Throughout this diary I will be naming the Great Weeds. A Great Weed is 1) one that is truly present in its time, and 2) strikes my botanical fancy.
Great Weed #1 is Alliaria petiolata, the garlic mustard. It is found in field and forest here and dominates. One really great thing about it is that gardeners and landscape freaks hate it, a sure sign of its worth--and it really does get ugly after a while, brown and big and ugly. That's part of it's greatness.
Other names for it are: hedge garlic, sauce-alone, jack-by-the-hedge, poor man's mustard, jack-in-the-bush, garlic root, garlicwort, mustard root
For those of you who are wondering why dandelions or creeping charlies or dooryard violets (Violoa sororia) are not Great Weeds, it's because my instincts tell me they're not.
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