The road-trip season is winding down. I have one more road trip planned for this year, a trek down the National Road in eastern Indiana this coming weekend. The rain we’ve had in the past week has removed much of the excellent fall color we’ve had this season – I hope the remaining color hangs on a few more days for our trip.
As autumn wraps up, however, the wildflower season seems to as well. I paid almost no attention to wildflowers until I started making road trips a few years ago. Their color and variety make them hard to ignore when I’m exploring an old bridge or walking the edge of an old alignment! So I slow down and take them in – and photograph them – when I see them.
Yet I know so little about them. I try to look them up online to identify them, but often my search comes up empty. I’d love it if somebody would perfect reverse image search. I’d like to upload my flower photo and have the Internet tell me what it is!
And so I did not find out what these pretty yellow flowers are. Theywere plentiful along a forgotten alignment of US 40 and the National Road in Indianapolis near the Hendricks County line, growing among some Queen Anne’s lace and chicory.
I also couldn’t identify these white flowers, which I found growing in vines last May near an abandoned bridge on old US 50 near Clay City, Illinois.
I’ve known the weed below all my life; they grow all over Indiana. I remember they were especially prolific at my grandparents’ palatial retirement estate in rural southwestern Michigan. I think it’s an ox-eye daisy. I found this resourceful one actually growing out of the deck of that abandoned bridge. Its root system can’t be very deep – the deck is only a few inches thick. I gather that the ox-eye daisy is considered a noxious weed in several states – it tends to take over wherever it grows.
Clumps of these purple flowers, which I think are phlox, grew along a 1919 bridge on the National Road just east of the Illinois border. The sun was very bright that afternoon.
I have no idea what this is, but bunches of it were growing along the Marshall County road on which the Chief Menominee monument stands.
The prolific black-eyed Susan really pops along the roadside all summer. I shot these along a gravel alignment of the National Road near Reelsville. While I shot all the other flowers in this post with my Kodak Z730, I shot this on film with my Minolta X-700. It reminds me of four pupils attentive to the teacher, with one in the back row daydreaming.
If you can identify any of the flowers I can’t, please enlighten me in the comments!
This is my second annual post about roadside flowers. Check out last year’s flowers!
