What is this yellow flower? It has taken over my urban/suburban single-family-residence neighborhood far more than dandelions each year and is rampant, though attractive, here this year. It has a single large tap root with only small fibers extending laterally from it. It is definitely not a local native. should I check with the INS? Do green leaves pass in place of green cards?
Please excuse my scanner photography.
Ray (botannical ignoramus)
Oh my. The dangerous night lily, on touch of it & presto! Poison.
Naw, just kidding. Its’ clover silly. Hey, three leaves, so that is very nice luck if you are Irish. They are bulbs, you’d need RoundUP if you want to get rid of it but some people love it.
But that’s not the usual sort of clover we’ve seen generally in CA.US in the past, which grows close to the ground and has a purple bloom and looks nothing like this flower, except for a different sort of trifoil leaf. I’ve never seen this yellow stuff in this state anywhere until the last 2 or 3 years, and then only in my neighborhood. The usual clover only has **non-bifurcated trifoliate leaves.
Ray (I thought Columbus disclovered America.)
Nanobyte, are these in your yard right now, with this much leaf disease already?
Oh, I’m gonna keep using these #%@&* codes 'til I get 'em right.
That’s Oxalis pes-caprae (Yellow Oxalis, Bermuda Buttercup), which comes from South Africa IIRC (it’s a hot topic on my mediterranean gardening list). The pink flowered type is either O. oregana (native from Washington to California in coastal forests), or O. purpurea. It only comes up here when it’s winter and spring, because it gets a steady supply of moisture. Otherwise it lays dormant.
I think it’s only prominent in California. It doesn’t make seeds (it’s sterile, and pentaploid, I think), but it spreads by temporary rhizomes, as well as small bulbs.
It’s a devil to get rid of, and I dont try to get rid of it totally, since it disappears during summer, and the tops are easy to pull up (the bulbs stay in the ground though). To rid your yard of it fully, you have to get the bulbs out, and that often means filtering your soil through a fine screen. It’s one redeeming quality is it will totally cover almost any soil type (my yard is sand, and it grows well there), and it has attractive flowers. It also has a sour taste (why it’s sometimes called wood sorrel), because of oxalic acid (as a kid we called it “lemon grass”).
There’s a relative of this plant that are grown for their edible tubers in the Andes, and I hear some grow it in NZ (no, i don’t mean the potato :))
It’s worth the risk of burning, to have a second chance…
Jois:
Yes, they’re here now. You’re saying those very small spots on their leaves are disease? I wonder.
Doobieous:
Well, if they don’t produce seeds, I don’t see how they reproduce. They don’t extend their roots whatsoever, and they are currently growing in numerous paved-street-separated blocks here now.
Ray (I know storks don’t bring them, because the closest we have are blue herons and egrets.)
I’ve seen that type of clover in New York State. Long Island.
And it’s not a bad photo. Good color, nice soft focus.
“I drive way too fast to worry about my cholesterol.”
Ray, I know what i’m talking about.I have a whole side yard full of these plants. I know what i’m talking about.I’ve dug these plants up with rhizomes attached. They grow a temporary rhizome, which is mostly water, and shrivels up and breaks off (i’ve seen it and had people on my plant email list identify one as an oxalis rhizome). They also reproduce from bulbs which form on the roots at well, this is how they reproduce, and be sterile.
from: http://biodiversity.bio.uno.edu/delta/angio/www/oxalidac.htm
Note, they can be both tuberous and weakly
rhizatomatous also. I can also ask my plant list if it would please you, ray.
Hey, Doobieous:
I didn’t contradict anything you said. I just wanted to know how they got across the street without a crossing guard. Do they wait for the light, etc. That sort of thing. Only you can be Doobieous. . .but I can be dubious.
What I said isn’t false either. Looking on the net, the particular species is Oxalis pes-caprae, Bermuda buttercup / soursop / Cape sorrel / numerous other names. [For visual comparison to the photo of my previous post, see URLs below.] This is different from the wood-sorrel type of oxalis that has been pointed out to me on local hikes in the Bay Area, and which is white with some violet markings. The ones I pulled up, early in their active season here and apparently first generation in situ, didn’t have any bulblets and only had lateral threads from their tap roots that didn’t appear to be capable of producing any source of new plants. I gather that they do eventually. <a href=“http://www.imaja.com/change/environment/albanyca/SunCup.html” taregt=“Resource Windows”>Here</a>‘s a statement about oxalis’ reproductive methods. A bulblet shows in the second photo (long download) on that Web page. But <a href=“http://www.imaja.com/change/environment/albanyca/SunCup.html” target=“Resource Windows”>here</a>'s what a UCB botanical professor additionally says about ways it can get across the street without wrecking the pavement:
My landlady hires college kids to dig up her lot, which is essentially nothing but weeds. Then she does nothing with the land. Each following year it grows much better weeds. I haven’t heard what the neighbors think of this, but I can guess where a lot of there weeds have come from. This year this lot has loads of this oxalis and across and down the street and all the neighboring streets the plant in growing in lawns, as well as in gardens and in the curb strip. Hmm. There are lots of squirrels in North Berkeley. There are also lots of hired gardeners. I’ll be some of them brought the plant into the area.
The plant apparently got to Europe, from South Africa near <a her=“http://www.quercus.es/Auladecampo/febrero.htm” target=Resource Windows">the end of the 18th Century</a>.
Apparently the plant has become quite a nuisance in may places in the world having “Mediterranean”/subtropical climates, particularly, as to agriculture, in parts of Australia. California, always having been afraid of devil furriners (but which is now, of course, mostly composed of them and their progeny), and which is the home quite aggressive non-native-plant haters, or weed vigilantes:
http://www.imaja.com/change/environment/albanyca/stewardship.html
http://endeavor.des.ucdavis.edu/weeds/ProjectDescription.asp?ProjectPK=4701
Albany Hill is only a couple miles away from me, but honestly, I hadn’t seen this plant before, in enough quantity to get my attention. Well, some of the below Web pages refer to this plant’s being “naturalized” here in CA.US, but it seems there’s still a <a href=“http://endeavor.des.ucdavis.edu/weeds/ProjectDescription.asp?ProjectPK=4778” target=Resource Windows">weed INS</a> out to get it.
But, wow! It’s now proliferated all over cyberspace also:
http://www.support.net/Medit-Plants/plants/Oxalis.pes-caprae.html
http://gardenbed.com/o/2521.cfm
http://www.chariot.net.au/~adplains/weed_soursob.htm
http://axp.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/WEEDS/bermuda_buttercup.html
http://storm.usfca.edu/usf/env-safety/Natives/sour.html
http://www.catalinaconservancy.org/plants/thorne/oxalpes-.htm
http://www.nova.es/~axis/agrios.html
<a href=“http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?where-genre=Plant&where-taxon=Oxalis+pes-caprae” target=“Resource Windows”>Berkeley overdoing things again, with too long an URL</a>
http://www.agric.wa.gov.au/agency/Pubns/ff1/5c97c67.htm
http://commserv.ucdavis.edu/CESanDiego/news.htm
http://home9.highway.ne.jp/morio_m/pescapraeE.html
http://florawww.eeb.uconn.edu/acc_num/198500729.html
http://ostracon.biologie.uni-kl.de/b_online/d51/oxalis.htm
http://www.arrakis.es/~bapialu/stipa/verise08.htm
Ray (not responsible for this yellow peril “weed” like to see restrained)
Sorry, Nano. HTML has gone away. If you’d like to repost that message with UBB coding, I’ll delete the first one and this message.
Livin’ on Tums, vitamin E and Rogaine
Man, you got there fast!
What’s the deal? The Reply Form still says HTML is activated.
I’m not going to screw around with UBB for those URLs. People can just copy and paste them if they want. You can translate them if you want, but the last time I tried using UBB code for this purpose, it wouldn’t keep long URLs from widening the thread – how long I don’t know. The one URL I HTML-coded in the long list of otherwise explicit URLs is only a little bit too long to remain explicit. I don’t know if UBB will handle it. It probably will, but it wouldn’t handle the much longer SF Chron CGI URLs.
Ray ***** WE WANT HTML BACK! ***** Inhibit the image-transfer code from either system if you must, but give us the rest back! Nobody’s abused HTML. What’s the problem?
BTW, some of the sites on Oxalis pes-caprae didn’t really say this plant couldn’t reproduce by seeding, in warm climates.
Ray
