Leader for today's Ramble, Linda
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.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=don.hunter.56&set=a.5938741856142330
Number of Ramblers today: 32
Today's emphasis: Trees (Lower Shade Garden, White Trail Spur and ROW)
Reading: Dale read a passage about Johnny Appleseed from Treepedia: A Brief Compendium of Arboreal Lore by
Joan Maloof. Roger recounted
how he and Pat recently came across a spring in Pleasant Valley, Ohio, that John Chapman (AKA Johnny Appleseed)
used for water during his wanderings.
Show-and-Tell:
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Southern Magnolia flower
Stamens
have fallen, exposing the dark red base of the receptacle; the golden
stigmas are curling away from the ovaries that will comprise the
aggregate fruit. |
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Although native to moist ravines in the Coastal Plain, Southern Magnolia is planted in parks and lawns throughout the south. Its flowering marks the beginning of summer for many southerners. Fossils from the Magnolia family are found in the fossil record as far back as 140 million years ago, making it the earliest flowering plant family to evolve (how we got from ferns and conifers to magnolias is still a multi-million year mystery). The flowers we see today resemble their ancient ancestors in two ways. Unlike most modern flowers, which have separate whorls of colorful petals and green sepals, Magnolia flowers (and other primitive families' flowers such as Sweet Shrub's) have undifferentiated "tepals," a word for petal-like structures that function as both petals and sepals. At the center of the flower, a cone-shaped receptacle holds whorls of stamens at its base with whorls of curled stigmas above. The stigmas are attached to the ovaries that will eventually form an aggregate fruit with many seeds.
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Roger
brought a branch of Chinquapin in flower. The fuzzy white spikes
contain the pollen-producing flowers. The spiny green structures will
mature into nuts.
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| Richard
brought some immature Osage Orange fruits festooned with dried,
blackened style branches, each attached to one of the ovaries that make
up this "multiple fruit" | |
Richard also brought a small wasp nest that we thought was probably made by Yellowjackets. It was partially enclosed by a fragile paper envelope.
Reading: Dale read from the book "Treepedia: A Brief Compendium of Arboreal Lore" by Joan Maloof. The passage was about Johny Appleseed. Roger recounted how he and Pat, two weeks ago, while in Ohio, came across a spring in an area called Pleasant Valley, where John Chapman AKA Johnny Appleseed used to stop for water during his wanderings.
Today's Route: We left the Children's Garden pergola, taking the walkway into the Lower Shade Garden. After several switchbacks, we took the mulched path leading from the Shade Garden and heading towards the Children's Garden forest play area. We stayed on the White Trail Spur and headed down the hill, eventually walking out into the power line right-of-way. We then took a right and headed up the road, back towards the Visitor Center.
OBSERVATIONS:
Today's tour of trees began with upland species on the slopes above the Middle Oconee River and transitioned to trees adapted to life in the periodically flooded soils of the floodplain.
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| Black Gum |
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Black Gum, a tree of uplands, is a difficult tree to identify - its obovate leaves are pretty generic and, until it's quite old, its bark is not very distinctive. But one trait is very useful: its branches leave the main trunk at a nearly 90 degree angle, making them more or less parallel to the ground. Most trees hold their branches at an acute angle (less than 90 degrees relative to the trunk), seeming to be reaching toward the sun. The placement of branches, and leaves as well, evolved in all plants to maximize the capture of sunlight. In Black Gum, stretching laterally seems to be working just fine.
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| American Beech |
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American Beech trees are covered now with developing fruits or "beech nuts." Beech is in the same family as oaks, chestnuts, and chinquapins, and, with some imagination, you can see the similarity of the spiky covering on beech fruits to the rough caps of acorns. Beech leaves are thin-textured, almost papery, and have parallel, evenly spaced lateral veins. Beech trees have only a slim connection to Beech-Nut gum. The company that made Beech-nut gum began life as the Imperial Company making smoked bacon and ham (later expanding into baby food, gum, etc). Deciding that Imperial sounded un-democratic, the original owners changed the name to reflect the beech wood embers over which their meat products was cured.
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| Northern Red Oak leaf |
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| Northern Red Oak bark with "ski trails" |
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Northern Red Oaks are common in upland forests throughout the Garden. They are easy to identify by the vertical, white "ski trails" that mark their bark and by the pointed, bristle-tip lobes of their leaves. Northern Red Oaks at the Garden seem especially vulnerable to wind-throw; most of the recently downed trees here are this species. It seems likely that climate change - hotter temperatures, longer droughts, more intense storms - coupled with the shallowness of our topsoils (legacy of 100+ years of cotton agriculture) is responsible for this.
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| Hickory bark |
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| Hickory leaves |
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A large, old hickory marks the first switchback along the Shade Garden trail. Its bark shows the typical braided or diamond-shaped ridges of most hickory species. This tree may be Pignut Hickory or, more likely, Red Hickory which has shaggier, loose-looking braids. We'd need to see a nut to be certain. Both Pignut and Red Hickories have alternate leaves with five leaflets.
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| Sycamore camo bark |
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This American Sycamore has the typical "camo" bark found on the mid- to upper trunk of Sycamores. Myrna pointed out that the word "Sycamore" contains the word "camo," providing us with the best mnemonic of today's ramble. Sycamores are naturally bottomland trees that nevertheless thrive when planted in uplands.
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Red Maple branches
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Red Maple leaves
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Red Maples are among the handful of tree species in the Georgia Piedmont with opposite leaves and branches. Their leaves are distinguished by being both lobed and toothed. (Chalk Maple and Florida Maple leaves are lobed but not toothed and look like small Sugar Maple leaves.) There is something red on a Red Maple in every season of the year: in winter, it's twigs and buds; in late winter and early spring, it's flowers; in spring, the fruits; in summer, petioles; and in fall, the leaves.
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| Chalk Maple leaves |
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Chalk Maple leaves are lobed but not toothed.
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Shortleaf or Loblolly pine?
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| Shortleaf pine bark with resin pits |
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From a distance it's hard to distinguish a Shortleaf from a Loblolly Pine, but up close the resin pits (or pitch pockets), resembling tiny moon craters, on the bark plates distinguish the Shortleaf.
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| Black Oak |
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Black Oak is the hardest of our upland oaks to identify but the consensus seems to be that these leaves - with the glossy green upper surface and the yellowish-green petioles and midveins - came from a Black Oak, courtesy of a squirrel. The inner bark of the twig was yellow, clinching the deal. We did not locate the tree from which it came.
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Octagonal Casemaker Moth
caterpillar inside self-constructed case
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On an American Beech leaf Bill Sheehan found an unusual moth larva living in a case of its own making. It is constructed by the caterpillar from its own frass (a polite word for caterpillar poop). The case grows longer and wider as the caterpillar grows. It is basically a long, hollow eight-sided tube with unconsolidated frass at the largest end. The common name is Octagonal Casemaker Moth.
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Nymph of Annual Cicada
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Bill also found a living crawling on someone's shirt. This seems to be too small to be one of the dog-day cicadas that we hear later in the summer.
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| Jack-in-the-Pulpit |
Jack-in-the-Pulpit is not a tree, but who can complain about going off-mission when a conspicuously tall one is growing right on the trail, with developing fruits and lush, five-leafletted leaves? The question arises: what is a wetland species doing on this high-and-dry upper slope? Maybe it's not the wet soils that this species requires but the extra nutrients washed downslope to floodplains? And maybe the soil on this slope provides those nutrients?
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Hop Hornbeam
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A positive answer to that last question is suggested by the presence along this trail of a number of Hop Hornbeams, with their "cat-scratched" bark. This species is an indicator of a soil high in the nutrient elements calcium and magnesium.
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Mockernut Hickory bark
Photo courtesy of Janie K. Marlow, Name that Plant, http://www.namethatplant.net/plantdetail.shtml?plant=279
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| Mockernut Hickory leaves |
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Mockernut Hickory has the most conspicuously "braided" bark of all our hickories. The tight ridges look more like diamonds or expanded metal than braids to some people. Mockernut is as likely to have seven leaflets as five, and they are very hairy on the lower surface, the leaf stalk, and the rachis (the extension of the leaf stalk that holds the leaflets).
Leaving the upland slopes and entering the Middle Oconee River floodplain, we encountered what is probably the most abundant tree along this stretch of the river,
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| Box Elder leaves |
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Box Elder (or Ash-leaved Maple). Its leaves have 3, 5, or 7 leaflets; when three, the leaf resembles those of Poison Ivy.
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Silverbell bark
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| Silverbell leaves |
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Common (or Mountain) Silverbell is abundant in the floodplain at the Garden. Its oval leaves are not particularly distinctive but the bark, striped gray and tan, is a good indicator. When the dangling, four-winged fruits are present, you can narrow your choices to this species or Carolina Silverbell, which is mostly found in the Coastal Plain and is rare in the Piedmont.
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| Red Mulberry |
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Red Mulberry is a beautiful and ecologically important tree of the floodplain subcanopy. Its rough-textured, heart-shaped leaves are distinguished by elongated "drip tips," so named because they are thought to channel water away from the leaf surface, thus reducing the growth of fungi or other pathogens on the leaf surface. Drip tips are especially noticeable and quite elongated where they occur in the hot, rainy tropics. But recent research is calling this "just so" story into question, so the jury is still out. The berries in this photo are immature and will turn white then reddish- or purplish-black as they mature; they are relished by a variety of birds.
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| Silky Dogwood flowers |
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| Silky Dogwood "elastic veins" |
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Silky Dogwood flower clusters are quite different from those of the upland Flowering Dogwood (Cornus florida), completely lacking the showy white bracts that mark the latter species and attract pollinators to its tiny greenish flowers. Silky Dogwood flowers are larger and form a showy, flat-topped cluster that is plenty attractive to pollinators. Silky Dogwood is found in southern swamps and other wetlands as is Swamp Dogwood (Cornus foemina); they can be distinguished by counting the number of veins on one side of the midvein. Silky Dogwood leaves have 5 or more veins on each side of the midvein; Swamp Dogwood has only 3 or 4. Dogwood veins have an amazing feature: if you gently tear the leaf and carefully part the broken segments, fibrous threads will stretch across the gap. These threads are the vascular tissues that transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. In the Cornus genus, they are especially strong and elastic.
SPECIES LIST
Common Eastern Bumble Bee Bombus impatiens
Purple Beautyberry Callicarpa dichotoma
Southern Magnolia Magnolia grandiflora
Blackgum Nyssa sylvatica
American Beech Fagus grandifolia
Japanese Maple Acer palmatum
Northern Red Oak Quercus rubra
Prothonotary Warbler Protonotaria citrea
Borage species Family Boraginaceae
Pignut Hickory Carya glabra
American Sycamore Platanus occidentalis
White Oak Quercus alba
Red Maple Acer rubrum
Shortleaf Pine Pinus echinata
Octagonal Casemaker Moth (cocoon) Homoledra octagonella
Black Oak (tentative) Quercus velutina
Annual cicada Family Cicadidae
Jack-in-the-Pulpit Arisaema triphyllum
Hophornbeam Ostrya virginiana
Mockernut Hickory Carya tomentosa
Box Elder Acer negundo
Four-winged Silverbells Halesia tetraptera
Chalk Maple Acer leucoderme
Wild Rye Elymus sp.
North American Tarnished Plant Bug Lygus lineolaris
Flower weevil Family Baridinae
Daisy fleabane Erigeron sp.
Goldenrod gall fly Eurosta solidaginis
Tulip Tree Liriodendron tulipifera
Sweetgum Tree Liquidambar styraciflua
Aaron's Rod Thermopsis villosa
Swamp Dogwood Cornus foemina
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