442 COMPOSITAE (COMPOSITE FAMILY) 
‘i 
Time of bloom: Late March to June. 
Seed-time: June to July. ; 
Range: Labrador to Nebraska, southward to Georgia and Texas. 
Habitat: Dry soil; open woods, upland pastures. 
These plants have dicecious flowers and their stoloniferous 
habit causes them to form broad, dense patches, the fertile and 
sterile groups commonly distinct but very neighborly. Root- 
leaves tufted in a small rosette, obovate 
to spatulate, obtuse, three-ribbed, taper- 
ing to petioles, softly white-woolly on 
both sides but more so beneath; leaves of 
old plants sometimes become smooth on 
the upper surface; stem-leaves few, 
small, and sessile. Stems at first very 
short but often lengthening to a height 
of six inches or a foot, the fertile plants 
being ‘much the taller. Heads in small 
corymbose clusters, each head less than 
a quarter-inch broad, the pistillate ones 
showing two-cleft, crimson styles and 
when in fruit having the more copious 
pappus; bracts of the involucre dry and 
scarious, those of the fertile heads pur- 
i \\7 <a plish brown at base, with narrow white 
a a tips, those of the staminate heads with 
Fie. 307.— Plantain- broad white petal-like tips. After fruit- 
ci a eared ing, the plants spend their energies for 
the remainder of the growing season in 
sending out runners with young plants at the tips, which take 
root and extend the size of the patches. Cattle leave the plant 
unmolested, and in dry fields and pastures it sometimes “runs 
out” much of the grass. (Fig. 307.) 
Means of control 
Disk-harrow, fertilize and reseed the hilly pastures in the fall, 
first removing the thickest patches of the weed by hoe-cutting. 
Cultivation and rotation with clover is the best remedy for ground 
not so hilly as to be in danger of washing. 
