Pink and Red Wild Flowers for Your Garden - Buckwheat family

Part of the Buckwheat family, Common Persicaria, Pink Knotweed, Or Joint-Weed, and Smartweed are all common names for the Polygonum Pennsylvanicum wild flower. This plant produces very small, densely packed pink flowers and grows from one to three feet tall. The plant often is partly red itself and the leaves have a wide range of growth: from just to inches up to eleven inches in length.

This plant likes to grow in moist soil and on roadsides. It flowers from July to October and does well in the Gulf of Mexico, Texas and Minnesota. Usually you'll see more bright pink buds and seeds than you will flowers.

The Lady's Thumb (P. Persicaria), often a troublesome weed, roams over the whole of North America, except at the extreme north -another illustration of the riotous profusion of European floral immigrants rejoicing in the easier struggle for existence here. Its pink spikes are shorter and less slender than those of the taller Pink Knotweed, and its leaves, which are nearly seated on the stem, have dark triangular or lunar marks near the center in the majority of cases.

An insignificant little plant, found all over our continent, Europe, and Asia, is the familiar KNOT-GRASS or DOORWEED (P. aviculare), often trailing its leafy, jointed stems over the ground, but at times weakly erect, to display its tiny greenish or white pink-edged flowers, clustered in the axils of oblong, bluish-green leaves that are considerably less than an inch long. Although in bloom from June to October, insects seldom visit it, for it secretes very little, if any, nectar. As might be expected in such a case, its stem is smooth.

When the amphibious WATER PERSICARIA (P. amphibium) lifts its short, dense, rose-colored ovoid or oblong club of bloom above ponds and lakes, it is sufficiently protected from crawling pilferers, of course, by the water in which it grows. But suppose the pond dries up and the plant is left on dry ground, what then? Now, a remarkable thing happens: protective glandular, sticky hairs appear on the epidermis of the leaves and stems, which were perfectly smooth when the flowers grew in water. Such small wingless insects as might pilfer nectar without bringing to their hostess any pollen from other blossoms are held as fast as on bird-lime. The stem, which sometimes floats, sometimes is immersed, may attain a length of twenty feet; the rounded, elliptic, petioled leaves may be four inches long or only half that size. From Quebec to New Jersey, and westward to the Pacific, the solitary, showy inflorescence, which does well to attain a height of an inch, may be found during July and August.

Throughout the summer, narrow, terminal, erect, spike-like racemes of small, pale pink, flesh-colored, or greenish flowers are sent upward by the MILD WATER PEPPER (P. hydropiperoides). It is like a slender, pale variety of the common pink persicaria. This wild flower tends to be inconspicuous, but very common, and it flowers from June to September. The plant, which grows in shallow water, swamps, and moist places throughout the Northern areas of the United States, rises three feet or less. The cylindric sheaths around the swollen joints of the stem are fringed with long bristles - a clue to identification. Another similar WATER PEPPER or SMARTWEED (P. hydropiper) is so called because of its acrid, biting juice.