Ramble Report November 14 2019

Today's Ramble was led by Dale Hoyt.

Here's the link to Don's Facebook album for today's Ramble. (All the photos in this post are compliments of Don, unless otherwise credited.)

Today's post was written by Dale Hoyt.

22 Ramblers met today.

Announcements:

1.      Next week’s Ramble is the last formal Ramble of the year.

2.      Until formal Nature Rambles resume on March 5, 2020, we will meet Thursdays at 10 a.m. for an informal social hour whenever the Garden is open.

3.      After each social hour there may be a spontaneous, leaderless and unreported ramble – wherever you want to go – or not. (In other words, a walk in the woods.)

4.      Here’s the schedule:

Nov. 21: Last Nature Ramble of the year
Nov. 28: Thanksgiving; Garden is closed; no NR social hour
Dec. 5: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Dec. 12: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Dec. 19: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.; NR Book Group at 11:00 a.m. (Winter World)
Dec. 26: Garden closed
Jan. 3: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Jan. 10: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Jan. 17: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.; NR Book Group at 11:00 a.m. (Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies)
Jan. 24: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Jan. 31: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Feb. 6: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Feb. 13: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.
Feb. 20: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m.; NR Book Group at 11:00 a.m. (Buzz, Sting, Bite)
Feb. 27: NR social hour @ 10:00 a.m. Mar. 5: Nature Rambles resume @ 9:00 a.m.

5.      To reduce the number of emails you receive, no email reminders will be sent in Dec., Jan. or Feb.

6.      Print or copy the schedule above and put it on your calendar!

Today's Route: From the arbor through the Shade and Dunson Gardens to the power line right of way. The down the White Trail to the river, left on the Orange Trail to the Purple Trail, on which we returned to the Visitor’s Center and Café Botanica for some refreshments and conversation before the Nature Rambler Book Group met at 11:30.

Click on a photo to enlarge it; Esc or click again to return.

OBSERVATIONS

The Ginkgo trees by the Arbor have dropped all their leaves over the last two days. The weather conditions Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, as discussed in last week’s Ramble Report probably stimulated the coordinated leaf fall.

Frost flower beginning to melt.

Frost flower melting

Frost “flowers.”

Frost flowers are not really flowers. They are ice formations that appear on the stems of White Crownbeard (Verbesina virginica), under specific weather conditions. Those conditions are: a hard frost overnight (temperature below freezing for a number of hours. The stems of White Crownbeard split open and water oozes out, freezing as it does so. This results In beautiful ribbons of ice on the sides of the stem. Conditions were perfect on Tuesday night and our photographer, Don Hunter, found many beautiful examples early Wednesday morning at Sandy Creek Nature Center. (Link to Don’s SCNC Frost Flower Album.)

The forecast for Wednesday overnight was for similar overnight freezing temperatures. But the temperature stayed below freezing for only a few hours, warming above freezing at 2:30 a.m., and the frost flowers that formed started to melt. So we dispensed with the reading this morning any moved as rapidly as we could to try to catch the remaining frost flowers outside the deer fencing at the bottom of the Dunson Garden. Don’s Facebook album (link at the beginning of this report) has photos of what we found.

For more information about frost flowers visit this Ramble Report and explore the links there.

Goldenrod, Wingstems, Ironweed

Wingstem seed heads

Ironweed seed heads

Goldenrod seed heads

Walking toward the river in the power line right of way you can’t help but notice that the different plants are just as distinct as they are when blooming. The goldenrod’s yellow masses of tiny florets have been replaced by fuzzy gray spherical seed heads. The ironweed still towers over the others and has its own distinctive seed head. The various species of wingstems also have their unique seed heads, lacking the fuzz of the others. It’s hard to remember that the stems of these plants are dead or dying and will be replaced, come spring, by new shoots from the roots and rhizomes that continue life in the soil.

Ground Ivy

The naturalized Ground Ivy huddles against the ground at the edge of the path, flourishing in a disturbed area.

Photo of River Cane from April 25, 2019 ramble.

Our stand of River Cane has done amazingly well. It was planted by volunteers from the Oconee Rivers Audubon Society and the State Botanical Garden of Georgia three years ago. The cane has prospered and survived several floods that completely submerged the plants. The volunteers planted small River Cane plants, spaced at fairly wide intervals. In just two years this stand appears now to be as dense as the historic canebreaks were. For more information about the River Cane restoration project click here. (Thanks to Gary Crider for the link.)

Red Maple across the river turning color.

A riverside is a special habitat and there are many trees that grow there but only rarely in other habitats. Most are rapid growers and produce prodigious amounts of seed.

Sycamore light bark above, dark toward the ground.

The Sycamore is a water loving tree usually found in the flood plains of rivers and streams. It grows rapidly and can reach heights of 150 feet and live for 300 years or more, if undisturbed. As the tree grows older the heartwood is usually invaded by fungi and becomes hollow. European settlers in Ohio and Indiana found these enormous, hollowed out Sycamores and used them for shelter while they were building their log cabins. Sometimes they were used to stable the horse or cow.

The rapid growth creates an interesting pattern of light and dark bark. The trees grows so fast that its bark is stretched and breaks, eventually flaking off in large patches, revealing the lighter layers beneath. Older trees have this camouflage-appearing upper bark but the lower bark is dark and blocky.

Sycamore seed ball

Seeds are produced in spherical balls, each seed attached to a brownish fluff that will be dispersed by the wind and water when the seed ball fragments in the spring.

Box Elder, sometimes called Ash-leaved Maple, is, in fact, a maple. It has opposite, compound leaves, typically with three leaflets. But the number of leaflets can vary from one to seven, sometimes on the same individual. After the leaves have fallen you can still identify it by the opposite twigs and the bright green color of the new growth. Like other maples it produces “whirligig” seeds in pairs, each with a wing that causes it to spin as it falls.

Green Ash also has opposite leaves but they usually have five to seven leaflets. The seeds

Box Elder, green twigs, opposite leaves and twigs. The seeds are produced singly and are shaped like a canoe paddle.

River Birch

River birch, another riverside tree, has a brownish, shredded bark that is unique.

Lance-leaf Greenbrier

Saw Greenbrier

We found two kinds of greenbriers, Lance-leaf and Saw. Of the two, the Lance-leaf is unusual by having few to none of the thorns that most of the greenbriers posses.

When we walked the Orange Trail beside the river earlier this year we saw large stands of Butterweed. Butterweed is a kind of ragwort, relative to Golden Ragwort that blooms in early spring in the Dunson Garden. Unlike Golden Ragwort, a perennial plant, Butterweed is an annual. It germinates, grows, flowers, produces large numbers of seeds and dies, all within a single twelve-month period of time. More specifically, it is a winter annual – the seed germinates in the fall and forms a basal rosette of leaves that hug the ground. It survives the winter and then grows and flowers the following spring, producing seed and dying during the summer.

Seed heads of Virgin's Bower clematis.

Vines of the two Clematis species, Virgin’s Bower and Sweet Autumn Clematis, are producing seeds.

Pokeweed; plump berries and frost bitten leaves.

Pokeweed has very frost-sensitive vegetation but the purple fruits, a favorite food for birds, still hang on, waiting to be plucked off, the pulp digested and the seed defecated.

Purple Passionflower with intact fruits.

One surprise is that many of the Wingstems and the Purple Passionflower growing on the riverside are still green, in spite of Tuesday's freezing temperatures. Perhaps nearness to the river kept them from freezing Tuesday night.

Feeding paths of wood boring beetle larvae, bark removed.

We found Wood boring beetle tracks in a fallen tree. The larvae of these beetles feed on the living layer of the tree, the cambium, just under the bark. (If you scrape your fingernail along the thin bark on the twig of a living tree you will expose a green layer just under the bark. This is the cambium.) The larva eats the cambium as it crawls along, leaving a flat groove where it has eaten. It pupates in the wood and then the adult beetle chews its way through the bark, leaving a “D” shaped hole. It’s possible that this tree was attacked by the Emerald Ash Borer, but we don’t have any evidence of what species it was.

Near where the Purple Trail meets the Orange trail some ramblers saw a Pileated woodpecker tapping its way up a tree that leaned over the river.

American Witch Hazel flower, one of the few native tree/shrubs to bloom in the fall/winter.

On the way back to the Visitor’s Center we passed through the Herb & Physic Garden and noticed an American Witch Hazel in full bloom. This small, multi-branched shrub was completely covered with yellow-petaled flowers, unlike the same species growing in the Shade Garden.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Ginkgo	Ginkgo biloba
White Crownbeard	Verbesina virginica
Tall Goldenrod	Solidago altissima
Tall Ironweed	Vernonia gigantea
Wingstem	Verbesina alternifolia
Yellow Crownbeard	Verbesina occidentalis
Ground Ivy	Glechoma hederacea
Red Maple	Acer rubrum
Jackson-briar	Smilax smallii
Catbriar	Smilax bona-nox
American Sycamore	Platanus occidentalis
Purple Passionflower	Passiflora incarnata
Box Elder	Acer negundo
Sweet Autumn Clematis	Clematis terniflora
Virgin’s Bower Clematis	Clematis virginiana
American Pokeweed	Phytolacca americana
Pileated Woodpecker	Dryocopus pileatus
American Witch Hazel	Hamamelis virginiana