Leader for today's Ramble: Linda
Author of today’s Ramble report: Linda. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin@uga.edu.
Insect identifications: Dale Fungi identifications: Don
Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble. All the photos that appear in this report, unless otherwise credited, were taken by Don Hunter. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen.
Number of Ramblers today: 39. Three new ramblers joined us today: Donna, who has been a greeter for the Children’s Garden; Toby and Mark, who were recommended by Richard; and, Caroline, a UGA student. Welcome!
Today's emphasis: Seeking what we find in the Lower Shade Garden, the White Trail spur crossing the powerline prairie, and the first half of the Blue Trail.
Today's Route: We walked through the Lower Shade Garden, then crossed the road to reach the White Trail Spur and the prairie. We then entered the woods, and bore left onto the Blue Trail which we followed to a point above the Mimsie Lanier Center for Native Plants. We bushwhacked a short distance to reach the Center's service road and from there returned to the Children’s Garden.
Readings:
Don read Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti
Linda read an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s essay “Upstream”:
“I walked all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot…The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats; pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles…Little by little, I waded from the region of the coltsfoot to the spring beauties. From there to the trilliums. From there to the bloodroot. Then the dark ferns. Then the wild music of the waterthrush…I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.”
OBSERVATIONS:
As ramblers gathered, Don photographed some plants in the Children's Garden.
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| Purple Foxglove flower with splotchy red nectar guides |
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| Wild Indigo |
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| A bumblebee, its pollen baskets loaded with golden pollen, is visiting an Ohio Spiderwort flower.  |
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| Bishop’s Hat
or Red Barrenwort, a European member of the Barberry Family |
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| Golden Spikemoss photo by David J. Stang, Wikimedia Creative Commons |
Golden Spikemoss is sometimes called Peacock
Fern, but both names are misnomers: this plant is neither a moss nor a fern,
but a member of a different, ancient lineage that also reproduces by spores. It is native to western
Sub-Saharan Africa and islands off the coast of northwest Africa. Spikemosses
first appeared in the fossil record about 383 million years ago, approximately 250 million years before the arrival
of flowering and fruiting plants.
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| Sassafras sapling in the Shade Garden There are no mature Sassafras trees that we know of in the vicinity so this "planting" must be the result of long distance travel by birds or squirrels. |
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| Sassafras leaf shapes Photo by Metro Parks, Butler County, Ohio |
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| Tulip Tree flower with ant licking sugary nectar produced by nectar glands in the orange petal patches. Tulip Tree flowers are also visited by honey bees, native bees, and hummingbirds. |
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| Pale Yellow Trilliums are still in flower in the Shade Garden |
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| Sweet Shrub, yellow-flowered cultivar ‘Athens’ |
Once on the sunnier White Trail, we began to see some cool-season grasses in flower. Cool-season grasses flower in the spring after overwintering (in Georgia) as a rosette of leaves. Unlike the large, showy warm-season grasses that flower in late summer and fall, these species typically have smaller, more delicate flowers.
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| Yellow, twisted anthers and white, brushy stigmas of Needle Grass flowers |
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| Needle Grass seed with long twisted bristle at the top and short, downward-pointing bristles at the base |
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| Witch Grass overwinters as leafy stems then flowers in April and May |
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| Witch Grass flower cluster |
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| Close-up of Witch Grass flowers Don’s close-up photo of Deer Tongue’s flowers captured the brushy female stigmas and the oval, pollen-producing anther sacs, all emerging between the scale-like lemmas that enclose the ovary. |
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| Native Blue Grass species are small, cool-season grasses with tiny flowers. The anthers are lavender and the brush-like stigmas are transparent. |
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Small's Ragwort flower heads are beginning to open. Its leaves and stems are hairless except for patches of white fuzz at the base of each leaf. For ramblers who enjoy botanical esoterica, (and you know who you are, Avis) the white fuzz is officially known as "floccose tomentum." Three species of Ragwort bloom in succession in different habitats at the Garden each spring: Golden Ragwort in Dunson Garden, Butterweed in the floodplain, and Small's Ragwort in dry, sunny, upland areas.
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Bottlebrush Buckeye, planted along the edge of the powerline prairie many years ago, leafs out much later than Painted
Buckeye and Red Buckeye, which typically break bud in early March. Each of these
young leaves has five drooping leaflets that will eventually spread horizontally. At the bottom of the top photo, you can
just see some strangely shaped leaf-like structures; below is a close-up. These almost-but-not-quite-leaf-like structures stumped us, so I
consulted Ron Lance, author of “Woody Plants of the Southeast: a Winter Guide,”
and an expert horticulturist and botanist. Ron says these are an “oddly reduced
first set of leaves just out of the bud [with what] look like rudimentary leaflets
borne on a winged petiole that is kind of a transition between bud scale
and petiole. I have seen similar weird half-leaf/half-bud scales on Aesculus
indica [Indian Horse-chestnut] seedlings growing back after freeze damage,
but not with a full set of five little leaflets.” |
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| The bark of young Black Cherry trees, branches, and twigs is marked with horizontal lines of lenticels, patches of loose cells that permit the passage of carbon dioxide into the tree and oxygen out of the tree. These horizontal lines are still visible on the flaky bark of older trees. |
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Black Cherry leaves are pretty generic in appearance but can be
identified by the two tiny red glands at the base of the leaf blade or nearby on
the leaf stalk. |
Most nectar-producing glands are found deep inside flowers where they attract pollinators. When they occur outside the flower, on leaves or stems, they are called extrafloral nectaries and usually play a role in defending the plant from herbivores. Black Cherry extrafloral nectaries begin exuding nectar soon after the leaves emerge from the bud. The sugary nectar attracts ants (usually Western Thatching Ants, Formica obscuripes) who supplement their sugar-rich diet by eating tasty Eastern Tent Caterpillars which are just at that moment hatching from eggs laid the previous fall. Nectar production from the leaf glands peaks during the first three weeks after bud break, at the same time that the caterpillars are no more than twice the size of the ants, making them just the right size for an ant's dinner. Eastern Tent Caterpillars are the primary defoliators of Black Cherry trees, making ants important players in protecting the new leaves of this widespread species. Photos of Eastern Tent Caterpillar nests and ants are here.
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| Just off the trail, we saw a young Black Cherry tree infected with Black Knot, a fungal disease. Black Knot infects other cherry species, both native and non-native, as well as wild plums, and weakens and sometimes kills the trees. More info here. |
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| Perfoliate Bellwort with its three-sided fruit |
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| Green-and-Gold |
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| Smilax (aka Greenbrier) vines are famous for their tough, prickly stems carried aloft on the branches of trees. Most people aren’t aware that there are several species of herbaceous Smilax, with soft, spineless stems and delicate, pale yellow-green flowers. This newly emerged plant is probably Huger's Carrion-flower, Smilax hugeri, rising from a large tuber. We’ll return in the next few months to confirm that name as the plant puts out more leaves and reaches full height (as much as 15 feet if it’s Huger’s). The common name refers to the flowers which attract fly pollinators with a rotting-meat smell. |
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| Nearby, a stout, purple-striped Smilax stem, looking a whole lot like an asparagus spear, has recently emerged. This is one of the woody, high-climbing Smilax species. Tendrils and young leaves are just beginning to expand at the growing tip. |
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| Adder's
Tongue Fern Plant with both sterile and fertile leaves (left, Janie K. Marlow) Fertile leaf close-up (right, Don Hunter) |
Looking as un-fern-like as possible, Adder’s Tongue Fern is always a treat to see but is easily overlooked or mistaken for a seedling of a lily or orchid. Unlike most ferns, its small, fleshy leaves are not divided into leaflets nor do they bear spores on their lower surfaces. An Adder’s Tongue plant bears only two leaves: a smooth, oval, fleshy sterile leaf up to 3 inches long, and a narrow, pointed fertile leaf with two rows of spore-producing sporangia. The fertile leaf with its pointed tip – somebody’s idea of a snake’s tongue – arises on the stem near the base of the sterile leaf. Each plant has up to 20 roots that spread and proliferate, forming clonal patches. This species is fairly common in north and central Georgia but is easy to miss; look for it in the spring when the presence of the fertile leaf makes it somewhat more conspicuous. It likes successional woods, bottomlands, and grassy openings at the edges of thickets.
We bushwhacked downhill from the Blue Trail to the Mimsie Lanier Center for Native Plants where we found lots of plants in flower.....
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| Georgia Rockcress |
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American
Wisteria |
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| Gray Rosemary, a member of the Mint Family, is native to longleaf pine sandhills and coastal dunes in Florida and Alabama (but not Georgia). |
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| Southern
Beardtongue, so called because of the hairy, yellow “tongue” that projects from the throat of the flower. The tongue is actually a highly modified stamen, now functioning
to brush pollen off the bodies of visiting bees. The remaining four stamens
(white stalks with purple pollen sacs at the tips) curve inside the upper surface of the flower
tube. The conspicuous purple stripes are nectar guides that guide pollinators
to the nectaries deep within the flower. [Remember, you can tap on your screen or double-click to enlarge a photo] |
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| A close-up view of Southern Beard-tongue buds reveals the dense glandular hairs that cover the flowers, leaves, and stems of this species. |
On our way back to the Visitor Center along the Mimsie Lanier Center service road, we saw some of the species in the “second wave” of spring wildflowers...
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| Cut-leaf Evening Primrose |
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| Florida Betony |
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| Opposite-leaf Dwarf-dandelion |
Purple Foxglove Digitalis purpurea
Wild Indigo Baptisia sp.
Bishop’s Hat/Red Barrenwort Epimedium alpinum X E. grandiflorum
Golden Spikemoss Selaginella braunii synonym Lycopodioides braunii
Sassafras Sassafras albidum
Tulip Tree, Tulip Poplar Liriodendron tulipifera
Ohio Spiderwort Tradescantia ohiensis
Daddy Longlegs Family Opiliones
Pale Yellow Trillium Trillium discolor
Sweet Shrub ‘Athens’ Calycanthus floridus cv. ‘Athens’
Needle Grass Piptochaetium avenaceum
Small’s Ragwort Packera anonyma
Bottlebrush Buckeye Aesculus parviflora
Large-seeded Forget-Me-Not Myosotis macrosperma
Black Cherry Prunus serotina
Funnel-web Spider Family Dipluridae
Deer Tongue Witch Grass Dichanthelium clandestinum
Perfoliate Bellwort Uvularia perfoliata
Bloodroot Sanguinaria canadensis
Chattahoochee Trillium Trillium decipiens
Poa grass Poa annua
Huger's Carrion-flower Smilax hugeri
Wild Onion Allium sp.
Green-and-Gold Chrysogonum virginianum
Hickory (sprouts) Carya sp.
Christmas Fern Polystichum acrostichoides
Smilax (shoot/sprout) Smilax sp.
Black Knot fungus Apiosporina morbosa
Eastern Red Cedar Juniperus virginiana
Loblolly Pine Pinus taeda
Adder’s Tongue Fern Ophioglossum pycnostichum synonym: Ophioglossum vulgatum var. pycnostichum
Cutleaf Evening Primrose Oenothera laciniata
Florida Betony Stachys floridana
Georgia Rockcress Arabis georgiana
American Wisteria Wisteria frutescens
Gray Rosemary Conradina canescens
Mouse-eared/Lobed Tickseed Coreopsis auriculata
Southern Beardtongue Penstemon australis
Witch Grass Dichanthelium sp.
Opposite-leaf Dwarf-dandelion, Weedy Dwarf Dandelion Krigia caespitosa
