Native. Annual. Propagates by seeds.

Time of bloom: July to September.

Seed-time: September to November.

Range: Newfoundland to the Saskatchewan, southward to the states bordering on the Great Lakes. Habitat: Low meadows, sides of streams and ditches, roadsides, and waste places.

Although this plant loves moisture and is a common weed of flooded ground, it can adapt itself to very different conditions; the writer found the specimen from which this description is written thriving in the dry ground of a vacant city lot. (Fig. 310.)

Stem two to six inches tall, with many branches, the lower ones spreading on the ground, making it much broader than its height. The plant is covered all over, stems and leaves, with close-pressed, white wool. Leaves sessile, spatulate to lance-shaped, narrow, pointed, and but one or two inches long. Flower-heads white, very small, in close-packed terminal clusters surrounded by leafy, white-woolly bracts. Involucral scales oblong, the outer ones bluntly rounded and woolly, the inner rows acute, dry and scarious, yellowish white. Its very low, spreading habit of growth and dense white-woolliness would make it a pretty border plant in the flower garden if its ambitions in regard to bloom and fruitage were kept nipped in the bud.

FiG. 310. - Low Cudweed (Gnaphalium uliginosum). X 1/4.

Means Of Control

Hoe-cutting or hand-pulling while in early bloom, making certain that no seed has developed.