Still Here: In a world full of mugwort, be a daisy fleabane

Mugwort is a plant you see everywhere. If there’s a vacant lot, there’s probably mugwort there. If there’s not enough park staff to pull invasive plants at your local park due to anemic park budgets, you’ve probably seen mugwort. Not only have you seen the individual plants, you’ve also seen fields of them. It’s the kind of plant that sees a nice sunny patch of land and wants all of it to itself.

When it does take over a swath of land, it essentially deletes that land’s potential to support Brooklyn’s native wildlife. Mugwort is actually medicinal to humans, and it does benefit wildlife in its native Europe that evolved with it, but when it hit these shores it started colonizing as much as the people did. It can clone itself through rhizomes and create monocultures. Large patches of Bush Terminal Park just feature mugwort, and it’s certainly trying to take over the places it hasn’t already laid claim to.

There are native plants that fight back! Some also have rhizomes — like milkweed and dogbane! But not all heroes need to clone themselves to survive in the urban wilds, and no plant looks cuter surviving here than daisy fleabane, Erigeron annuus, an annual or biennial that loves disturbed land. Bush Terminal, a former industrial site and trash heap built on infilled marshland, is as disturbed as it gets.

Just as you have definitely seen mugwort if you’ve gone to Bush Terminal, there’s a strong chance you have also seen daisy fleabane. It would be accurate for me to say that its flowers look like miniature daisies, but I would prefer to say that they look like button-sized eggs over easy. The yolk is actually a disk of tiny little florets, and the egg whites are ray florets. Each of these tiny flowers turns into a seed if pollinated. Daisy fleabane is in the Asteraceae family, along with daisies, sunflowers (and also mugwort).

The flowers, which must look like a perfect bull’s-eye to flying pollinators, are perched on top of erect one- to three-foot stems lined with narrow, lanceolate leaves on the upper portion of the plant. Leaves on the bottom portion are more squat. When the wind blows, the flowers dance like fairies. Maybe they are fairies — and scrappy ones at that.

Daisy fleabane does not require much water, or much of anything else, really. Where lots of plants wilt after a rainless week under the full summer sun, the yellow centers of its flowers look happy to shine back at the disk in the sky.

Because it seeds prolifically and because of its resilient nature, lots of daisy fleabane can pop up in lots of places. Far from being grateful that this plant graces us with its presence while requiring no effort on our part, many people consider it just a bane, and the internet is full of tips on how to get rid of it, which shows just how little sense humans make sometimes.

There are hundreds of types of fleabane across the globe, and almost half of them are native to North America. One would imagine that a plant called fleabane might compel other insects to exercise caution, but that is not the case. While people around the world used to gather fleabane and hang bouquets of it in their dwellings and even stuff it into their bedding, thinking it repelled fleas, science has not established that it has any flea-repelling properties.

Get close to any flower and you’ll see that it is quite appealing to insects. Each tiny flower is a gathering and resting place for many kinds of insects nourished by its nectar and pollen. It’s also a larval host for the lynx flower moth. In the winter, when the plants have completed their life cycle, birds feast on the seeds.

These kinds of pit stops are important in places overgrown with invasive species. See what kinds of bugs you find crawling on mugwort. The answer is probably none. And guess what? Mugwort is wind-pollinated and doesn’t need pollinators anyway.

On the other hand, many of our native plants reproduce by sharing nectar and pollen with all manner of creatures. Each flower looks and smells different to attract the different types of pollinators it needs to survive. Like humans, these plants rely on a community to survive. When you are in a community, you give and you receive, and you make sure there’s space for others, just like the daisy fleabane.