Leader for today's Ramble: Linda
Link to Don's Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today: 32
Today's emphasis: Seeking What We Found along the White Trail Spur, the Orange Trail Spur, the Orange Trail, the Purple Trail, the Purple Trail Spur and the lower Flower Garden
Reading: Dale read an excerpt from the July 14th entry of An Almanac for Moderns, by Donald Culross Peattie:
Show and Tell:
Richard brought an Osage Orange to show. It has been known by a variety of common names in addition to Osage Orange, including hedge apple, horse apple, the French bois d'arc and English transliterations: bodark and bodock, also translated as "bow-wood"; monkey ball, monkey brains, yellow-wood and mock orange. Due to its latex secretions and woody pulp, the fruit is typically not eaten by humans and rarely by foraging animals. Richard described it as an anachronistic "ghost of evolution," persisting since the time when large megafauna such as ground sloths and mammoths would have subsisted on such large fruits. For more on this interesting phenomena, see: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/anachronistic-fruits-and-the-ghosts-who-haunt-them/
Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:
1. Emily gave us an update on the Nature Ramble shirt printing. She will send out instructions for ordering and pick-up or delivery.
2. Emily offered to include any rambler who so requests in her contacts in case you are running late and needed to call to find out where we can be found once you arrive.
3. Emily announced that if you are a new Rambler and want to get on the email list for Dale's blog post and other announcements, see her at some point during the Ramble and she will add you to the email list.
4. Bob Ambrose put in a pitch for a book he recently enjoyed, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.
Today's Route: We left the arbor and headed through the Children's Garden and followed the White Trail Spur down to the Orange Trail Spur which we followed to the Orange Trail. From this point we headed left, down river, to the Purple Trail. We took it up to the connector to the lower Flower Garden and took it, heading up to and through the Heritage Garden and then on a direct route back to the Visitor Center/Conservatory.
Today's post was written by Linda Chafin.
OBSERVATIONS:
Link to Don's Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today: 32
Today's emphasis: Seeking What We Found along the White Trail Spur, the Orange Trail Spur, the Orange Trail, the Purple Trail, the Purple Trail Spur and the lower Flower Garden
Reading: Dale read an excerpt from the July 14th entry of An Almanac for Moderns, by Donald Culross Peattie:
Bee droning; white clouds in full sail for an open sea of blue, and the odor of clover, honeyed and familiar and reminding one of all the summers gone by-that is July.
The clover plant is such a common thing that nobody praises it as it deserves to be praised, this fragrant, hardy, ubiquitous plant that leaves the soil richer than it found it. . . .
The place to look for the astonishing in Nature is amongst common things. The clover with its dense head of two-lipped flowers exactly suited to the long tongues of butterflies and some bees, sustains a symbiotic relationship with insects quite as much as the orchid. The roots of the clover harbor colonies of nitrifying bacteria which improve the soil, as important or more so than the fungi in the roots of orchids. Where orchids are scarce and useless, clover creeps over the surface of the world, invading our continent and the Antipodes, leaving the world better than it found it, nourishing cattle, alluring bees and butterflies, and trooping down the dusty roadsides where haughtier flowers will not consent to grow.
The clover plant is such a common thing that nobody praises it as it deserves to be praised, this fragrant, hardy, ubiquitous plant that leaves the soil richer than it found it. . . .
The place to look for the astonishing in Nature is amongst common things. The clover with its dense head of two-lipped flowers exactly suited to the long tongues of butterflies and some bees, sustains a symbiotic relationship with insects quite as much as the orchid. The roots of the clover harbor colonies of nitrifying bacteria which improve the soil, as important or more so than the fungi in the roots of orchids. Where orchids are scarce and useless, clover creeps over the surface of the world, invading our continent and the Antipodes, leaving the world better than it found it, nourishing cattle, alluring bees and butterflies, and trooping down the dusty roadsides where haughtier flowers will not consent to grow.
Show and Tell:
Richard brought an Osage Orange to show. It has been known by a variety of common names in addition to Osage Orange, including hedge apple, horse apple, the French bois d'arc and English transliterations: bodark and bodock, also translated as "bow-wood"; monkey ball, monkey brains, yellow-wood and mock orange. Due to its latex secretions and woody pulp, the fruit is typically not eaten by humans and rarely by foraging animals. Richard described it as an anachronistic "ghost of evolution," persisting since the time when large megafauna such as ground sloths and mammoths would have subsisted on such large fruits. For more on this interesting phenomena, see: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/anachronistic-fruits-and-the-ghosts-who-haunt-them/
Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:
1. Emily gave us an update on the Nature Ramble shirt printing. She will send out instructions for ordering and pick-up or delivery.
2. Emily offered to include any rambler who so requests in her contacts in case you are running late and needed to call to find out where we can be found once you arrive.
3. Emily announced that if you are a new Rambler and want to get on the email list for Dale's blog post and other announcements, see her at some point during the Ramble and she will add you to the email list.
4. Bob Ambrose put in a pitch for a book he recently enjoyed, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.
Today's Route: We left the arbor and headed through the Children's Garden and followed the White Trail Spur down to the Orange Trail Spur which we followed to the Orange Trail. From this point we headed left, down river, to the Purple Trail. We took it up to the connector to the lower Flower Garden and took it, heading up to and through the Heritage Garden and then on a direct route back to the Visitor Center/Conservatory.
Today's post was written by Linda Chafin.
OBSERVATIONS:
Children's Garden, Food Plants Section:
" On our way to the White Trail Spur, we stopped in the Children's Garden to admire a densely sprawling tangle of the slender vines of Creeping Cucumber, or Melonette. This is a native species in the cucumber family, Cucurbitaceae, with fruits that resemble miniature watermelons. It has recently become popular in organic gardening circles. Eve warned us that while the fruit is edible when green, it is a powerful laxative when ripe and purplish-black in color.
White Trail Spur:
" Many downed twigs and branches sported rows of small, delicate mushrooms with white caps and black, slender, springy stalks. They are probably Black-footed Marasmius.
" While searching the leaf-littered slopes along the Spur Trail for Crane Fly Orchid, ramblers discovered the plant of the day: Pinesap! This plant has not been documented at the Garden since 8 July 1976, when Bruce Hammerslough, a volunteer who created the Garden's tiny herbarium, collected and preserved a specimen. (Here's a plea for recognition of the importance of herbaria - and other natural history collections - to our knowledge of natural history.) The species had been collected in Clarke County only once before, in 1968, so this seems to be a rare plant in Clarke County (and other Piedmont counties as well), though it is fairly common in the mountains. Like its single-flowered relative, Indian Pipes (Monotropa uniflora), Pinesap is entirely without chlorophyll and cannot carry on photosynthesis. While Indian Pipes are a ghostly white color, Pinesap stems and tiny, useless leaves range in color from yellowish-tan to pink to red. For centuries, it was believed that these achlorophyllous plants were "saprophytes" drawing nutrients from rotting wood buried in the soil and leaf litter. In fact, there are no plants with the ability to break down organic matter to extract nutrients. There are parasitic plants which are directly attached to a living host, but Pinesap is actually in a three-way relationship among trees and fungi. Pinesap and its relatives draw nutrients from an underground network of fungi that extracts carbohydrates from the roots of a tree that does the work of photosynthesis for all three members of this menage á trois. We know from the work of many researchers such as Suzanne Simard that the fungi "gives back" to the trees by acting as an underground communication and nutrient-sharing network sometimes called the "wood wide web."
" A large patch of five-leaved Jill-in-the-Pulpits are growing on both sides of the Spur Trail, each with 5 leaflets per leaf and a small cluster of green, unripe berries held at the top of a stalk. Members of this species have the ability to change gender - one year a plant may be a Jill, the next a Jack. If rain and nutrients were abundant the previous year, a plant's underground storage organ (a corm) will be enlarged with carbohydrates that can support a large, fruit-bearing, female plant. Fruiting is a much more nutrient-expensive process than producing pollen, so small-cormed plants bear male, pollen-producing flowers. Female-flowered plants are taller and usually have five leaflets, while male-flowered plants are shorter and have three leaflets; non-flowering plants are smaller than both of those and have three leaflets. The corm is drained by the process of bearing fruits, and these plants will often be male-flowered the next spring. Plants in this genus may live up to 20 years, changing their gender from year to year, depending on conditions and the size of their corms. The green fruits we saw today will soon mature into shiny, red berries that are eaten by birds including Wild Turkeys.
" As usually happens in wet years at the Garden, chanterelles are popping out of the leaf litter just about everywhere we went today.
Orange Trail Spur:
.
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| Creeping Cucumber, or Melonette |
" On our way to the White Trail Spur, we stopped in the Children's Garden to admire a densely sprawling tangle of the slender vines of Creeping Cucumber, or Melonette. This is a native species in the cucumber family, Cucurbitaceae, with fruits that resemble miniature watermelons. It has recently become popular in organic gardening circles. Eve warned us that while the fruit is edible when green, it is a powerful laxative when ripe and purplish-black in color.
White Trail Spur:
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| Black-footed Marasmius |
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| Pinesap |
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| Closeup of Pinesap flowers |
" While searching the leaf-littered slopes along the Spur Trail for Crane Fly Orchid, ramblers discovered the plant of the day: Pinesap! This plant has not been documented at the Garden since 8 July 1976, when Bruce Hammerslough, a volunteer who created the Garden's tiny herbarium, collected and preserved a specimen. (Here's a plea for recognition of the importance of herbaria - and other natural history collections - to our knowledge of natural history.) The species had been collected in Clarke County only once before, in 1968, so this seems to be a rare plant in Clarke County (and other Piedmont counties as well), though it is fairly common in the mountains. Like its single-flowered relative, Indian Pipes (Monotropa uniflora), Pinesap is entirely without chlorophyll and cannot carry on photosynthesis. While Indian Pipes are a ghostly white color, Pinesap stems and tiny, useless leaves range in color from yellowish-tan to pink to red. For centuries, it was believed that these achlorophyllous plants were "saprophytes" drawing nutrients from rotting wood buried in the soil and leaf litter. In fact, there are no plants with the ability to break down organic matter to extract nutrients. There are parasitic plants which are directly attached to a living host, but Pinesap is actually in a three-way relationship among trees and fungi. Pinesap and its relatives draw nutrients from an underground network of fungi that extracts carbohydrates from the roots of a tree that does the work of photosynthesis for all three members of this menage á trois. We know from the work of many researchers such as Suzanne Simard that the fungi "gives back" to the trees by acting as an underground communication and nutrient-sharing network sometimes called the "wood wide web."
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| Jack-in-the-Pulpit |
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| Fruits of Jack-in-the-Pulpit |
" A large patch of five-leaved Jill-in-the-Pulpits are growing on both sides of the Spur Trail, each with 5 leaflets per leaf and a small cluster of green, unripe berries held at the top of a stalk. Members of this species have the ability to change gender - one year a plant may be a Jill, the next a Jack. If rain and nutrients were abundant the previous year, a plant's underground storage organ (a corm) will be enlarged with carbohydrates that can support a large, fruit-bearing, female plant. Fruiting is a much more nutrient-expensive process than producing pollen, so small-cormed plants bear male, pollen-producing flowers. Female-flowered plants are taller and usually have five leaflets, while male-flowered plants are shorter and have three leaflets; non-flowering plants are smaller than both of those and have three leaflets. The corm is drained by the process of bearing fruits, and these plants will often be male-flowered the next spring. Plants in this genus may live up to 20 years, changing their gender from year to year, depending on conditions and the size of their corms. The green fruits we saw today will soon mature into shiny, red berries that are eaten by birds including Wild Turkeys.
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| Chanterell |
" As usually happens in wet years at the Garden, chanterelles are popping out of the leaf litter just about everywhere we went today.
Orange Trail Spur:
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| Woodland Spider Lily (A possible escapee from the Dunson Garden) |
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| Coral Tube Slime Mold |
Coral Tube Slime Mold on a damp, decaying log. Not a coral nor a mold, but definitely slimy, slime molds are placed in the kingdom Protista along with amoebae and algae.
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| Cross-veined Troop Mushrooms |
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| Virginia Dayflower In the same family as spiderworts, their pale blue flowers also last only for a day. |
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| Common Elderberry with umbels of green fruit. |
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| Late Blooming Thoroughwort |
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| Yellow Crownbeard Opposite leaves |
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| Wingstem Alternate leaves |
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| American Pokeweed
in bloom. The round, green ball in the center of the flower is the ovary which will ripen into a dark reddish-purple fruit that is an important food source for songbirds as they get ready for their southward migration. The leaves and stems are toxic and rarely eaten by mammals. |
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| Eastern Anglepod |
One of Georgia's six species of milkvine, Eastern Anglepod, oozes white latex when injured as do all members of its family, Apocynaceae. Often referred to as sap, the latex is entirely different from sap and is held in a system of tubes (lactifers) that are separate from the plant's vascular tissue. As with the closely related milkweeds, the latex is rich in cardiac glycosides intended to poison caterpillars and other insect herbivores. Despite the presence of toxic latex, milkvines are not used by Monarch butterflies as a host plant.
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| Sensitive Fern |
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| Last season's fertile ffrond. |
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| Jewelweed A harbinger of late summer and fall wildflowers, is just beginning to flower in the floodplain. |
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| River Oats, AKA "Fish-on-a-pole." |
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| Virgin's Bower clematis, with its sharply toothed leaflets. The similar but highly invasive Sweet Autumn Clematis has smooth leaflet margins. Gary mentioned that he has treated much of the invasive species at the Garden and has noticed the scale tipping to more native than invasive where the invasive used to be the more common species. |
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| Green Ash fruits |
Green Ash with its paddle-shaped fruits is common in the Middle Oconee River floodplain. Green Ash is a wetland species while White Ash is found in uplands. It's easy to confuse Green Ash with Box Elder, both floodplain species with opposite, compound leaves. Their bark is also similar. However Green Ash leaflets have smooth margins, and Box Elder leaflets are toothed, suggesting that we should always carry binoculars in the field.
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| Box Elder |
Box Elder leaves, especially those with only 3 leaflets, resemble Poison Ivy leaves. Roger showed us that if you fan the leaflets of Box Elder (a maple tree, despite its common name), it forms a "typical" maple leaf shape. Not recommended for people who are highly allergic to Poison Ivy since this method required handling the leaves! Also, like all Maples, the leaves are opposite on the stem, while Poison Ivy leaves are alternate.
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| Lurid Sedge fruits are held in a short spike below the male, pollen-producing spike |
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| Guttation |
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| Guttation |
Guttation: During the day, water is constantly moving through the bodies of plants, pulled up from the roots through the plant's vascular system and out into the leaves, stems, flowers, and fruits. This process is a result of water evaporating from tiny pores called stomates; as water evaporates from the surface it pulls more water up behind it. But at night, the stomates are closed. Then, if atmospheric humidity and soil moisture are high, water builds up in the plant and is forced out through special cells (called hydathodes) that line the margins and some surfaces of leaves. This process is called guttation. Look closely at wet leaves in the morning and you can tell the difference between dew, which has condensed randomly on leaves, and guttation which produces droplets along the margins of the leaf, often at the tips of teeth.
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| False Death-Cap mushroom. |
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| Nigroporous vinosus mushrooms |
Lower Flower Garden:
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| Short-toothed Mountain Mint |
Short-toothed Mountain Mint was attracting bees in a bed in the lower Flower Garden. Mountain-mints are flowering throughout the mountains and Piedmont now and are often hard to tell apart. Most have white bracts associated with the flower heads (hence the common name Hoary Mountain-mints), and many have pale green lower leaf surfaces that contrast with the dark green color of the upper leaf surface. This species is characterized by the dark green color of both leaf surfaces and the somewhat flattened flower heads.
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| Sculpted Resin Bee on the flower. |
SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:
Osage Orange Maclura pomifera
Creeping Cucumber, Melonette Melothria pendula
Cranefly Orchid Tipularia discolor
Black-footed Marasmium Tetrapyrgos nigripes
Pinesap Monotropa hypopithys,
Creeping Cucumber, Melonette Melothria pendula
Cranefly Orchid Tipularia discolor
Black-footed Marasmium Tetrapyrgos nigripes
Pinesap Monotropa hypopithys,
syn. Hypopitys lanuginosa
Jill- and Jack-in-the-Pulpit Arisaema triphyllum
Smooth Chanterelle Mushroom Cantharellus lateritius
Wingstem Verbesina alternifolia
Woodland Spider Lily Hymenocallis occidentalis
Yellow Crownbeard Verbesina occidentalis
Coral Tube Slime Mold Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa
Cross-veined Troop Mushroom Xeromphalina kauffmanii
Virginia Dayflower Commelina virginica
Late-flowering Thoroughwort Eupatorium serotinum
American Pokeweed Phytolacca americana
Eastern Anglepod Gonolobus suberosus,
Jill- and Jack-in-the-Pulpit Arisaema triphyllum
Smooth Chanterelle Mushroom Cantharellus lateritius
Wingstem Verbesina alternifolia
Woodland Spider Lily Hymenocallis occidentalis
Yellow Crownbeard Verbesina occidentalis
Coral Tube Slime Mold Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa
Cross-veined Troop Mushroom Xeromphalina kauffmanii
Virginia Dayflower Commelina virginica
Late-flowering Thoroughwort Eupatorium serotinum
American Pokeweed Phytolacca americana
Eastern Anglepod Gonolobus suberosus,
syn. Matelea gonocarpos
Sensitive Fern Onoclea sensibilis
Jewelweed Impatiens capensis
River Oats Chasmanthium latifolium
Virgin's Bower Clematis virginiana
Green Ash Fraxinus pennsylvanica
Box Elder Acer negundo
Lurid Sedge Carex lurida
False Death-Cap Mushroom Amanita citrina
Mushroom (NCN) Nigroporous vinosus
Short-toothed Mountain Mint Pycnanthemum muticum
Sculpted Resin Bee Megachile sculpturalis
Spiny-backed Orbweaver Gasteracantha cancriformis
Sensitive Fern Onoclea sensibilis
Jewelweed Impatiens capensis
River Oats Chasmanthium latifolium
Virgin's Bower Clematis virginiana
Green Ash Fraxinus pennsylvanica
Box Elder Acer negundo
Lurid Sedge Carex lurida
False Death-Cap Mushroom Amanita citrina
Mushroom (NCN) Nigroporous vinosus
Short-toothed Mountain Mint Pycnanthemum muticum
Sculpted Resin Bee Megachile sculpturalis
Spiny-backed Orbweaver Gasteracantha cancriformis
