WISCONSIN'S COLORFUL SUMMER ROADSIDES

A WISCONSIN ROADSIDE FLOWER BOUQUET
QUEEN ANNE'S LACE, BLACK-EYED SUSAN, PURPLE CONEFLOWER, AND TANSY

Saturday, 8:00 AM. 65 degrees F on the ferry dock, 68 on the back porch.  Wind WNW, light to moderate.  The sky is clear with some haze over the Islands.  The humidity is 69%.  The barometer is falling rather precipitously, and is currently at 29.89".  We are catching some warmer winds up here on the bluff at present, but the temperature will soon even out.  The rapidly falling barometer predicts a thunderstorm by tomorrow morning, but it looks like it will be nice today.  We had storm cells that swept through the region late yesterday afternoon that looked fierce, but did little but blow things around
   We got back from our trip (literally across Wisconsin, North to South, then East to West, and finally back North) yesterday afternoon, in time to pick Buddy up from the kennel.  He was one happy pup, who was rewarded for good behavior with a chicken dinner (no bones about it).
   We travelled from Bayfield to Richfield, north of Milwaukee, then to Hudson, on the beautiful St. Croix River, and from there back home.  We have never seen Wisconsin's highways more resplendent with native wildflowers, garden escapees and colorful weeds.  The most common and prevalent roadside flowers on this trip were Queen Anne's lace, AKA wild carrot, Daucus carrota, in the Parlsey (Umbeliferae) Family, and black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta, in the Sunflower (Compositae) Family. The former is a perennial introduced from Europe and long naturalized, the later a native North American prairie and meadow plant.
    In England Queen Anne's lace  is also called bird's nest, which is quite descriptive of the flowers when going to seed, as they curl upward and look much like a bird's nest.  All parts of the plant are used in folk and herbal medicine, mainly as a diuretic and an aid to digestion.  The roots look nothing like a domestic carrot, which was derived from it over perhaps thousands of years.  Leave this plant and any that look like it pretty much alone unless you know then, as many plants in the Parsley Family are poisonous to one degree or another, some extremely so.
   Black-eyed Susans are a biennial or weak perennial, sometimes escaped from cultivation but also native throughout Wisconsin.  Some of the I39 and I90/94 embankments and medians were so colorful with great patches of these yellow flowers that I suspect they may have been planted by seed, and I will have to enquire as to that possibility.
   I could not get a good photo of roadside flowers on the freeways in what was consistently heavy traffic, so the bouquet will have to suffice.