whose parents were deliberately planted nearby.
Drumstick Alliums (Allium sphaerocephalon) are more and more popular, but still a bit odd-looking. These grew in Beechview, where they were in full bloom at the beginning of July.
No tree celebrates fall more enthusiastically than Liquidambar styraciflua, the North American sweetgum. Pittsburgh is a little north of its native range, but it has been adopted everywhere as a favorite urban planting. In the fall, its leaves turn every color of which autumn leaves are capable, all on the same tree—from bright yellow to the deepest eggplant purple.
