Can you help me identify this plant?
This plant came up in my flower bed, and since I consider (most) volunteer plants as gifts, I let it grow. It is now about 3' tall and 3' wide. By the shape of the leaves I thought at first it was a redbud tree, since I have several in the yard, but the branches are red, soft and mostly hollow not woody. I tried to look it up in my reference books and the closest description I found was for belladonna, but could find no reference as to why lower leaves are a different shape, like fig leaves (picture 2)
I take in a lot of "orphan" plants, so get a lot of stray volunteers and seeds in the pots. I'm sure with the vast knowledge on Grow, someone can help me decide what this is, and whether I need to keep it or dispose of it.
Comments
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The top picture looks a lot like my young volunteer cottonwood trees.
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The plant in the top photo resembles Japanese knotweed, which I would NOT recommend adopting! It is very aggressive and hard to eradicate once it gets established. It can get 5-8 feet tall and has subtle white sprays of small flowers at the top in late summer. HOWEVER, I don't recall ever seeing leaves like the ones in the second photo on the Knotweed, so maybe you have something different there. I am following this thread!
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I took a picture of something like that and ran it through inaturalist app and it had no clue either. I have been looking for this same plants identity as well.
Atleast I think that's the same thing that you have.
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Amazing that the young leaves are so much different from the more developed plant. Never would have thought from looking at the two pictures that they were from the same plant.
You are way out of my zone so nothing like that growing in my area. However, it does look somewhat familiar. I have lived in other climate zones before so it might be rattling a distant memory.
Definitely not belladonna.
It will be interesting to see if it flowers. Hope someone can identify it for you.
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It is strange that the top leaves are so different than the bottom leaves. Are the stems woody? I can tell that it isn't a cottonwood, the top leaves look more plumb but the bottom leaves are really stumping me.
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Stems are not woody like a tree seedling would be - they are somewhat hollow, fibrous and soft, red on the outside, cream on the inside.
I have a couple trees that develop different leaves as they mature (mulberry and sassafras), but these are different in a couple ways - besides shape, leaves are larger than the other leaves, and they emerge singly or in pairs from a cleft where branches of other leaves diverge, and not from a branch itself. Will be interesting to see if and what flowers look like.
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This looks just like the one in your first picture: Be sure and open the link to see the stems and the off set leaf veins
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The second picture looks like a Sassafras seedling. I did an image search and came up with these :https://duckduckgo.com/?t=avast&q=sassafras+seedling&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.shopify.com%2Fs%2Ffiles%2F1%2F0246%2F5021%2Fproducts%2FKGrHqJ_r_FGT-tibZUBRuS5FI_9_60_1_grande.jpeg%3Fv%3D1471056680 So I think you have a Sassafras seedling. An easy way to tell is to break a stem and smell it, you should get a whiff of root beer. The smell isn't as strong in the stems as it is in the roots, but you usually can get a slight odor.
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@Jeanne Spears another pic of the same one I just posted:
If this is it, it is a beautirul tree, as shown in this last link scroll down and enjoy it in its beauty...
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@VickiP I have a lot of sassafras and ruled that out as this plant does not have the woody stem of a tree seedling.
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@silvertipgrizz I think your pics are very close to this as far as main leaves and stem color, but there is still the anomaly of the fig-leaf shaped secondary leaves. Not real sure how something native to New Zealand would have ended up in my flower bed in northern Indiana, but this will bear watching to see if it blooms. As a precaution though I'm going to move it to a more remote location before it gets any bigger.
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Wow, the second pic leaves really do look figgy. I will be interested to see what it reveals itself to be.
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@Jeanne Spears When you uproot to move it, see if there are any attachments to the figgy leaf looking plant...perhaps they are just two diff plants just growing too close together?
Keep us updated..
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My closest guess would be the knotweed. If the stems start to look like bamboo then that's what it is.
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@silvertipgrizz The fig shape leaves are emerging from the same stems as the other leaves, so it is all one plant. I'm going to move it to a back corner as soon as we get a couple days of rain - right now we're too hot.
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