• keywords: howtogrow Showy Tick Trefoil, alias Desmodium canadense
• seedsfrom: Ion Exchance
• location: Chicago, Illinois, USDA zone5

This is some showy tick trefoil in the back yard. Its doing a nice job of co-existing with a crowd of sawtooth sunflowers. Over the years its gotten stronger, taller (to 4 feet when tied to the fence) and produced many more flowers. Flowers seem to last the day and that's it but the flowers now keep coming for a while. Someone told me that his plants bloom for a month.

The first I knew of this plant was a small painting in a guidebook and it looked for all the world like a lupine but without the flowers so densely packed. Being soft on lupines I ordered showy tick trefoil when I found a source. But alas, it is not that neat. For the first few years the plants were short and the blooming unremarkable. I ripped them out in one location and left them in another. After a few more years the results got better as the photo shows. The seeds that form are "stick-tights", they have those hairs that enable them to stick to clothing, skin and what-not so expect to find them sticking to you (Velcro was engineering to work like these seeds.).