June 20, 2013, Ramble Report

The reading this week was provided by Carol Nourse and is from The Garden, by Freeman Patterson, p. 100:

If it weren't for fungi the planet would soon cease to function, probably within minutes.  Like many other fungi, Amanita mushrooms are important to the collective health of the forest, though I've also found and photographed them in open areas, where other species also live and do their work, often in gardens. For example, the delicious Agaricus, often called the "meadow mushroom," is common wherever there is decomposing manure of farm animals.

…………..

The visible part of mushrooms, those weird constructions I love to photograph, are the reproductive organs. However, the daily work of most species is carried out by mycelia: fine, fibrous, root-like hairs that invade dead wood and other material, causing it to decay. Then bacteria take over and complete the process of making it part of the soil again. One day it occurred to me that we all garden with fungi and bacteria to a greater extent than we do with shrubs and herbs and grasses.

The route:  We went through the Shade Garden and on to the white trail.  Just past the Power Line Right of Way we took the Green Trail, then continued to the right on the White Trail to a large group of Chanterelle Mushrooms. Then we returned the same way we came.

Our first stop was under the Power Line on the White Trail.  Gary identified the white button mushrooms as Puffballs. He told us they should be eaten when the inside is white, before it becomes yellow. They must be cooked to get rid of dangerous alkaloids before eating.

Under the power line we also found a False Caesar’s Mushroom (Thank you Sandra for working with the mushroom guide and finding some of these names) (Amanita parcivolvata).  As we rambled along, we found many more mushrooms than we could name. We only managed to identify about five. We found many individuals of Black footed Marasmius (Marasmiellus nigripes), a really interesting small, white mushroom growing on a twig (and eventually found growing on the trunk of a tree) that had dark thread-like projections emerging from the wood below the mushroom itself. There were so many interesting mushrooms to see that we were hardly moving on the Green Trail. We wanted everyone to see the Chanterelles, we decided to move on to where they were growing and then come back along the Green Tail at a leisurely pace. Gary said the Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) were excellent eating. There were quite a number of them at this site. We turned around and started back.

The first stop on the way back was for a mushroom that looked like a Chanterelle, but was growing on wood and not on the ground. Gary noted that this one was poisonous. I could not find latin name of the poisonous Chanterelle-looking mushroom.  But we did find the name (Thank you Sandra) for the red mushroom bursting out of a white covering, American Caesar’s Mushroom (Amanita caesarea). One of the slime molds and a coral mushroom were seen along the Green Trail on the return.

In addition to mushrooms we noted several rattlesnake ferns (Botrychium virginianum), partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) not blooming, and pipsissiwa (Chimaphila maculata). We also identified several trees:  Southern Red Oak (Quercus falcata), Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea), mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa), pignut hickory (Carya glabra), shagbark hickory (Carya ovate), and a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).

Don Hunter found our last mushroom off the trail:  Silver Ear Fungus or White Jelly Mushroom (Tremella fuciformis). Gary said that Jelly mushrooms were edible.

As we walked by the old flower garden we saw wild petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis). 

Returning to the Arbor, we dispersed with many retiring to Donderos for coffee and snacks. This was a very pleasant day with eye-catching mushrooms even if we could not identify most of them.

Hugh

June 13, 2013, Ramble Report

Today’s reading was from Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 1956. This short piece was originally written for Women’s Day magazine. Ms. Carson intended to expand it later, but died before this could be done. A short paragraph follows (Roger was her grand-nephew):

When Roger has visited me in Maine and we have walked in these woods I have made no conscious effort to name plants or animals nor to explain to him, but have just expressed my own pleasure in what we see, calling his attention to this or that but only as I would share discoveries with an older person. Later I have been amazed at the way names stick in his mind, for when I show color slides of my woods plants it is Roger who can identify them. "Oh, that's what Rachel likes -that's bunchberry!" Or, "That's Jumer [juniper} but you can't eat those green berries-they are for the squirrels." I am sure no amount of drill would have implanted the names so firmly as just going through the woods in the spirit of two friends on an expedition of exciting discovery.

Today’s Route (mostly in the shade due to the hot weather):

From the Arbor we went past the Dunson Native Plant Garden and then on to the White Trail to the gate; left at the gate on the old service road, past the Torreya project, then onto the Blue trail back to the White trail.

Stuff we saw or talked about:

On the way down the switchbacks to the Dunson Garden we paused to look at the galls on the Witch Hazels (we examined these on May 16; see the Ramble Report).

The Black Cohosh was still blooming even though the inflorescence had fallen over (see this Ramble Report for more on Black Cohosh).

On the White trail we stopped where an American Beech and a Hophornbeam stand side-by-side, making comparison of the leaves easy. The branch of this Beech is low and exposed to more sun than is usual and its leaves are not typical of the Beech leaves we normally observe. Because of the increased sun exposure they are thicker, darker and feel tougher. They are “sun” leaves. This is typical for many trees – the leaves we see low to the ground are usually shade leaves – thin, wider and larger than the leaves in the canopy. The sun leaf thickness is due to an extra layer of photosynthetic tissue that develops when a leaf is exposed to high levels of light.

Another thing we noticed was an absence of fruit on the Hophornbeam. Last year at this time we saw lots of the hop-like clusters of maturing seeds on these trees. Many of the canopy species exhibit a pattern of fruit production called masting. (Mast is the collective name for the fruits of all tree species in an area. The amount of mast varies considerably from year to year and the mystery is that many trees over large areas synchronize their mast production. Such years of heavy seed production are called mast years. We usually think of the masting habit in terms of the canopy species like oak, chestnut, or beech. But some of the subcanopy species, like Hophornbeam also have the masting habit. This year is not a mast year for the Hophornbeam.)

We puzzled over some saplings with compound leaves that I at first thought were alternate (they were not). When we realized that it had opposite, compound leaves we decided it must be an Ash, probably a Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica).

Along the way we noticed a few flowers: Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron strigosum), Spiderwort (Tradescantia sp.), Deptford Pink (Dianthus armeria), Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) and Wild Petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis).

We also noticed a lot of fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) nests that I can’t resist poking into. There is a reason behind my madness. Fire ants frequently produce their reproductive castes (future queens and males) in the spring or early summer and these are released from the nest soon after a rain. Not many people have seen winged reproductive ants and I’m eager to show them to everyone, but no luck today. After their mating flight the inseminated queens separately fly off to a hopefully suitable site, land and discard their wings. Each solitary queen then begins, by herself, to dig a nest. She doesn’t feed, living off the energy she gets from metabolizing her now useless flight muscles. If she’s lucky she will live long enough for her first brood of workers to emerge and start to forage for food. Then she will attend to her only function – laying eggs. I’ll tell you more about fire ants on later rambles.

Finally we entered the woods and escaped the sun. It must have been 10 degrees cooler, but just as humid. (The coolness is not only due to the shade but the evaporation of water from the tree leaves. It takes energy to turn water from a liquid to a vapor and that loss of energy lowers the temperature considerably. It’s natures air conditioning!)

Nothing was seen blooming as we walked through the woods, so we paid attention to the trees and looked for other things. We did manage to find a few mushrooms (fewer than I would have expected, given all the recent rain.) One was a pretty white one about 6 inches high and still fresh. It had the remains of a structure called the veil on the stem below the cap. Some mushrooms with veils are poisonous. Unfortunately, other poisonous mushrooms lack a veil and some with veils are edible. Lacking expert guidance, it’s probably better to not experiment.

You should think of a mushroom as a single flower of a perennial plant whose body is hidden from your sight. This “body” is a complex network of extremely fine threads, called a mycelium, that ramifies and permeates the soil around the visible mushroom, sometimes for many hundreds of feet or more. In some cases it sets up a mutualistic relationship with the roots of trees or other plants, giving its plant host mineral nutrients in return for sugars. Such mushrooms are called mycorrhizal, which literally means “mushroom root.” In other cases the mushroom secretes digestive enzymes into the soil and absorbs nutrients that are released. These are called saprotrophic fungi, meaning that they feed on dead or rotting organic material.

We slipped past the Florida Torreya (Torreya taxifolia) protection plantings, noting only that they don’t seem to be thriving. Then it was back via the Blue trail to Donderos’ (for those who could stay) to enjoy cookies and beverages.

Dale

June 6, 2013, Ramble Report

Today, we guessed correctly that the 30 percent chance of rain wouldn't occur before we finished our walk.  To avoid mud because of the heavy rain last night we went through the International Garden, the Physic Garden, Heritage Garden, and Flower Garden to the short cut trail to the Orange Trail.  Then we went up the Orange trail to its end at the upper parking lot.  We also took a short side trip along the white trail before going to Donderos’ for refreshment.

Hugh provided a reading from Janisse Ray’s The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  I think most were a little non-plussed.  It wasn't what they expected:

"A junkyard is a wilderness.  Both are devotees of decay.  The nature of both is random order, the odd occurrence and juxtaposition of miscellany, backed by a semblance of method.  Walk through a junkyard  and you will see some of the schemes a wilderness takes--Fords to one section, Dodges in another, or older models farthest from the house--so a brief logic of ecology can be found.

"In the same way, an ecosystem makes sense:  the canebrakes, the cypress domes.  Pine trees regenerate in an indeterminate fashion, randomly here and there where seeds have fallen, but also with some predictability.  Sunlight and moisture must be sufficient for germination, as where a fallen tree has made a hole in the canopy, after a rain.  This, too, is order.

"Without fail in a junkyard you encounter the unexpected -- a doll's head, bodiless; a bike with no handlebars; a cache of wheat pennies; thirty feet of copper pipe; a boxy '58 Edsel.  Likewise, in the middle of Tate's Hell Swamp you might look unexpectedly into the brown eyes of a barred owl ten feet away or come upon a purple stretch of carnivorous bladderworts in bloom, their BB-sized bladders full of aquatic microorganisms.

"In junkyard as in wilderness there is danger:  shards of glass, leaning jacks, weak chains; or rattlesnakes, avalanches, polar bears.  In one as in the other you expect the creativity of the random, how the twisted metal protrudes like limbs, the cars dumped at acute, right and obtuse angles, how the driveways are creeks and rivers.'"

Our theme for today was ferns, since most forest plants have finished flowering and the meadows have not quite started yet.  Bracken ferns in the International Garden were our first stop.   

First we reviewed the different parts of a fern:  The frond is made up of a blade (the “leafy” part) and a stipe (the stem that holds up the blade.)  The blade has a rachis (the main vein) and is usually subdivided into smaller pinnae (singular: pinna) that are each attached to the rachis by a vein.Sometimes the pinnae are themselves subdivided, partially or completely, into pinnules that are attached to the midvein of each pinna.

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) is deciduous (meaning the fronds do not persist through winter) and occurs in almost every county in Georgia.

In the Endangered Plant Garden we found New York Fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis) has a blade whose pinnae are shorter at both ends than they are in the middle.  The Botanical Society taught me that people in Manhattan are so busy that they burn their candle at both ends – an easy way to remember New York Fern.  New York Fern is deciduous.

In the Indian Garden there were two ferns of interest: The first is probably the most common fern in the Garden -- Christmas Fern (Polystichum acrostichoides). It has sori (spore producing structures) on the undersurface of the pinnae at the ends of some fronds (these are called fertile fronds). Each of the pinnae are shaped like a Christmas stocking with the toe toward the rachis. Christmas Fern is also quite common in the mountains and piedmont of Georgia but less so in the coastal plain.  We see it all year as it is evergreen (not deciduous). 

The second was Royal Fern.  Fertile pinnae are absent at this time of year.  The fronds look more like a locust tree than a fern.  Usually found in wet, acid soils (I have found them in the depressed wetland near Track Rock Gap).  Occurs throughout most of Georgia.

The two wildflower and the native grass beds in Flower Garden elicited some comments. Currently blooming are several Coneflowers (Echinacea sp., Rudbeckia sp.and Ratibida sp.) and mints (Monarda sp.).  One of the fun plants blooming was Horse Mint (Monarda punctata).  It did have the usual mint square stem.  I do not believe it was quite in full bloom because I do not remember seeing the yellow petals interspersed between the pink ones.

On the Orange Trail our next find was the Broad Beech Fern (Thelypteris hexagonoptera).  It is described as bipinnatifid,which means that the pinnae are almost “cut” through to the rachis and each pinna is pinnately almost cut through to the midvein. This produces a rachis with “wings” between the pinnae, a diagnostic feature for this species.  It is common in the mountains and piedmont of Georgia but only found in a few counties in South Georgia.

The next fern was the Southern Lady Fern (Athyrium asplenoides).  Someone said that it looked very delicate, and that is a characteristic of this fern.  This fern tends to cluster, each frond arching, and deciduous.  The rachis can be yellowish green to reddish.  The blade is broadest near the base.  It is bipinnate to tripinnate, finely cut and looks delicate.  It is found throughout Georgia, except in the sandy pineland in Southeast Georgia.

A break from the ferns was finding a number of white avens (Geum canadense).  We have seen the rosette that comes in very early spring, but not the flower, which just bloomed this week.

We also noticed the warty bark of a young tree, Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata), a type of Hackberry.

We found several Rattlesnake Ferns (Botrychium virginianum) along the Orange Trail.  The blade is ternate and triangular in shape.  It is bipinnate to tripinnate. The fertile stalk arises from the where the blade branches, actually the base of the blade.  You will remember that a fern that looks similar comes up in the fall and the fertile stalk is attached below the base of the Blade, and is called a Grape Fern.

We looked a long time for the common Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron), which was the last fern we found on the Orange Trail. It is common throughout all of Georgia, with the exception of the Southeastern Coastal Plain. One characteristic is the shiny dark brown rachis (almost looks black).  Like the Christmas Fern some of the fronds are partially fertile with sori on the back side of the pinnae.  Each pinna has an ear like projection next to the rachis.  It is deciduous.

There was some time left so we scooted out the White Trail across the road to check out the blooming Wafer Ash or Hop tree (Ptelea trifoliate, which is not an ash).  There was quite a group of them.  We could not name the family at the time.  Looking it up, I found it to be in the Rutaceae, or Citrus family, which includes the Prickly Ash, Hercules Club, and Hardy Orange.

We then retired to Donderos’ for conversation and refreshment.

Hugh