Since the autumn of 1991, I estimate that I have submitted at least 860 of these articles. The great majority of them have been printed in the paper you are now reading. And, I think that I have submitted very few on subjects well known to each and every one of you.

Today, however, I have one that should be known to all of you and to all of your relatives who have lived their lives in the North Temperate Zone. Along the La Crosse River Trail — or anywhere around the world in our climate zone.

It is a plant, and I’ll bet that fewer than 1 per cent of you know its name! (I didn’t either, until I looked it up.) Yet, every one of us probably walks past at least one specimen of it every day during “shirt sleeve” weather! We do it without noticing that it’s there. We’d likely notice it more if it was gone!

To a professional botanist this one is known as Polygonum aviculare. Polygonum means “many knees,” while “aviculare” may be rendered as “choice of the birds”

Common folk around the world have given it a lot of names involving objects and figures that are familiar to a neighborhood. Wire-weed, stone-weed, beggar-weed, goose-grass, swine-grass, door-grass and bird-grass are a few of the homemade names. There are more — probably many more.

Actually, this is a small reclining plant that trails along the ground. Its branches and the growing tip of each plant stand erect to the usual height of around 4 inches. All the stems have conspicuous joints at intervals from a quarter inch to about an inch apart. Leaves and branches arise from these joints which have come to be called “knots”, hence the common name “knotweed” for this species and its relatives.

The little flowers of this plant arise from those same joints to produce their three sided seeds in quantities sufficient to ensure a healthy reproduction of our bird-grass.

Wherever it grows, this little plant is well known for covering those difficult spots from which the grass is all too often worn away. Let somebody create a foot path that is used regularly enough to eradicate the grass, and, if there is enough light, our bird-grass will soon appear. The plentiful supply of seeds seems ready to grow on any bare spot that receives enough sunlight to germinate the seeds.

Though, during my youth, no one that I knew had a name for this small knotweed, everybody was familiar with its existence. It grew somewhere in every rural dooryard and in the approaches to every barn I ever knew. It also appeared, just as contentedly, in odd corners of the villages — and, I’d bet, the cities of our area, too. If that condition no longer exists, it has to be due to the use of weed killers.

If I’d find that this innocuous little weed had been eradicated anywhere, I’d feel all the poorer for it. For those who might not have it are missing a harmless — if useless — little curiosity that might even be called a part of our heritage.

Who ever said that everything we have or know must be valuable, anyway? Here. Along the trail.