Lindheimer Senna
Some idiot in my neighborhood has been going around ripping out all the Lindheimer Senna growing wild near the end of our street. I’m trying to save it—gathering the uprooted plants, putting them in water, and then replanting them—but I don’t know how successful I’ll be. Lindheimer Senna is a beautiful native plant with delicate, velvety, silver-tipped leaves and lovely yellow flowers. It’s dangerous for cattle, but to the best of my knowledge we don’t have any cows roaming the neighborhood.
Sadly, your chances of rescuing them are close to nil. What root hairs weren’t stripped in the original pulling dried out within a few minutes of exposure, and without those, the plant is unable to absorb water through its roots.
Some people are truly dense when it comes to plants. This senna is very pretty, but it isn’t a “yard” plant, so it must be a weed, right? My husband, weed-puller in chief, almost lost his fiance, me, when he “weeded” his yard in New York and destroyed a bed of trilliums (you know, the endangered wildflower) that I estimated were 20 years old.
http://tinyurl.com/qv9xld
These days he’s only allowed to pull two kinds of plants, which he can identify (I tested him): thistles and wild carrot, aka, beggar’s ticks. My yard looks pretty wild to most people, but to me it looks like a gathering of old friends. Old friends that occasionally need to be culled with a chainsaw