Thugs of the Plant World on Display

I was at a coffee shop today and couldn't help but be amused by the photos on display. I'm not offering a critique of the photos themselves (nor should I, based on the bad quality of the photos I took of them! Sorry about that) but rather of the plants that are shown in them.

The one that got my attention first was this -- it's creeping bellflower, Campanula rapunculoides -- the scourge of my garden:



Creeping bellflower spreads aggressively, and you can't pull it up -- you have to dig up every bit of its roots, which can be several feet deep. It's growing in every corner of my neighborhood. In fact, my favorite thing about winter is that I don't have to look at this plant everywhere I turn.

So I couldn't help wondering if the person who took the photo knows it's a weed and doesn't care, or meant to take a picture of a weed... or (most likely) doesn't know it's a weed.

The second picture, which was located side by side with the first, was of a purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea:



Nothing too unusual about that. But notice the odd green bits in the (admittedly bad) closeup of the orange cone:



This is the sign of a coneflower with a condition called aster yellows. This disease causes coneflowers to have malformed blossoms, from mildly odd like this one to extremely bizarre -- I've seen instances where there are no petals, just a ball of green spikes. There is no cure for it. All you can do is dig the plant up and throw it away (and not into the compost pile, either).

Anyway, that's all. I swore when I started this blog that I wouldn't put gardening stuff in it, but when I saw these photos, I just couldn't resist.