On the naming of weeds

[anef]

It's raining.  This is Good For the Garden in one way, obviously, but I had intended to get out there and do some more weeding.  I spent a couple of hours yesterday, doing some work on the woodlandy bits at the back.  This is not a huge area  - maybe eight or ten square metres, with an apple tree and some bushes at the back. It's shady and I've been trying to get some woodland plants to grow under the trees - foxgloves and pulmonaria and hellebores and such like.  It's full of bluebells and celandines at the moment, with stinking iris at the back, and it's covered in a mat of general weedstuff that I can't name. 

There is creeping ivy, and stuff that might be groundsel, or possibly chickweed (or is that only in ponds?), and that sticky stuff with long fingers that grows all over everything but is very shallow-rooted, and lots of something very pervasive with serrated leaves.  No, not dandelions, although we have plenty of those, thank you.  All I know is that it isn't ground elder (which is a bit like saying, well, I don't have housemaid's knee).   I almost fell upon the alkanet with relief, not because it's good (which it isn't) but because I know what it is.

So I dug away at this stuff, and made some space for my Sissinghurst White pulmonaria to breathe and split them up as recommended by the chap at the nursery.  They seem a  lot more fragile than the blue and pink varieties, but very pretty.  I've  done the same on the other side with my alchemilla, which seems to come back year after year despite being neglected and swamped by weeds.  My posh aquilegia that I bought last year (Black Barlow) seems to have survived the winter although no flowers as yet and of course all the normal aquilegia is rampant and I shall have to go around thinning them out.  My aim is to replace most of the weedy sorts of aquilegia with some prettier ones, with yellow or white flowers and long flying spurs.

Anyway, if anyone knows a good website for identifying weeds (with large and detailed pictures) please send me a link.  If I'm sending plants into oblivion, I'd at least like to know what they are.  And it's very hard to complain adequately to other people "and the flowerbeds are absolutely covered in X" if you don't know what X is.

Comments

[bluehairsue.livejournal.com]

What you need is a good wild flower book (or website, but the advantage of a book is that you can wander round the garden with it open, and actually look at the picture next to the plant. "Long sticky-fingered leaves, shallow rooted" sounds like goosegrass (aka cleavers; I'll look up the botanical name for you). Something very pervasive with serrated leaves could be ragwort (or loads of other stuff!). Chickweed is definitely NOT only in ponds, it has smooth small flat leaves and tiny white flowers and is edible. (So is ground elder -- treat it like spinach -- which is absolutely the only good thing I can say about ground elder, which we have in profusion, coming in under BOTH fences. Sigh.

[anef.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I have found this http://www.british-wild-flowers.co.uk/ which is very helpful. I have already identified loads of my weeds. So that's what ground elder looks like - I think I'd always vaguely identified it with cow parsley. Still don't have it, though (hurrah!). It may be that I will have to keep some of the plants under observation until they flower to identify them definitively.