Suddenly, I’m seeing a lot of this weed in our yard:
Seek identifies it as Fourleaf Manyseed (Polycarpon tetraphyllum). (Interesting how close the common name is to the botanical one: “Carpon” is a “seed” or “fruit”, from Greek, so “Polycarpon” could be translated “many seed” and “tetraphyllum” just means “four leaves”.)
It does look pretty similar to some of these photos from Calflora so I will trust Seek this time.
I pulled out every single one I found. Some of those:
I hope the birds and other critters won’t miss eating the seeds too much.
Wikipedia says: “Polycarpon tetraphyllum is native to Southern Europe, Great Britain, the Mediterranean region, the middle east, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of tropical South America… Extracts of the plant shows a potential to protect from free radicals. Its capability as an antioxidant is however slightly lower than the one of Vitamin C. It furthermore showed antibiotic, antifungal and antiproliferative properties.”
This Go Botany page has some more details as does Jepson: the leaves are opposite and whorled, simple and entire (not compound, not toothed, etc.), etc.
(I release theses photos into the public domain. These works are marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)
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