admire the tenacity of jewelweed: it blooms early in June and keeps blooming all summer long. This year the more impressive late-summer wildflowers are not doing well: the ironweed is short and sparse, and the Sweet Joe Pye Weed is limp and lacking in color. But the lush green jewelweed plants are still producing masses of delicate yellow or orange blossoms. I wish I could cut them and take them inside, but I made that mistake only once. Like many wildflowers, when cut, they stink.
An evening ramble around the property revealed plenty of poison ivy and massive amounts of very tall ragweed, which is ugly and invasive in addition to making my head explode. In a few places we found tiny yellow or orange vines twining around weeds; the delicate vines look almost cute at first, but eventually they form a dense orange mat that looks diseased.
Meet dodder, AKA bindweed, strangleweed, hellbine, or the Vampire Plant (according to this report). A parasitic plant that makes no chlorophyll of its own, dodder drains host plants of nutrients--and any herbicide strong enough to destroy the dodder will also kill the host plants. We have just a few patches of it at the edge of the woods, where it's twining around a stand of ragweed. Which would you root for?
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