All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.
See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.
(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I thought I knew all the plants that would attack me in southern Illinois...then I headed off trail to find a good spot for a cathole and started to push through a shoulder-high thicket of these guys:
This proved to be a mistake, due to the hitherto-unnoticed-by-me spiky thorns all over their stems. I found another spot, so now I'm just left with small punctures & curiosity.
I was thinking maybe some kind of locust tree sapling but I think the leaf shape is wrong. I'm surprised no one has recognized it; it was all over the place. Then again if Beehaw is like most online communities most users are from the coasts rather than the midwest.
this seems like a prime use case for AI image recognition tools. There was some iphone app called leafsnap that does somthing like this... can you upload a picture and it finds likely candidates. Haven't used it in years, this was pre-chatGPT era
Oh and yeah... could be black locust. Not sure why I didn't tihnk of that, I have a billion of them in my yard