Since the first two shots are not plants I am likely to be wrong but... It looks like the bacterial growth called Crown Gall. Sandy

When someone says "that smarts", they mean "that hurts". So "smarting on the skin" means it causes pain on your skin. Herb Robert grows wild here in Oklahoma along water ways, lakes or ponds and ditches, but any moist place. I can testify that it spreads rampantly, by roots, seeds, little pieces of the stems that drop on the ground and root, and God only knows how it gets from one side of the yard to the other, but it does. Pulling it out does not get rid of it because it produces a massive root system of tiny fibrous roots. When you pull out the plant, part of those roots remain in the ground and regrows a whole plant. It only takes one tiny piece of root to regrow an new plant. It is EXTREMELY invasive and very difficult to eradicate! I too introduced pretty Pink Knotweed or Smartweed to my garden about 8 years ago. I planted it near my fish pond on the north side of my house. It was indeed beautiful there, but it didn't stop there. It went down into my pond! It jumped across the lawn to the area against the house under the water faucet and then around the AC condenser unit where it stays moist. From there, it moved to the back yard area by the patio and all around the edge of the patio. This year I found it over in the Potager and nearly every flowerbed and veggie bed in my one-acre garden. It is everywhere now. It loves any kind of soil, but really goes to town where it is wet. I cannot imagine how bad it would be in my garden if I had soil that held moisture year round and we didn't have severe winters to kill it back. ~Annie

Susan, I love zinnias and have grown them every year for as long as I can remember....dating back to early childhood. My dad always planted them in our flowerbed when I was a kid, and it was my job to deadhead them. My first flowerbed at this house, which I actually built in the future back yard in the spring of 1998 (six months before the builder started building the house) had zinnias and hollyhocks in it. I love Whirligig. When you plant it, you never know what you're going to get. I have planted some of the newer hybrids like the Profusion, Magellan and Zahara series, but prefer the old OP varieties because the butterflies seem to like them more. This year I grew Lilliput as a border plant around the raised beds of tomatoes and now have volunteers everywhere because I wasn't deadheading them regularly in the July and August heat. My all-tie favorites are the cactus-flowered types and Benary's Giants, and the green zinnias like Envy. I deliberately let all my zinnias reseed at the end of the season and it is fascinating what kind of flowers you get year after year from the flowers cross-pollinating one another. Sometimes I get bi-colored blooms which is always pretty cool to see. Out in the front pasture some spring-blooming wildflowers like Indian Blanket and Pink Evening Primrose are blooming. They have come out of heat- and drought-induced summer dormancy and burst into bloom just as they normally would burst into bloom in spring after winter dormancy. It is sort of bizarre, but we have some of that after every extreme summer drought. Tracey, I've never seen moonvine with the same kind of trilobed foliage as your mystery vine. I'm not saying it never could happen, but it would be more normal for a vine with that foliage to be I. nil or something else. Moonflower vine has heart-shaped leaves. When you have different vines mixed together on a fence or trellis sometimes it is hard to tell which flowers go with which leaves. There is something about your trilobed foliage that looks very familiar but I can't remember what I've grown with leaves that look just like that. To me, morning glory and moonvine flowers are more spectacular in fall than in summer. The summer heat can fade the color some, but once fall's cooler temperatures arrive, the colors become much more vivid, and that includes the white of the moonflowers---it is just a dazzling white in cooler temperatures. Even the green of the foliage looks so much better once the heat has diminished somewhat. I've noticed the butterflies visit the fall vining bloomers nonstop all day long in my garden. You'll also notice as the weather cools that both moonvine and morning glory flowers stay open more hours per day. Susan, I agree with you on the misuse/abuse of animals, including the pinning of butterflies and the operation of puppy mills too. Dawn

Actually, Dswan, I kill wildlife fairly often. Only in the appropriate season and only what I eat...and I don't feel bad at all about it. But I can sympathize about the snake...or any other critter that gets killed for no good reason at all. I've sadly run into enough boneheads over the years (and many aren't hillbillys...not sure if we technically can legally call them "hillbillys" in Canada...it may be like "champagne" is only rightfully applied to certain wines produced in the appropriate districts in France..perhaps we can call them "sub-alpine oriented peoples" ) who seem to feel that the only appropriate response to any critter on their property is extermination. I have a skunk that lives under my front verandah...not so much lives but loiters. In the several years that it's been resident, I've smelled it only once, and my olfactory abilities are finely honed. I've enjoyed watching the old girl raise litter after litter of handsome young skunks. A visiting relative was shocked by my entire family's nonchalance over the skunks. I told him that we learned to accept them and their odd habits, in much the same way my family came to accept him. Still, on his own little slice of rural bliss, he routinely dispatches any and all skunks, coons, and squirrels as they are "vermin". I find this appalling. What's worse is that he is an extremely civilized, well read and thoughtful individual...and unless Manchester, UK qualifies as part of Appalachia, I'm doubting his hillbilliness. Every day I hear complaints about Canada geese, cormorants, and sundry other birds and mammals. More and more, these complaints are coming from retirees and yuppies, refugees from the urban sprawl of Toronto or Ottawa. I hear comments about control and culling, and how the environment is "out of whack" Personally I'd like to see the exposion of these minivan driving Homo sapiens brought under some sort of control..they've taken to building their large bulky homes in every corner of our once proudly rural township...they clutter our roads and insist on trying to recreate the exact situations they left behind...if anyone has any suggestions I'm open.