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February 24, 2006
I love this season of year – late Winter/early Spring – when there is so much anticipation of what is to come, and so much fun planning what to do for the Spring garden.
Have you noticed just this week all the wild onion popping up everywhere? Where I am from in SC the soil is very sandy, and wild onion gets really quite big. As kids we used to love to pick bunches of it, sit and peel back the dirty parts and eat that slippery white core. Sometimes I’d pick a bunch for Mom for dinner salad. It was really pretty good.
My most favorite little wildflower is also popping up right now. If you have a chance just to walk around your neighborhood you’ll see plenty of it. I used to call it Lamium (its genus). Its common name is Henbit. It is a member of the mint family.
It tends to grow in waste places, lawns that are not soaked in weed killer, along roadsides, and generally wherever its little seeds can find a place to sprout. It tends to like a little sun. There is a south facing lawn in my neighborhood that is just covered in it. Oh how I appreciate those folks who do NOT cover their lawns with weed killer!
The Henbit flower is a soft lavender, and has an orchid like appearance. This is a low growing flower so you have to stoop or lie down to really get a good look. I hope you will. Henbit makes me smile. Maybe it will make you smile too.
The plant proper shoots up as a squarish stem, with leaves in whorls spaced every inch or so, the whorls farther apart as the stem grows in height. The leaves are roundish with many indentations. Toward the bottom the leaves have petioles or stems, but toward the top they do not.
The flowers tend to pop out also in a whorl at the top of the stalk, though you will see flowers coming forth from secondary whorls farther down as well at the axils where the leaves appear. The lavender flowers are rather long and tubular with a kind of wide open mouth appearance at the end, about a half of an inch to an inch long, quite hairy, with several stamens protruding. They really are exquisite little flowers, as lovely as about anything you will ever try to grow yourself.
What I like about Henbit is that you’re on a walk, and you turn a corner, and there is a clump of it, unexpected, smiling at you, just wanting you to get down on all fours, or lie down and take a closer look. Yes, Henbit, or Lamium, is a great little plant just to slow you down on a warm winter day in February, to remind you that the world is beautiful whether you fertilize and use weed killer or not, and that it surprises you with joy at every turn, if you just take the time and let it.
Henbit is an annual. Which means it comes back by seed each season. If you have a decent magnifying glass, or really good eyesight (not I), the little nut like seeds can be seen as the plant matures. Sometimes Henbit never exceeds 6 inches in height. Sometimes it will grow a foot.
If you’d like to see a picture (Oh, that’s Henbit) click here.
So get out and smell the Henbit.
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