Bittersweet is so perfectly colored for the season, though poisonous and probably invasive. Well, nobody’s perfect. There are, apparently, two types of bittersweet. One is native (American) and the other is not (an Asian import). Odds are that this is the nonnative, invasive none.
This is a familiar flower, even if I never knew what to call it before now. White campion used to grow near one of the soccer fields in my hometown. Sometimes, if I wasn’t playing in the game, I would pick the flower and tear apart the “distinctive inflated calyx” (as Wikipedia refers to it). It was a way to pass the time. There doesn’t seem to be too much else to say about the plant, though this website about Virginia wildflowers has a little more information (plus the site is full of pretty flower pictures and worth visiting just to ooh-and-ah a bit).
Here is another member of the aster family (surprise, surprise). This stuff is said to be very toxic. If milk producing animals eat it, the toxins get into the milk, with potentially deadly consequences. One thing that can eat this plant is leaf miner (mentioned at this website), and you can see that one of the leaves in this picture has been damaged, presumably by the same type of insect.
There are more dandelionish types of flowers than I’d ever realized before, and it can be difficult to tell them apart. My field guide nearly convinced me that this one was cat’s ear, but only because it didn’t include hawkweed. How could a guide about the CT-MA-RI area not included hawkweed? It’s a common plant, one I’ve seen before, just usually with more flowers per stem.
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