Herein lies an adventure into the wild kingdom. Some gardens are organized and maintained to a degree not found in nature with nothing anywhere not specifically ordained to be there. Other gardens allow the surprises of nature, the globetrotters and volunteers that nestle in alongside radishes and tomato plants, and they are welcome as long as they keep their distances because a gardener might find a delightful new plant has chosen this garden.
When garden plants go to seed, seedlings will sprout in unexpected places. Kale, cilantro, mustard and arugula, for example, will reseed themselves if the gardener allows it, and they are recognizable when they suddenly appear.
But what if a newcomer moves in? The tomato bed is planted, carefully cultivated, watched over with pious devotion, and along with the few volunteer red mustards and marigolds that pop up, there appears a smattering of what look like tiny basil sprouts here and there. There was no basil there in the past to leave seeds behind. We are scientists, and we want to know who is the new one in the garden.
The adventure begins. Most scientists will have learned by eighth grade a little sprout with two leaves is a dicotyledon. These first leaves eventually fade, so the scientist must wait to see the first true leaves. The initial lesson learned is squatting there day after day and staring with great enthusiasm apparently does not hasten plant growth. After awhile, the little round cotyledons give way to a pair of new leaves and then another pair at the next node, so the scientist now has useful data for identification.
There are thousands of sites online for identifying plants, and some are useful. Most will help identify a flower, but the research at hand is about a young plant two or three months shy of flowering. It barely has its second pair of leaves, so the online guides will ask about the shape of a leaf, the leaf arrangement, the leaf margin and the parts of the leaf. Quickly the gardener faces new terms like petiole, sessile, reniform and hastate.
The Plant Identification Guide from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources states, “There are over 50 terms to describe the shape of a leaf.” Using the helpful guide at the site, the enterprising investigator determines the plant in question has a simple cordate (heart-shaped) leaf with a winged petiole. The petiole is the stalk connecting the leaf to the stem, and on the plant in question the stalk is accompanied by blade (leaf) tissue, thereby making it winged. Leaves connected directly to the stem are sessile. A scientist is always ready to learn new language.
The leaf margin, or edge, is an identifier as well. Is the edge smooth or wavy or toothed? And if toothed, are the teeth rounded, pointed or sawtoothed? The focus of our study has sawtoothed margins.
With online sources at the ready, the investigator can search for “simple cordate serrated leaf with winged petiole” just to see what happens.
What happens is 1.08 seconds later, about 82,000 results appear for perusal. Some are encyclopedias and some are long lists that include every plant with leaves matching any of the search terms. There are sites with botany textbooks, possibly historic and valuable, for sale, and others that focus on trees only. The Yale School of Forestry has an excellent site with 15 colorful pages for identifying herbaceous plants but none even closely resembles the target of our research.
What becomes obvious as the researcher pores over site after site is how infinitely creative nature is in its leaf shapes, but so far none of the photos resembles the leaf on hand. Is it possible the scientist has dozens of the rarest plant in all of botany sprouting on a rocky hillside?
Another research opportunity is using a plant identification app available for smartphones. The app called myGardenAnswers allows the curious researcher to take a photo of the suspect plant and compares it to the thousands of photos in its library. How clever and modern! The comparisons it offered included Irish potatoes, pigeon berries, spinach, echinacea, deutziam, wild yams and pigweed… not even close.
It did suggest the mint family, however, and this newcomer is very similar in appearance to mints. The leaves have a mildly sweet herby fragrance, like if chervil mixed with key limes and fennel. The midrib in purplish-red at least halfway through the middle of each leaf, and the blade (leafy part) is rippled with smaller veins between the primary veins.
Though the plants are distributed throughout the hillside, one garden bed seems to be the ground zero origination point where a parent might have been. One year ago in that bed another newcomer appeared and, being different and unknown, seemed like it should stay and reveal itself. It also smelled herby like oregano but had long, skinny leaves, or – as the scientist has learned – simple entire linear leaves with winged petioles and smooth margins. It did have a wonderfully exotic flower, and noted plant expert, author, and Eureka Springs boy, Steven Foster identified it as Monarda punctata, or spotted beebalm. Also growing in the vicinity are patches of M. russeliana. An inquisitive scientist might wonder if the newcomer might be another monarda.
Foster’s Herbal Renaissance tells us there are 12 monarda species in North America, but the description of M. didyma makes it the leading candidate to be the hearty newcomer. The good news would be it has brilliant, exotic flowers in shades of red. The flip side is it’s a clump-forming perennial that colonizes an area in the wild by sending root runners all about, a less attractive feature for specimens in a home garden. Hummingbirds like the pretty red flowers and the leaves make a good tea, but the colonizing habit sounds troublesome, flowers will not show until mid-summer, and our specimen might be something else anyway.
So far, a search through the online literature has surpassed cursory and approaches diligent, but has yet to name the newcomer for sure. Much has been learned about plant structure, names of parts and the incredible variety of leaf shapes, but without a flower, the result of the search is the same – ask Steven Foster.