Bad Beauty & The Butterfly
(Talk of the Town photo copyright Jennifer Zartman Romano)
A silver spotted slipper perches on a beautiful-but-bad purple loosestrife. The plant is in bloom now along the shorelines of local lakes, creating an ideal time to find and make note of it for removal early next summer. But be careful -- an mature adult plant can disperse thousands of hardy, difficult to destroy seeds.
The aggressive, non-native plant species arrived in the Americas aboard ships in the 1800s and has since found its way to every state. The plant chokes out native species along shorelines and degrades wetland areas.