need some botanical help

[Harry Fuller]

There are several plants in bloom around Salem even in late November.  There’s dandelion and his compository cousins, cyclamen, some bare branched magnolia, hydrangea that have clung to clusters for many weeks now, a few roses, asters, Queen Anne’s lace, yarrow, a hardy group of violets here and there, English daisies, even a stubborn begonia.  And this plant that didn’t even put out leaves until the rains began, and now it’s blooming and it continued to bloom all last winter.  There must be hardy tubers underground.  The leaves resemble foxglove but the plants are less vertically inclined, none over two feet high yet. Five-petal flowers less than a half-inch across,  The leaves bristling with fine, flexible hairs.  Many leaves have multiple perforations so the plant is not highly toxic to some herbivore(s).

What is it?

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Harry Fuller

author of: San Francisco's Natural History: Sand Dunes to Streetcars:

https://ecowise.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/sfnh/

author of Great Gray Owls of CA-OR-WA: https://ecowise.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/the-great-gray-owl-book/

author of Freeway Birding: freewaybirding.com
birding website: http://www.towhee.net
my birding blog: atowhee.wordpress.com

[Tanya Lasswell]

Hi Harry,

This is Pentaglottis sempervirens, aka 'Green Alkanet'. It is related to forget-me-nots and garden borage. While it is a perennial that is generally green year-round (hence, 'sempervirens'), it prefers moist and shady places. I guess it figured that spot was finally moist and shady enough to pop up again after our dry summer!  It is not native here, but from Western Europe.

In looking up where it was from, I discovered a new word! This plant is apparently a 'calcicole', or 'chalk-dweller' - Wikipedia says that it, like ash trees, honeysuckle, and some others, can show signs of aluminum toxicity and phosphate deficiency under acidic soil conditions. That would explain the reddish coloring I often see on honeysuckles...

All the best,
Tanya

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[Lisa Millbank]

It looks like Green Alkanet or Evergreen Bugloss, Pentaglottis sempervirens, but there could be some other related plant that's a better match.  It's in the borage family, so that's why it resembles forget-me-nots, comfrey, hound's-tongue and borage.  Someone must have planted it as an ornamental. 

Lisa Millbank

On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 4:13 PM Harry Fuller <ato...@gmail.com> wrote:

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