{"id":254,"date":"2006-05-21T02:54:31","date_gmt":"2006-05-21T06:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2006\/05\/21\/alewife-tick-patch-and-on-the-way-to"},"modified":"2006-05-21T23:24:37","modified_gmt":"2006-05-22T03:24:37","slug":"alewife-tick-patch-and-on-the-way-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2006\/05\/21\/alewife-tick-patch-and-on-the-way-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"alewife tick-patch and on the way to work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I biked out to my favorite abandoned spot out behind Alewife station.  Was very careful about ticks this time &#8211; still residually wigged out from the vast numbers of them that were crawling on me after I came out from near the buttonbush and oil-slick stink-river two weeks ago.  I remember that I&#8217;ve seen a few homeless camps in the woods around here.  With the ticks and the ubiquitous poison-ivy (not to mention the numerous and voracious mosquitoes &#8211; at least last year) this seems like a Bad Place to Live.<\/p>\n<p>There wasn&#8217;t anything particularly interesting here, and so I headed on out the Minuteman path. After a few miles of pure celandine and garlic mustard, I got bored and hungry and headed back.  But on the way, right by the pond where last year I saw all those great turtles hiding in garbage, and that tragically misplaced heart-leaved umbrellawort (a plant I&#8217;ve not seen again anywhere else) growing from the sidewalk, I caught a flash of purple, and<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Narrow-leaved vetch <em>(Vicia angustifolia)<\/em> (pea family) &#8211; these are really quite beautiful.  I find vetches particularly charismatic for some reason &#8211; I guess it&#8217;s my fondness for any member of the pea family, combined with their weird grabby leaf tendrils.  I think this is the fourth kind of vetch I&#8217;ve run across.  A catbird was running through some of its licks while I keyed this one out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Afterwards, I remembered something I&#8217;d seen near work, and biked on over.  For some reason the name &#8220;cranebill&#8221; had come into my head the other day, and I was disappointed when I looked it up and found something unlike the flower I&#8217;d seen.  But with a key, turns out my friend here is<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Storksbill <em>(Erodarium cicutarium)<\/em> (geranium family) &#8211; the seedpods are hilariously long, and don&#8217;t seem to have finished elongating.<\/li>\n<li>Field pansy <em>(Viola kitaibeliana)<\/em> (violet family) &#8211; I thought perhaps this was a garden plant, since I couldn&#8217;t find it in Newcomb.  But on a closer look the seemingly divided leaves were actually huge divided stipules, and the leaves were just lobed.  It was a white flower with a yellow throat, and I could see blue on the more stemwards part of the flower.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know why this is called <a href=\"http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/P%C3%A1l_Kitaibel\"><em>kitaibeliana<\/em><\/a> by Newcomb and <em>arvensis<\/em> by other sources&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I biked out to my favorite abandoned spot out behind Alewife station. Was very careful about ticks this time &#8211; still residually wigged out from the vast numbers of them that were crawling on me after I came out from near the buttonbush and oil-slick stink-river two weeks ago. I remember that I&#8217;ve seen a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[407],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}