Plant IDs from around the yard

[synclinorium]

It's times like these I am reminded of how woefully ignorant I am as far as plants are concerned. I was wandering around the yard and noted some interesting looking plants that I am more or less clueless about.

Plant 1: Growing along the boundary between my neighbor's property and mine, I imagine this was something that was intentionally planted. At first glance it reminds me of a Rose of Sharon, and it is kind of shrub-like, I'll know for sure when it blooms in a few weeks...

Plant 2: Also growing along the property line, so again probably deliberately planted, a pretty looking flowering shrub/vine that I am not familiar with.

Plant 3: I'm going to hazard a guess and say this is a Mulberry, but since I don't remember having them around growing up, I'm not certain.

Plant 4: This is an odd one. Herbaceous plant that currently has stems as thick as my arm, dies back to the ground in winter, and grows huge. It's about my height right now, and I seem to recall it having small white flowers though I may be confusing it for something else...

Any ideas?

 

[ajijoe]

one, two and three is rose of sharon
six is black raspberry

the others i have seen many times but dont know what they are

thanks your friend Joe

 

[synclinorium]

Oh sorry, I should probably make it clear that the berries are in fact on a tree, probably about 30 feet tall, this is just a very low hanging branch... annoyingly low really, easy access but it makes mowing the lawn rather annoying. I tried a few, nice sweet flavor.

Good to have confirmation on the Rose of Sharon... I might need to steal a cutting or three, I love those plants.

 

[jsschrstrcks]

You are right, that is a mulberry, we have those here... One female tree, and a few dozen male trees... After the hurricane season in 2004, we cut all the remaining male trees down...

All it takes is climbing one of those in a hurricane, with a chainsaw one time, to keep half of it from hitting your house, to convince anyone to do the same

 

[Yumyumyellow]

the last one is some type of weed, possibly milkweed; i have them everywhere

 

[synclinorium]

You are right, that is a mulberry, we have those here... One female tree, and a few dozen male trees... After the hurricane season in 2004, we cut all the remaining male trees down...

All it takes is climbing one of those in a hurricane, with a chainsaw one time, to keep half of it from hitting your house, to convince anyone to do the same

Sounds like quite the experience... the plants don't look particularly sturdy, I keep waiting for this branch to finally snap off in a good storm, hasn't happened yet...

Didn't realize the plants were dioecious. All of the trees in my yard must be female. This time of year it rains black bird s**t on everything.

the last one is some type of weed, possibly milkweed; i have them everywhere

Weeds are fine by me... as long as they're growing in the part of the yard that doesn't include the garden. Invasive plants, on the other hand, must go. It's a losing battle. My photos somehow managed to capture the few areas surrounding my property that aren't completely covered in honeysuckle...

 

[Yumyumyellow]

i have morning glories that come up every inch or so in my 100sqft of my garden every time it rains... what a nightmare. yeah that thing won't really spread much but i just cut them down

 

[Avon Barksdale]

Last one looks like pokeweed.

 

[Yumyumyellow]

nope, pokeweed isn't thick enough

 

[synclinorium]

Last one looks like pokeweed.

nope, pokeweed isn't thick enough

At the same time I do remember strings of black berries on the plant towards fall...

 

[Yumyumyellow]

yeah it's pokeweed... the picture i saw was super skinny but they can get super wide... mine are like an inch and a half wide

wheoops!

 

[jsschrstrcks]

Here in Florida Mulberrys get to be substantial trees... We had one that was about 25 years old, and about 8 ft in diameter... It split at the trunk, and four limbs larger than my waist fell like compass points... It kept surviving until one year it died in the winter...

Its not uncommon for one to grow from a seedling to a 40-50 foot tall tree in just a few years though, once you have one, many many more pop up from the roots of the male tree... The female doesn't seem to be as voracious.

Having googled it, we must have had some kind of paper mulberry hybrid... Black fruit, fast growing, water depleting, sticky mess of a tree...

But it grew considerably taller than the 15 meters they are saying... The one with the 8' diameter trunk was easily 100' tall. It was in the middle of what is now my parents standard sized (60m long) Dressage arena, and one branch extended out over the canal, and the other well into the neighboring pasture... which means the branches that fell were easily 90-100 foot tall...

the others were tall, but no where near in size to the big one.

the one we had to cut down was double the height of our house (which is 10' off the ground due to being in a flood plane and has a walk around attic). and was struck by lightning in the storm... the lightning caused the tree to split, but not fully... every time we had a big gust of wind the halves would smash back together and make a large clap sound. Each time the wind pushed on the split, one half of the tree would work its way just a little closer to falling on my bedroom...

Fortunately this was happening during the day, so we saw it coming... The tree was tall enough and close enough to the house, that if it fell, it would have devastated that whole side of the house.
This also meant we couldn't cut the side of the tree off that was leaning towards the house... So I climbed up to the top of the tree with a saw, and cut off 5' sections until the whole thing could safely be felled. All during hurricane Charlie (or Jeanie, or Frances).

I'll tell you... That is an experience I'll not soon forget... legs and arm wrapped around a tree limb, being blown on by hurricane force winds, the trunk smashing back together, and me with a chainsaw in my free hand....

Praise God I survived lol.

sorry for hijacking the thread with my story Sync...

 

[Avon Barksdale]

Yeah pokeweed gets pretty big here. The stems usually get to about the diameter of a quarter and the plants usually reach about 6 feet tall. If you have kids running around I would remove the plants, most of the plant including the purple berries is poisonous. Unfortunately your mulberry looks like white mulberry (morus alba) because of the glossy and more lobed appearance of the leaves, they were introduced from Asia a couple hundred years ago to try to start a silkworm industry and now are rampant throughout the country. They are very fast growing, invasive, and hard to get rid of, the fruit is not as good as the native red mulberry (morus rubra). The white mulberry fruit is a little insipid and not very useful, although there is a white/red cross called Illinois everbearing mulberry that has good fruit. The black mulberry (morus nigra) has the best fruit but they are not cold hardy in our area.

 

[windchicken]

The last one is definitely pokeweed. When my brothers and I were children we spent our summers in East Texas with our grandparents. Our grandmother regularly made a dish from pokeweed called Poke Salad. She would boil it and pour off the water 3 times, to leach out the poison. I haven't eaten Poke Salad in probably 40 years, but I remember it tasting pretty good....