Ramble Report June 8, 2023

Leader for today's Ramble: Linda

Authors of today’s Ramble report: Linda and Don. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin@uga.edu.

Insect identification: Don Hunter, Dale Hoyt

Fungi identification: Don Hunter

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: 24

Today's emphasis: What’s happening in the Nash Prairie and adjacent woodlands in late spring – or is it summer already?

It was a froggy ramble today, starting with scores of tiny toads hopping along the Shade Garden paths, and ending with this full grown American Toad spotted by Catherine on the White Trail.

Reading:

Kathy read “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work (1986).

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

 

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

 

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit

carries within it

 

the thorn

that is heavier than lead–

if it’s all you can do

to keep on trudging–

 

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted–

 

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

 

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not

 

you have ever dared to pray.

Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:

William Bartram

Roger C. shared that today is the 250th anniversary of William Bartram’s visit to this part of the state during his journeys through the Georgia Piedmont. He stopped at Cherokee Corner, only eight miles east of the Botanical Garden on Hwy 78, with his party of surveyors, Cherokee Indians, and a rag-tag group of “hangers on.” Bartram made a side trip to Carr’s Hill, only about four miles from the Garden and adjacent to Oconee Hills Cemetery, to view the North Oconee River. At that time, the river was so clear you could count the fish on the bottom of the river, and stretches of the river with mica-bearing bedrock would literally glitter in the mid-day sunlight.

Related to that, Linda announced that the 2023 Bartram Trail Conference will be held in Athens this year, August 4-5. For more info and to register, click here.

An opportunity for citizen scientists, or folks who just love watching lightning bugs, is just now opening up – the chance to contribute sightings of fireflies, i.e. lightning bugs, to a new database that will track their status: the Firefly Atlas. There are 40(!) species of lightning bugs in Georgia – a hot spot for firefly diversity – so our participation is important. Another way to help fireflies is to provide and protect their habitat, including:

Healthy soil: Fireflies spend most of their time in the soil as larvae, so healthy soil rich with vegetation and leaf litter is essential for their success.

Moisture: Ponds, rain gardens, and rotting logs attract fireflies, providing a place for them to meet and mate.

Avoiding pesticides: Insecticides, grub killers, and even some fertilizers can kill fireflies and their larvae.

Minimizing outdoor lighting: Light pollution discourages fireflies from congregating in an area. Consider angling your outdoor lights toward the ground, setting timers, or turning them off completely. Other measures include shielding motion detectors and restricting light to where it is needed, such as paths and doorways.

The GA DNR website concludes with this inspiring paragraph: “In fireflies, we have a world of light that is often overlooked, the beauty of which most of us have only glimpsed as the faintest glow. This world, first experienced by many of us in jars, bug catchers, and even our hands, has the potential to take hold of our curiosity again and reintroduce us to the magic of the outdoors.”

One rambler (sorry, we forgot to note who!) urged us to visit the Ethnobotanical Garden at the Georgia Mountain Research and Education Center in Blairsville, GA (two-hour drive from Athens). There was an open house on June 9, but the garden is open any week day except federal holidays or days when special educational activities are scheduled – best to call ahead (706-745-2655).

Hugh and Carol Nourse, founding members of the Nature Ramblers in 2009, sent an email from St. Louis recommending a new book: “Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon,” by Melissa Sevigny.

Today's Route:  We left the Children’s Garden arbor and walked through the Shade Garden, crossed the road, and took the White Trail spur to the Nash Prairie. We explored the early summer flora in the Nash Prairie, then moved into the adjacent forest and returned to the Shade Garden on the White Trail.

OBSERVATIONS:

Don arrived early and got some great photos of insects in the Children’s Garden.

Daddy Longlegs, able to conceal its body but not its enormous legs behind a Rattlesnake Master flower head.

Winged ant (no ID) exploring a Mountain-mint’s leaves

Broken-backed Bug visiting a Mountain-mint flower

 The ramble began with a stroll through the Shade Garden….

The cultivar ‘Sunburst’ of St. John’s-wort, named for the saint day, June 24, of John the Baptist

Oakleaf Hydrangea was one of the first native plants to make it in the ornamental trade. The showy white sterile flowers attract pollinators (and gardeners) and the tiny, pinkish-tan flowers massed beneath provide nectar and pollen.

Spicebush Swallowtail butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves of all native species in the Laurel family (Lauraceae) including Spicebush and, in this photo, Sassafras.

Eastern Whitelip Snail cruising the bridge across the Rock Wash. The “white lip” is the narrow white line on the left side of the shell.

This year’s cool, wet spring seems to have fostered a mast year for Hop Hornbeam and American Beech, both of which are now heavily covered with fruits in the Bot Garden. Mast years are thought to be a reproductive strategy called “predator satiation,” whereby trees produce small seed crops for several years then a bumper crop. The bumper crop overwhelms seed predators – mice, squirrels, chipmunks, blue jays, wild turkeys, black bears – leaving some seed to germinate and grow into new trees.

The fruits (nuts) of American Beech are covered by a spiny husk that discourages predators until the fruits mature and drop off the tree, leaving the husks behind.

Hop Hornbeam fruiting clusters somewhat resemble those of beer-flavoring Hops. The seeds are held inside the pale green sacs that make up the cluster.

Hop Hornbeam fruiting cluster

Don somehow saw and, even more amazingly, photographed this tiny lacewing egg on a Hop Hornbeam leaf.

The White Trail spur between the road and the prairie is densely wooded on its east side and more or less open to the west, and is transitional between the deep shade of the Shade Garden and the blazing sun of the prairie, sporting species like Daisy Fleabane and Smooth Spiderwort that tolerate both sun and shade.  

Immature Daisy Fleabane flower heads

Daisy Fleabane's golden disk flowers are still tightly closed and the ray flowers are just expanding. I suspect the ray flowers are changing from lavender to white as the heads mature.

Smooth Spiderwort

Ramblers exploring the Nash Prairie
A welcome sign of summer is that Nathan is with us!

The Nash Prairie flora is coming into its own as the days lengthen and temperatures rise.

Leaf Cutter Bee

Dale spotted the circular cuts that Leaf Cutter Bees made on Redbud leaves

Dale wrote about Leaf Cutter bees in May 2014: "Leaf cutter bees construct a nest in a broken twig, especially one that has an easily chewed out core of pith. They hollow out the twig by removing the pith and then gather pollen and nectar to make a kind of bee bread that they put in the bottom of the hollow twig. When sufficient bee bread has been prepared the female bee lays an egg and then flies to a tree with the correct texture [smooth and thin] leaves and carefully cuts out a semi-circular piece from its edge. This is taken back to the nest and stuffed into the twig cavity. If there is enough room in the twig a second nest is provisioned in the same manner. When the twig is full of bee offspring she abandons them and seeks out another twig to provision. Leaf Cutter bees are a kind of solitary (non-colonial) bee that are highly efficient pollinators of native plants, better than honey bees. They and other solitary bee species are endangered by habitat loss as well as competition from Honey Bees which are not native to the United States."

Sensitive Briar is a sprawling member of the Mimosa subfamily of the Bean Family. Its flowers are tightly packed into showy clusters that attract pollen-gathering bees and flies (there is no nectar). Each flower consists of a tiny greenish-white calyx surrounding a pistil and 8-10 bright pink stamens. There are no petals, but who needs them with stamens like these?

This close-up photo by Jim Conrad from Backyard Nature of a Sensitive Briar flower cluster shows the greenish-white calyxes with their strongly exserted stamens.

The leaves of Sensitive Briar consist of many very small leaflets; when touched the leaflets fold up, discouraging herbivores and exposing the many spines on their stems.

Woodland Coreopsis (or Tickseed) is a harbinger of the many composites that will bloom in the prairie in late summer.

Appalachian Beebalm is just beginning to flower.

Carolina Wild Petunia

Carolina Phlox

Lance-leaf Loosestrife

The tiny glands that cover the red center of the Loosestrife flower and the stamen filaments secrete oil that specialized bees collect and mix with pollen grains to feed their larvae. These so-called “oil bees” also line their underground nests with the oil as water-proofing. (Click or tap on the photo to enlarge.)

Carolina Horse-nettle

Carolina Milkvine

This time of year, I am always excited to explore the upper reaches of the Nash Prairie – will the Carolina Milkvine be in flower? The answer this week is not just yes, but YES! I’ve never seen so many flowers on these vines before – they are absolutely loaded with clusters of these satiny, maroon flowers – gorgeous! If you didn’t make it to today’s ramble and want to see these flowers, walk north up the dirt road through the Nash Prairie. Near the top of the ridge, look left and you will see a small tree, a Sparkleberry, in the midst of the grasses. Start looking for the sprawling milkvine stems about 20 feet downhill from the Sparkleberry. You will not be disappointed! (NB: I did not get any ticks or chiggers today.)

In Georgia, Carolina Milkvine (sometimes called Carolina Spinypod) is one of seven milkvine species, six in the genus Matelea and one in the genus Gonolobus. Of these, five are state-listed as rare or endangered. Carolina Milkvine is not listed, thank goodness, and is found at many sites around Athens where the soils have basic or circumneutral pH. Only two other milkvines occur in Clarke and other eastern Piedmont counties: Oldfield Milkvine (Matelea decipiens) and Eastern Anglepod (Gonolobus suberosa). Carolina Milkvine is my favorite of the three–the lush maroon flowers are so appealing. Telling milkvines apart is impossible without either fruits or flowers–the leaves are identical.

Carolina Milkweed leaf
photo by Janie K. Marlow, Name That Plant

Years ago, I was excited to find Carolina Milkvine in the Nash Prairie. As a calciphile (a calcium-loving plant), its presence here supports Dan Williams’s find of amphibolite, a calcium-rich bedrock, in this part of the Garden. Usually, Carolina Milkvine grows and even flowers in shady forests, twining up the trunks of saplings and shrubs. Here in the Nash Prairie, it grows in full sun, sprawling across the ground and wrapping its vines around grasses or any upright thing it can get hold of.

Near the ridgeline, we stopped to examine a clump of Yucca plants, wondering if they had been more successful at setting fruit than the plants at the Dunson Garden. There were no fruits, alas, but lots of Yucca Plant Bugs. An adult bug is at the top of Don's photo with two nymphs below.

Happy to escape the building heat, we entered the forest on the west side of the prairie, and turned south onto the White Trail, a trail we’ve walked many times.

Known as Destroying Angels and Death Caps, species of fungi in the genus Amanita are deadly poisonous.

News-to-us: Cucumber Magnolia along the White Trail!
As Don wrote about this tree on his Facebook page, “It's amazing how you can still find or notice new things along paths you've walked for years.”

Leaves of a Cucumber Magnolia crown sprout

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A Brief Word on Southeastern Plant Names and Southeastern Botanical History….  What’s with all these “Carolina” plants that we encountered today? Why do so many southeastern plants have some form of the word “Carolina” in their names? Part of the answer – the part that concerns their scientific names – lies with the history of early North American plant exploration. Several of the early “big name” plant explorers were deeply connected to the Carolinas and named their plant discoveries for the region where they first encountered them. Mark Catesby published The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands in 1743. Andre Michaux created and maintained a botanical garden in Charleston and based his plant explorations from there. In 1788, Thomas Walter published Flora Caroliniana, the first North American flora to use the Linnaean system of classification.

That is a reasonable explanation for the names that have some form of Carolina in their scientific name, including several plants we saw today: Carolina Milkvine (Matelea carolinensis), Carolina Horse-nettle (Solanum carolinense), Carolina Phlox (Phlox carolina), and Carolina Wild Petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis). But there are dozens of common names that include the word “Carolina” as a prefix that have no connection to a “carolina” scientific name (see the very partial list* at the end of this blog). How did this come about?

The origins of so many common names are obscure but, in this case, I think the explanation lies with another historical fact: botanists at the University of North Carolina dominated the southeastern botanical world during the 20^th century. The near-biblical, 1200-page manual, Vascular Flora of the Carolinas, was published at UNC in 1968 and functioned as a flora for the entire southeastern region for 50+ years. (Georgia has never had an equivalent state manual, nor Alabama; Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia have only recently published theirs.) Common names in the Carolina manual became the standard though the sources of its common names are not known and are probably legion. North Carolina botanists also published many popular books on wildflowers during the 20^th century and continue to do so (search in your browser on “north carolina wildflower guides” and start counting), most of them perpetuating names from the Carolina manual. The current ‘bible’ of technical manuals, Flora of the Southeastern United States (2022), also comes out of UNC and is the source of most of the scientific and common names used in this blog. It seems inevitable that common names, too, would reflect both the remote and recent history of botanical expertise centered in “the Carolinas.”

OBSERVED SPECIES:

Mountain Mint     Pycnanthemum pycnanthemoides
Rattlesnake Master     Eryngium yuccifolium
Broken-backed Bug     Taylorilygus apicalis
Winged ant     Family Formicidae
Northern Flatid Planthopper (nymph)    Flatormenis proxima
Daddy Longlegs     Family Opiliones
St. John’s-wort     Hypericum frondosum 'Sunburst'
Oak-leaf Hydrangea     Hydrangea quercifolia
Spicebush Butterfly caterpillar     Papilio troilus
Sassafras tree     Sassafras albidum
Eastern Whitelip snail (tentative)    Neohelix albolabris
Hop Hornbeam     Ostrya virginiana
Green Lacewing (egg)     Chrysoperla rufilabris
Daisy Fleabane     Erigeron strigosus
Smooth Spiderwort     Tradescantia ohiensis
Sensitive Briar     Mimosa microphylla
Appalachian Beebalm     Monarda fistulosa
Woodland Coreopsis (Tickseed)     Coreopsis major
Carolina Wild Petunia     Ruellia caroliniensis
Eastern Redbud     Cercis canadensis
North American Tarnished Plant Bug     Lygus lineolaris
Carolina Phlox     Phlox carolina
Lance-leaf Loosestrife Steironema lanceolatum synonym: Lysimachia lanceolata
Carolina Milkvine     Matelea caroliniensis
Summer Bluet     Houstonia longifolia
American Beech     Fagus grandifolia   
Yucca   Yucca filamentosa
Yucca Plant Bug     Halticotoma valida
Ebony Spleenwort     Asplenium platyneuron
Southern Red Oak     Quercus falacata
Sericea Lespedeza     Lespedeza cuneata
Amanita fungi     Amanita sp.
American Toad     Anaxyrus americanus
Cucumber Magnolia     Magnolia acuminata
Latte Bracket     Trametes lactinea
Trident Maple  Acer buergerianum   
Florida Betony     Stachys floridana
Carolina Horse-nettle     Solanum caroliniense

*Some examples from Flora of the Southeastern U.S. of Carolina common names that do not refer to a scientific name:

Carolina Bellwort, Uvularia puberula

Carolina Spleenwort, Asplenium heteroresiliens Carolina Pineland-cress, Warea cuneifolia Carolina Lily, Lilium michauxii Carolina Sandhill Ironweed, Vernonia angustifolia Carolina Allspice, Calycanthus floridus

Carolina Buckthorn, Sideroxylon lycioides

Carolina Chaffhead, Carphephorus tomentosus

Carolina Green-and-Gold, Chrysogonum repens

Carolina Holly, Ilex ambigua

Carolina Jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens

Carolina Milkweed, Asclepias cinerea

Carolina Sweet Pitcherplant, Sarracenia rubra

Carolina Vervain, Verbena carnea