Shepard Lane Garden

   This is a plant called St. Andrew's cross,  Hypericum hypericoides, which is a member of the St. John's Wort family Hypericum .  It is a very common plant in the Southeastern United States.   One of the main differences visually between this and St. John's Wort is that the St. Andrew's cross has four petals, placed oblong in a 'winged' fashion, while the St. John's Wort has five evenly spaced petals.  The St. John's Wort contains folk medicine qualities that some believe in, and some don't.  St. Andrew's cross was also valued by the Native Americans for it's help in fighting certain inflammations and pain.   I believe in the past I have called this a 'yellow lespedeza', if only to myself, because the leaves do resemble the lespedeza sericea.  And, it is true that there are other colors and more showy versions of lespedeza than the one that has been wilded on our hill (back more than thirty years ago, I am told).  Today, after ...

So, what is this weed? I've been told it is the reason this place is called 'pea ridge.'  It is definitely in the pea family Fabaceae , which basically just means it is a legume, like peas and beans.  But it isn't your classic sweet-pea flower, or several of the other things Google suggested to me it might be. Balsam imaptiens?  Nope, that isn't a vine.  This is definitely a vine.  There are some of these plants called 'touch me not', which have seed pods that explode upon a touch.  This is not quite that animal, although the flowers are similar, the leaves are not.  And sweet pea flowers have much different leaves than this, as well.  IF you look at the leaves and they are markedly different - keep looking, you'll run into a better match soon! It winds itself around things like bindweed (in the convolvulus family, as we spoke of the other day) , but it isn't a 'classic' bindweed.  I had a hit on this being in Fabaceae, from the shape of th...