Native. Annual. Propagated by seeds.

Time of bloom: July to October.

Seed-time: August to November.

Range: Ontario and Ohio to Minnesota and Nebraska, southward to Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Habitat: Fields, roadsides, and waste places.

A vile weed, which is gaining ground in the Eastern States, being established in several places where it was brought in western hay, of which the refuse was spread on the fields.

Stem six to eighteen inches tall, erect, smooth, dotted with pellucid glands, much branched, and very leafy. Leaves but an inch or two long, opposite, sessile, pinnately divided into narrow, spatulate, toothed segments, and also dotted with glands which exhale an offensive, fetid odor. Heads numerous, terminal, on short peduncles, dull yellow, but little more than a quarter-inch broad; disk florets perfect and fertile; rays few and short, pistillate; involucre formed of one row of oblong, purplish bracts, united into a cup, with a few short, loose, and spreading ones at the base. Achenes dark, wedge-shaped, covered with fine, upward-pointing bristles; the pappus is a ring of stiff, bristly hairs. (Fig. 337.)

Fig. 337.-Fetid Marigold (Dyssodia papposa). X 1/4.

Means Of Control

Small areas newly infested should be pulled while in earliest flower, allowing no seed to develop. Ground on which plants have matured should be burned over, in order to destroy the seed on the surface.