Variable Milfoil

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I found this tiny 'fragment' of VLM on my beach, looking like it had been freshly washed up. I slowly pulled it out, to reveal an established plant, well rooted!

 

Look at how long the thin white roots can be, spreading down from the coil of viney-looking stem at the top of the next picture:

It's amazing how tall these plants can grow. I placed this dried piece next to my rake for comparison. It begins at the acorn cap in the bottom of the pic, all the way up to the plastic attachment of the rake. They can create an impenetrable jungle in deeper water.


When they're all dried out, they remind me of shed snakeskins!


The flowering bract of our invasive variable milfoil in Lake Arrowhead is not often seen. The summer of 2021, however, was a bumper year for it and the flowers that wash up are actually arranged in quite a lovely spire. Those green "leaves" are bracts that act as a base for the teeny flowers to sit in around the stem. The real leaves are feather-like and thin.



This plant is tenacious, resilient, super-adaptive and versatile, with some good-looking parts too. Kudos, variable milfoil, you are a very successful plant - ... but just look - this is the floating mass of sheared off plants we retrieved in the small area of our beach after a weekend of boating! It's about 90% milfoil.