What's blooming in High Park, late July

I had a great time with the High Park Volunteer Stewardship Program pulling weeds in the Sculpture Garden restoration site yesterday. There are tons of flowers in bloom now:

Natives

• Achillea millefolium (yarrow, achillée millefeuille)
• Asclepias syriaca (milkweed, bébé lala de lait) (only a few are still blooming, most are setting seed)
• Campanula rotundifolia (harebell, campanule à feuilles rondes)
• Conyza canadensis (horseweed, vergerette du Canada)
• Desmodium canadense (showy tick trefoil, desmodie du Canada) (shown above)
• Erigeron annuus (daisy fleabane, vergerette annuelle)
• Helianthus divaricatus (woodland sunflower, hélianthe à feuilles étalées)
• Lobelia cardinalis (cardinal flower, lobélie cardinale)
• Monarda fistulosa (wild bergamot, monarde fistuleuse)
• some kind of Potentilla, maybe Potentilla fruticosa (shrubby cinquefoil, potentille arbustive)
• Rudbeckia hirta (black-eyed Susan, rudbeckie dressée)
• Silphium perfoliatum (cup plant, plante bain d'oiseaux)
• Verbena stricta (hoary vervain, verveine veloutée)

Others

• Cichorium intybus (chicory, chicorée sauvage)
• Daucus carota (Queen Anne's lace, nid d'oiseau)
• Melilotus alba (white sweet clover, mélilot blanc)
• Pastinaca sativa (wild parsnip, panais sauvage)
• Polygonum sp. (smartweed, renouée)
• Trifolium pratense (red clover, trèfle violet)

We also saw a big wasp dragging a caterpillar to a hole she had previously dug, presumably to lay eggs on it. Although I felt sorry for the caterpillar, it was fascinating to watch. In Growing Green (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006), an intriguing book about veganic food production, Jenny Hall and Iain Tolhurst recommend growing native plants near fields of crops to attract beneficial insects such as parasitic wasps.

Desmodium canadense seeds: sticky little guys!

I bought these seeds for showy tick trefoil (desmodie du Canada) at Seedy Saturday in Scarborough, but another option is to go for a walk through the savannah of High Park in August—you will get a lot of these seeds stuck to your clothing, like ticks (hence the English common name).

Desmodium canadense in bloom

Desmodium canadense, known in English as "showy tick trefoil", "Canada tickclover", "beggar's lice", or "Canadian tick-trefoil" and in French as desmodie du Canada, is a perennial native to eastern Canada and northeastern and central US.

This picture does not show showy tick trefoil at its prime; for photos where it actually looks showy, see the Desmodium canadense page at Missouri Plants, which includes some amazing closeups of individual flowers. The "tick" in the English common name refers to the seeds, which, like ticks, cling to animals' fur (and peoples' clothing).

I photographed this plant at High Park.