Things I’ve Seen

Here is another post full of those odd, hard to fit in a post things that I see in my travels.

The rains we had over Memorial Day made jelly fungi swell up and they can be seen everywhere right now. When it is dry, they will once again shrink down until they are almost invisible. This is amber jelly fungus (Exidia recisa,) also called willow brain fungus because it grows on willow trees. It also grows on alder and poplar. Upper, shiny surfaces of this fungus bear spores and the lower, matte surfaces do not. This example doesn’t seem to have many shiny surfaces, but they often do.

 

The rain also helped bring a few mushrooms to fruiting stage. I liked the blue-gray color of the gills on this example. I think it is one of the Amanitas-possibly Amanita porphyria.

NOTE: A reader familiar with the above mushroom has corrected its identity. It is a wine cap mushroom (Stropharia rugosoannulata). Thank you Lisa!

 

When I was in high school there was a wooded area near the building where I and several of my class mates would hang out smoking, gabbing, and generally showing off and acting foolish. One day a friend of mine decided to see if he could catch a chipmunk barehanded. He caught it alright-in more ways than one. That cute little chipmunk instantly transformed into something resembling the Tasmanian devil on Bugs Bunny cartoons and gave him some nasty bites to the fingers.  I can’t remember much of what I learned in that school but I’ve never forgotten how sharp a chipmunk’s teeth are.

I had been seeing photos of pink and purple larch cones (Larix laricina) on other blogs and frankly, I was a little jealous because all I ever saw in New Hampshire were dry, brown cones.  But that was because I’m color blind and wasn’t looking closely enough.  Thanks to Chris and her sister Marie over at the Plants Amaze Me blog, I’m now seeing plum colored larch cones. I think they’re as beautiful as many of the flowers that I’ve seen.

 

This young Canadian hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis) tree was covered with new, light green growth and seemed to be so full of life that I had to take a picture of it. This tree might grow to 100 feet tall and 5 to 6 feet in diameter at maturity. These trees are also called eastern hemlock and, because of their unusual holding power, are often cut for use as railroad ties. Railroad spikes driven into hemlock ties are not as likely to loosen and work their way free as they are in other species.

Last year I misidentified a bracket fungus by calling it chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus .)  (This is a good example of why you don’t eat any old mushroom you read about on blogs.) I thought I’d take another crack at it this year by identifying the fungi in the above photo as chicken of the woods.  Its orange color makes it easy to see, but I don’t see many of them. This mushroom is also called sulfur shelf, and gets one of its common names because of the way that it tastes like fried chicken.

I like macro photography because it often reveals heretofore unseen things on plants that I’ve seen thousands of times.  Good examples are the ribbed and barbed dandelion seeds, called achenes, that my aging eyes will otherwise never see. The seeds are a fine example of how a dandelion flower is actually made up of many small flowers-each flower produces a single seed. If you counted the seeds you would know how many flowers were on the original flower head.

Orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata) is flowering now, as are many other grasses. This is a tall, cool season grass that is shade tolerant and drought resistant. I keep watch for grasses with their pollen ready to fly on the wind at this time of year. It is an interesting event that isn’t often paid much attention to.

Cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) got its common name from its cinnamon colored spore bearing fronds. Once a cinnamon fern begins to fruit it stops producing fronds and puts all of its energy into spore production. The fertile fruiting fronds will be covered top to bottom with spore producing sori. Sori are a fern’s equivalent of flowers.

Royal ferns (Osmunda spectabilis) have also started producing spores. Another name for this fern is “flowering fern,” because someone once thought that the fertile, fruiting fronds looked like bunches of flowers. Royal fern is the only fern that grows on every temperate continent except Australia, which makes it one of the most widespread of all living species. They are also thought to be one of the oldest living things, with fossil records of the Osmundaceae family dating back over 300 million years. Individual plants are thought to be able to live 100 years or more.

Regular readers will no doubt remember that I wrote about commenting on another blog about how New Hampshire seemed to be in a butterfly drought, and then right afterwards had a butterfly land on the trail in front of me. Well, it hasn’t stopped yet. Apparently nature is teaching me a lesson because this white admiral butterfly landed just a few feet away from me the other day.

 Less than a minute after I took a few photos of the white admiral butterfly this red-spotted purple butterfly landed right beside me. When I mowed the lawn that evening there were smaller butterflies landing on the clover blossoms. So okay-I get it. New Hampshire does not have a butterfly drought and I’ll never say that we do, ever again.

Maybe nature is trying to tell me that the butterfly drought might just be my imagination, and maybe all of this came about because I haven’t been paying attention. To that I have to argue that I have been paying attention-to plants, not butterflies.

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests. ~Thorton wilder

Thanks for coming by.