Devils Beggarsticks (Bidens frondosa)
- Family: Aster (Asteraceae)
- Flowering: August-October.
- Field Marks: Bidens frondosa is one of the Bidens without ray flowers. It differs from other rayless species by its pinnately divided leaf segments and the 5-8 leafy bracts which subtend each flowering head.
- Habitat: Low woods, wet meadows, swamps, marshes, roadside ditches, along streams, around lakes and ponds, fields.
- Habit: Annual herbs with a taproot.
- Stems: Erect, smooth, up to 4 feet tall.
- Leaves: Opposite, pinnately divided into 3-7 segments, each segment up to 4 inches long, up to 2 inches wide, smooth.
- Flowers: Many crowded together into a head, tubular and forming a disk, without ray flowers present, each head subtended by 5-8 leafy, ciliate bracts.
- Sepals: 0.
- Petals: Yellow, united to form a tube, about 1/6 inch long.
- Stamens: 5.
- Pistils: Ovary inferior.
- Fruits: Achenes flat, tapering to a narrower base, dark brown to black, smooth or hairy, about 1/3 inch long, with a pair of barbed awns at the upper end.
- Notes: The fruits are eaten by ducks. Muskrats will eat the entire plant.
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