Fleabane (I think) filling a small meadow

I have been taking the time to try to identify the flowers in my images.  It’s a little hard to tell because the images I’m finding online do not have good size comparison.

That said, I’m fairly certain that the tiny flowers with the fringe of petals in white are fleabane.  It’s a native wildflower in the aster family (which perhaps I am the last person to learn).  I found its photo on the uswildflowers.com website; the image was taken in downtown Chattanooga.

Tighter view of fleabane

I was able to find many photos submitted on the website by the same photographer and even one image in a local Chattanooga newspaper.  However, I was unable to locate a website.  I find myself curious as to whether I have met this photographer or not.  Not that I have met every photographer in Chattanooga, but I have run into quite a few now.

I digress.  The final flower I identified was, I believe, the oxeye daisy.  It seems quite a bit larger in the image on the website than the ones I saw in person, but I can’t find anything else that looks like it.

Oxeye Daisies?

These are not native.  They were introduced and are now becoming invasive–they’re officially listed as invasive in quite a few states now, although Tennessee is yet to be one of them.  Fortunately, only a few clumps of these appear in our little park.

They have been working to gradually remove the invaders and seem to only plant natives in the park, so it’s been fun to watch the transformation.

I wish there were a way to send romantic young couples seeking flowers after the invasive species.  The young couple I caught picking evening primrose (see 2 posts ago) might have been put to good use neutering oxeye daisies!

Follow the curb

As Tisen and I slowly made our way past the meadow of fleabane and daisies, I stopped to catch an angle that interested me looking back at the aquarium.  I didn’t quite get what I wanted, but maybe a little later in the evening when the sun is low enough to light the front of the aquarium would be better.

On our final stretch towards the more landscaped part of the park, after crossing the wetland, we paused to look up the stairs at the sledding hill.  I couldn’t help but notice with surprise that the sledding hill is growing large clumps of clover all over its Eastern face.  This struck me as both improbable and fascinating.  After all, it’s a sledding hill.  Not a northern sledding hill, but a southern one that gets slid upon, climbed up, skated down, run up, slept on, and even bicycled on every day of the year with very few exceptions.  That clover had found a purchase on the side of this hill and somehow evaded cardboard sleds, trampling feet, and rolling children seemed quite an achievement for a living thing bound to the earth by its root.

Stairs lining up with the sledding hill–clover clumps just barely visible on right side

The clover made me feel surprisingly hopeful.