I remember much of my childhood spent in the field with an axe or a machete. This was due to the acreage around our various homes having been overrun with the hardy blackberry bramble and scotch broom. The war raged continually and I remember being sent into many battles by my mother. I always wondered after an afternoon that no matter how hard I tried the plants had either filled in the gaps in there ranks or had regrown entirely the next day.
And here is the archetype of the focus of many afternoons; scotch broom. This made me think of my mother and so I had to get a picture and write up my nostalgia. The plant is much more hardy here with thick pointed needles but still with its signature yellow flowers and long soft stalks.
LOLOLOL, that is great. I remember when Blaine first saw it in bloom (it must have been after we were married) . . . he thought it was beautiful.
ReplyDeleteSo great. Love your tender hold on it. It must be an escaped domestic in Western WA. What do they call it over there...?
Nice wooly beard, EDO.
Mom alwayssaid that the Washington highway department thought it would be perfect to plant to prevent soil erosion but the plant took over. Apparently it was first introduced in 1840 on Vancouver island. Apparently it is shade intolerant so the best way to get rid of it is to plant other things in its place after cutting it down... Oops.
Deletehttp://www.shim.bc.ca/invasivespecies/_private/scotchbroom.htm
The plant in this picture is actually Gorse. It is a cousin of Scotch Broom but with spiny needles. Its needles fall and acidify the soil ensuring its dominance of an area. It can also pull nitrogen out of the air instead of its roots allowing it to grow in poor soil conditions. BC government nicknamed it "the spiny competitor."
Ohhhhh, THAT'S gorse. So interesting. We just listened to The Secret Garden (audiobook), where gorse bushes are mentioned all the time.
ReplyDeleteSame with Winnie-the-Pooh. He fell right into a gorse bush when Christopher Robin popped his blue balloon; he was pretending to be a little black cloud to sham some bees into getting their honey and needed to get down ASAP after the bees started stinging him ("These are the wrong kind of bees," he said.) He was covered with prickles.
Who knew I would be so relatively familiar with a gorse bush? I could have looked it up online of course, but crap. I didn't.