Daisy Fleabane
These flowers that I found growing beside the road on July 19, 2016, are another type[1] of fleabane:
They resemble daisies, but the white petals on the ray florets are still more numerous and thinner than what you would see on a daisy.
The plant was maybe a foot and a half tall, branching out to a number of flowers. It was growing in soil that had been basically stripped of topsoil when the road was rebuilt, so it clearly grows in really lousy soil.
So, I think this one is Daisy Fleabane, Erigeron annuus. The U of M Herbarium says this is a common plant in disturbed sites (like roadsides), and the plant gets fairly tall. Unlike a lot of the plants I’ve been posting lately, this one is a native plant, not an invasive from Europe. In fact, this one seems to have gone the other way and has been introduced to Europe. It is good to know that we aren’t always on the receiving end of these exchanges.
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[1] They are clearly related to the plant that I posted a while back and tenatively identified as “Hyssop-leaved fleabane”, but that earlier plant had flowers with a smaller yellow core, and a larger number of more hair-like white ray florets with a pinkish-purple tinge to their tips. Plus, the previous plant was growing in a wet, swampy area, not in the dry, disturbed soil next to our road.
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