Hawkweeds

I took a quick walk into the wooded area near my office's parking lot before commuting home tonight.  I debated snapping some shots of the pine trees but decided I should save those for later this fall when the other plants drop their leaves.  Looking down, I spied some small plants with yellow flowers:

The flowers were small, less than half an inch wide.  I noticed a few of the flowers had lost their petals, and all that remained were small poofy seeds similar to those you would see on a dandelion.  I grabbed a leaf from the base of one of the plants and headed out.

Once home I took an older Peterson's field guide that I inherited a few years ago down from my bookshelf :

I haven't spent much time with this book before, and looking at its title page I realized that it was  illustrated by Roger Tory Peterson, founder of Peterson's field guides - cool stuff!  This 1968 version of the guide arranges the flowers by color, making it very easy to use by a know-nothing like me.  I flipped to the "yellow" section, which begins with color illustrations.  After many pages of pretty yellow flowers, the illustrations turn to black and white sketches.  On the page "Small Dandelionlike Flowers: Hawkweeds" I found what appeared to be most similar to the plant I saw today:

The hawkweeds, genus Hieracium, belong to the composite, or daisy, family, the largest family of flowering plants.  Per Peterson, "the flower heads are clusters of many small flowers growing together (hence, composite)".   The hawkweed's composite blossom consists of flat, strap-shaped florets (called rays) that have 3 to 5 teeth at their tips:

The individual hawkweed species are set apart from one another based upon leaf shape and color, locations of fine hairs on the plants, number of blossoms per plant, and whether their leaves climb the stem or are primarily about the plants base (basal).   This plant had leaves "mainly in the basal rosette", indicating that this hawkweed was likely an "alien" species.  I observed a single blossom per plant.  The leaves were slender, slightly-toothed, and had hairs on both their top and underside:

Not seeing an exact match in my guide, I turned to the "hawkweed" entry on Wikipedia for reinforcement.  I clicked on several of the linked species within Wikipedia's extensive list but wasn't able to find one with slightly toothy leaves.  Wikipedia explained why classification to the species level may not be possible, as over 9,000 have been named!  In addition, there is "a lot of geographical variation" amongst individual species due in part to the plant's asexual seed production, resulting in hundreds of subspecies for each type.  So I guess that's a wrap for the evening.  This ID wasn't a total bust though, as it helped me learn a lot about flowers, their classification, and my Peterson's wildflower guide.



To sum up:

Plant, animal, mineral:  Plant
Name:  Hawkweed, genus Hieracium
Location:  42.453101, -71.234967
Sources:  A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America [2nd Edition], Wikipedia