Friday, June 30th
2:30pm
Wellfleet, MA
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t recognize this one but I’m pretty sure that they’re just really tall dandelions that haven’t bloomed quite yet? The color and size thoroughly confused me, even though the buds were slightly yellow they were much taller than any dandelion that I have ever seen. Granted we have not weeded outside our front door in quite some time which probably let these dandelions grow into the giant that they now are.
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t recognize this one but I’m pretty sure that they’re just really tall dandelions that haven’t bloomed quite yet? The color and size thoroughly confused me, even though the buds were slightly yellow they were much taller than any dandelion that I have ever seen. Granted we have not weeded outside our front door in quite some time which probably let these dandelions grow into the giant that they now are.
Dandelion’s scientific name is Taraxacum officinale. I was researching yellow flowers/ weeds that tend to grow in backyards but nothing was really matching what I saw, so I looked up flower buds instead and the dandelion matched it perfectly. A fun fact about dandelions is that their seeds can travel up to five miles. They are also called pioneer plants because they are the first plants to grow on land that has been disturbed, such as land after a wildfire.
This plant is a known weed in the area, I’m not sure of the exact name, but it is a darker purple/magenta flower that gets lighter towards the middle of the flower. This plant also has some interesting leaves that I found much to my surprise were fuzzy! The color of the flower was the thing that caught my eye, was much different than the other green or yellow plants surrounding it.Th
This weed had a thin but sturdy stem and each of its little branches was covered in little round/oval “seeds.” This caught my eye because of the way it was swaying in the wind, it held it’s ground against the strong summer breeze.
This wheat-like weed was small in stature, maybe about three inches tall, each of its branches only has about one or two “seeds” on the end of them. At first glance I thought it was just a younger version of the plant right before this one but I noticed some key differences such as the differing number of “seeds” on the branches.
This plant kind of reminded me of lettuce, with all of the leaves coming from one place, the middle of the plant. There were some key differences though, this plant had slightly thick leaves with a white outline around them, which I hadn’t really seen on a plant like this before. Also something else interesting is that the plant’s leaves were fuzzy! It makes you wonder what the advantages of a fuzzy leaf are for a plant such as this one.
I really loved this sketching assignment, it made me have a closer look at my surroundings, I had never noticed just how many types of weeds were in my front yard. It made me focus a lot on certain aspects of what I was looking at, such as the texture of the leaves, the number of seeds on the stems, the types of stems, etc. On my next visit I really want to find out what kind of weed the purple flower was in my drawing, I was doing a lot of research on it trying to find something but I couldn’t find anything I was 100% sure of in terms of identification.