Sometimes it is not just invasive plants that take over and make one frustrated. Devil’s beggarticks (stick-tights, tickseeds, old-lady’s-clothespins…), Bidens frondosa, is a North American native wildflower that has been driving me insane lately. It is not bothersome until it sets seed. It is small and unobtrusive for a long time until it flowers at the end of summer. It gets small, yellow, composite flowers which seem just as friendly as any other flower until…
… that pretty, unobtrusive, little yellow flower turns into a prickle bomb that lurks in the background of vision, waiting to embed a multitude of two-barbed achenes into every single piece of clothing I am wearing and sometimes even my hair. Each plant can produce around a thousand of these dry, one-seeded fruits.
My Book of Field and Roadside quotes Thoreau describing the experience of finding you have walked through beggar-ticks “as if you had unconsciously made your way through the ranks of some countless but invisible Lilliputian army which in their great anger had discharged all their arrows and darts at you, though none of them reached higher than your legs.”
The plant usually grows up to three feet tall. I am lucky. I have some growing up through the fence at the back of the garden that are taller than me.
EICIE 