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Sand Knotweed

Polygonella articulata. (Formerly Polygonum articulatum.) Buckwheat Family. Erect; branching; four to twelve inches high. Leaves.--Linear; inconspicuous. Flowers.--Rose-color; nodding; in very slender racemes. Calyx.--Five-parted. Corolla.--None. Stamens.--Eight. Pistil.--One, with three styles. Under date of September 26th, Thoreau writes: "The Polygonum articulatum, giving a rosy tinge to Jenny's desert, is very interesting now, with its slender dense racemes of rose-tinted flowers, apparently without leaves, rising cleanly out of the sand. It looks warm and brave, a foot or more high, and mingled with deciduous blue curls. It is much divided, with many spreading, slender-racemed branches, with inconspicuous linear leaves, reminding me, both by its form and its colors, of a peach-orchard in blossom, especially when the sunlight falls on it; minute rose-tinted flowers that brave the frosts, and advance the summer into fall, warming with their color sandy hill-sides and deserts, like the glow of evening reflected on the sand, apparently all flower and no leaf. Rising apparently with clean bare stems from the sand, it spreads out into this graceful head of slender, rosy racemes, wisp-like. This little desert of less than an acre blushes with it."