I found one in my yard, and need [color=DarkRed]your[/COLOR] help identifying it.
Of course, I must make it as hard as possible, by not having a picture.
Here’s the back story.
When we bought our house, it was Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were blackberry briars 5 feet thick and 40 feet high surrounding our back yard. We were told by the seller, that his mother had been a master gardener, but when she died he didn’t have the heart to keep it up.
He rented the house to a contemporary of his mother’s. In her 80s, she didn’t do yard work. No one cared enough to hire anyone, so the briars grew and grew. And grew.
We bought the house 6 years ago, and I started cutting blackberry vines. (they all laughed.) But I continued. I persevered. It seemed I always had a thorn festering somewhere on my body.
Fast foward to two summers ago.
I cut the last vine, woman-handled into the yard waste bin and called out to my honey, “The spell is broken, they’re all gone.”
The garden the Mrs Evans had tended was gone, but snippets and reminders of it were here and there. Like the six colors of lialics, or the 3 varieties of mock orange growing 45 feet tall, & supported in the arms of a 80 year old dogwood.
The next spring I was anxious to see what came up. We had dog-toothed violets, and grape hyacinth, blue bells and Lilly of the Valley. We had some pretty little white flowers on long leafless stems that smelled foul (some sort of garlic, I think.)
Then, back by the fence, I saw something strange, and unexpected. It was a Black flower! The plant wasn’t as big as the mock orange, in fact, it wasn’t doing well at all.
The flowers appeared to be black, but in better light, were very dark red, maybe because it was so dark under all that. My husband tried to move it, but it died. I forgot all about it, but this year, there it was again!
The leaves are shaped like one of the mock orange varieties in the same part of the garden. The leaves are delicate only slightly shiny about 1-1.5". They are not serrated, but have prominant vein patterns.
The flowers are about 1 inch in diameter. they remind me of a spider mum, or a dalia, only tiny. This year, the flowers are dark red, but not as close to black. They have a very sweet smell, like candy, it reminds me of something, but I can’t place it. The flowers grow at the leaf joints which are parallel. The stalk is woody & breaks easily.
I’m going to call the Washington Park Arboretum tomorrow, but if anyone recognizes it from my description, please let me know. I’m so curious.