Discuss plant id's here!! PHOTOS and Comments Welcome

[Bee Happy]

ok the leaves... (the flowers are about 1/4" for scale)

and the tree from a few feet away

[AllenF]

Looks like   Ilex vomitoria.     Commonly called Yaupon Holly, Yaupon, or Cassina.   People used to make tea out of it.   

[Bee Happy]

...we do have puke plants around here; that's a possibility that didnt occur to me.

[AllenF]

So you have heard of the black drink?

[Bee Happy]

I haven't heard it called that, I did hear somewhere that that the local natives used a tea from it to treat certain ailments.
I can't figure what they'd treat by  inducing vomiting - it would mean that someone ate something worse than puke tea to start with.

[AllenF]

Native Americans used the leaves and stems to brew a tea called asi or black drink for male-only purification and unity rituals. The ceremony included vomiting, and Europeans incorrectly believed that it was the drink itself that caused it (hence the Latin name). The active ingredient is actually caffeine, and the vomiting was either learned or as a result of the great quantities in which they drank the beverage coupled with fasting.

I made the tea once in college.   I used sugar to sweeten it like today's sweet tea.  It was ok.  The bush I had got cut down a couple of years ago.

[Shawn]

Here is a straight stem flower with red flowers clustered at the end. Sorry for no real good pictures. The area where it is planted is the "area of the nuknown." I get packets of seeds in from different places and sow them in this area. Does anyone know what the flower is

[AllenF]

The red flowers are Sweet William.

[Bamabww]

A local bee keeper told me that the purple bloom variety of soybeans is a good plant for honey production in our area (north Alabama). He said to avoid the white bloom variety.

Neither my county agent or local Farmer's Exchange Co-Op have been able to identify a purple bloom variety.  I've Goggled and can find a picture of not a name.

Anyone familiar with a purple bloom soybean that the bees can use early on and the deer can graze later?

[BlueBee]

Bama, there’s millions of purple flowered soy beans grown here in Michigan.  Since there isn’t a weed to be seen in the fields, I would assume the purple ones the farmers plant here are GM soybeans (Roundup ready soybeans).  I rarely see any bees on them here though.  I’ve been told there are numerous cultivars of soy beans and that bees love some and hate others.  The soybeans grown down your way are probably different than the ones grown way up here, but I really don’t know.

Good question.