this photo feels like the first harvest after the root cellar has been emptied, or the first soaking rain after a drought. as of this morning, i was quite out of old images and new ideas for STILL. our recent polar vortex had prevented any walking with a puggle, so I hadn’t done any gathering for a week or more, and the target pitch i’ve been working on has been an all-consuming, all-hands-on-deck cramming-for-finals kind of effort. so, when i saw forecasts in the 30s today , i grabbed my gathering basket and headed out for an emergency forage. if the volume of stems on my kitchen floor tonight are any indication,  i may have overdone it a bit in my anxious enthusiasm. i guess we’ll know more when i’ve started to triage by color palette. meanwhile one of the items too big to fit in my basket was a six foot tall stem i had never seen before. when i got home, i set about deconstructing it, as you see above, while my hubby (@sjrhoffman) worked some Google magic to identify it as Japanese Knotweed, which is, of course, an invasive species in MN. i’ve been doing this long enough. i should have guessed. at this point, any striking stands of meter high wetland weeds that i haven’t noticed before are almost certainly going to turn out to be invasive species. the one advantage of spending twenty minutes carefully deconstructing this plant is that i will forevermore be able to identify japanese knotweed. now i just hope the rest of the stems in my basket are familiar.

decontructed japanese knotweed in winter

grass lake, saint paul, minnesota