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Crabgrass
Digitaria sanguinalis

This is a young crabgrass plant. As it get older the upward growing "arms" often flop over and radiate out from the center, covering the ground and driving gardeners nuts..

Please pull it out of the garden anywhere you find it except along the street part of the garden (where the boulders are). We are not developing that area yet, except for trees , and the crabgrass will hold the soil.

My Audubon Guide to North AmericanWildflowers mentions that it is a valuable source of food for songbirds. It makes a lot of seed! Not a native plant, crabgrass was introduced from Europe. I don't know if it got here by accident or not...if you do, tell me and I will pass the information along. You can't see it in this photo but there are very fine hairs growing at the nodes, the joints, of the stems.

If you have a good imagination it does look like some creature, maybe a crab, that has lots of arms...or fingers. "Digit" is another word for finger...check out the botanical name of this plant over on the photo. "Sanguine" refers to blood; do you see the reddish color at the base of the stems? In plant and animal scientific names it refers to the color "blood-red".

The botanical name is the same no matter what language you speak. Scientists from all countries have agreed to use the exact same name to avoid confusion. The names sometimes have in them clues to what the plant looks like or what it is (was) used for....but don't count on it.

The most common language used in botanical names is Latin. Latin was a language that most educated people knew in the 18th century when Carolus Linnaeus came up with the system for classifying plants. He wanted to pick a language that would be understandable to the largest number of people in many countries. While many people still can read latin it is not automatically taught in the schools anymore.
You would have to ask to learn Latin now. The other language you will find at the root of botanical names is Greek. It is not uncommon to find references to Greek mythology in the names of plants. The people who name the plants can be serious or silly in their name choices...so don't put a l all your confidence in a name's being accurately descriptive!

A very cool thing about learning Latin and Greek is that it helps you be a great word detective. Many, many of our English words have Latin roots. If you know the Latin you can often correctly guess what a new word means.

So there you go....

More pictures of very young crabgrass and more info at http://www.weeds.ppws.vt.edu/crabgrass.htm

Study Pointers:

• Use a magnifying lens to look for the hairs that give this plant its name.
  
• Keep an eye out for this plant as you walk around town. What types of places can you find it? Is it common?
  
• Measure the plants that have gotten wide. What is the biggest one you can find? Where was it growing? What sort of conditions helped it get so big?
  
• Check the joints of the plants...do you find any that are making new roots there? That is called "tillering" ,I think. Why do you think the plant is bothering to do that?

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This page designed and maintained by Emma Craib:
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