A December to Remember

I’d like to take you for a little walk through December in New Hampshire so those who’ve never been here might know what it’s like. I’m going to start on December 9th, when I was taking photos of Johnny jump ups (Viola tricolor.) As any gardener knows these pretty little flowers don’t mind a little cold but still, seeing them blooming in December is rare here.

Even rarer than Johnny jump ups blooming in December is forsythia blooming at any time beyond June, but I found one shrub blooming happily in the warm sunshine on the same day I saw the Johnny jump ups. And it wasn’t just a single blossom; this bush probably had 30-40 flowers on it. Whether or not it will bloom again in the spring like it should is anyone’s guess.

Flowers weren’t the only thing happily carrying on in the warmth; bright yellow lemon drop fungi (Bisporella citrina) decorated the end of a log. They look like tiny drops of sunshine sprinkled over logs and stumps, and are fairly common. Lemon drops are in the sac fungus family, which refers to their microscopic reproductive structures that resemble wineskins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including ear and cup fungi, jelly babies, and the morel and false morel mushrooms.

Lemon drops start life as a tiny yellow disc and look as if they lie flat on the log, but they actually hover just above the surface on a short stalk. As they age each disc will become cup shaped. The citrina part of the scientific name comes from the Latin citrin, and means “lemon yellow.” They are very small; the smallest in this photo would be barely the size of a period made by a pencil on paper, so a hand or macro lens comes in handy.

Greater celandine (Chelidonium majus) is a tease and always reminds me of spring, but it just lies under the snow all winter staying almost as green as it is here. Greater celandine was purposely introduced from Europe and is now considered an invasive plant but nobody really seems to mind it. When I was a boy we called it mustard because of the yellow sap that stained your hands, but it is in the poppy family and has nothing to do with mustard. The sap was once used to remove warts but science has found that it is toxic and can be extremely irritating, especially to the eyes and skin, so its use isn’t recommended.

Sweet little bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) is the smallest member of the dogwood family that I know of here in New Hampshire. It gets its name from the bunches of red berries that appear after the flowers are pollinated, and I hoped to get some photos of them for you this year but they are apparently popular with the critters because they disappeared quickly. Instead all I can show is its pretty fall leaves. Bunchberry was an important plant to Native Americans. They made tea from it to treat colds and also dried the leaves for smoking. Ashes from the burned plants were used to treat sores and insect bites and the roots were ground and used to treat colic in infants. The plant has strong antiseptic, antibiotic, and anti-inflammatory properties but I love it for its beautiful pure white, dogwood like blossoms.

I wish I could tell you what this is but I don’t know myself. I found several of them growing in damp, sandy soil in full sun and it says liverwort to me, but I can’t be sure. It is a low growing, flat on the ground plant. When I went back to look a little closer they had all curled up and died from the cold. At least I think so.  If you’ve seen them and know what they are I’d love to hear from you.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is our latest blooming shrub, even blooming as late as January in a warm winter, so I wasn’t that surprised to see these blossoms in December. What the real surprise concerning witch hazels was this year was their lack of blossoms. Most of the shrubs that I know of didn’t bloom at all this year, and that’s very strange. In fact I only saw two or three shrubs out of hundreds blooming and I can’t guess what is holding them back, unless it was the unusually cool weather in August. Some Native American tribes steamed witch hazel twigs over hot stones in their sweat lodges to soothe aching muscles and others made tea from it to treat coughs. As is often the case Natives had a use for virtually every part of the plant and witch hazel is still in use today. It can be found as a lotion in almost any drugstore.

Since I was in the neighborhood I had to stop in to see the only plantain leaved sedge (Carex plantaginea) that I know of. It grows in an old stone wall and I like to see its crinkly, foot long evergreen leaves. Each leaf has a prominent midrib and a vein running on either side of it, and this makes identification very easy. I often come to see it in mid spring when it blooms. I wish I’d see more of them but so far in my experience this plant is quite rare here.

Heartleaf foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) blooms in May and seems like a delicate little thing, but in reality it’s a very tough plant that stays green under the snow all winter. Some foamflower plants have leaves that turn pink and maroon but these examples stayed green. Like many plants that hold their leaves through winter, this year’s foliage will only brown and die back in spring, when new ones will appear. It is thought that some plants stay green in winter so they can get a jump on their competitors by photosynthesizing just a short time earlier. Foamflowers form dense mats of foliage and there is usually nothing else seen growing among them.

American wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens,) another of our native evergreens, goes by many other names but to me it will always be the checkerberry. Thanks to my grandmother, who had trouble getting up after keeling and so had me crawl around through the forest looking for its bright red berries, it was the first plant I learned to identify. We loved the minty, spicy flavor of the berries but coming up with only a handful was often difficult. The name checkerberry comes from the chequer tree, which is a mountain ash tree native to Europe and which is thought to have similar berries. From what I’ve seen though the only similarity is the color of the fruit. Oil of wintergreen can be distilled from the leaves of American wintergreen, and they also make a pleasant, minty tea. Native Americans would take a handful of the leaves with them on a hunt and nibble on them to help them breathe easier while running or carrying heavy game.

With a name like evergreen Christmas fern you probably wouldn’t be surprised to see this fern’s green leaves in winter, but these leaves did surprise me because they weren’t the deep green color that they usually have. They were a much paler, blanched green and this is something I’ve never seen before. I can’t even guess what would have caused this nearly indestructible fern to lose its color. Early colonials used to bring the fronds of this fern indoors in the winter, presumably to brighten what must have been a long, cold, dark period for them. If you look closely you can see that each leaf has a tiny “toe,” which makes it look like a Christmas stocking.

You would expect it to get cold in December and we weren’t too deep into the month when I started finding mushrooms like these brown ones frozen absolutely solid, but the cold that froze them was nothing compared to what was to come.

If you want to strike fear into the heart of even the crustiest New Englander just say the words “Ice storm.”  An ice storm coats absolutely everything in ice and as the ice builds up layer after layer on tree branches the branches and sometimes the whole tree will fall, and when they fall they usually take the already weighed down power lines with them. This leaves entire regions; sometimes millions of people, without electricity. Of course it is cold outside as well, and when you don’t have electricity to power your furnace, unless you have a woodstove or fireplace you have only two choices: move or freeze. I have no backup heat source, and all of these thoughts crossed my mind as I walked through the landscape on the morning of Christmas Eve day, right after an ice storm.

An ice storm can be both beautiful and terrible at the same time, but thankfully only a few thousand people lost their power this time and it was restored rather quickly. I’ve known people who have lost their power for close to a month after an ice storm and returned home only to find their house nearly destroyed by frozen and burst water pipes. I don’t think there is any weather event that we fear more.

The ice looked thick on all the trees but in reality was probably only about a quarter inch thick, which isn’t usually enough to cause much damage, thankfully.  Anything above that can mean trouble.

After the ice came about 5 inches of snow on Christmas morning, and this weighed the branches down even more because most of the ice was still on them. Still, though the Christmas tree lights blinked once or twice our power stayed on and I was able to cook our Christmas ham.

After the snow of Christmas day came the cold, and I do mean cold. Record breaking, dangerous cold settled in and hasn’t left yet, nearly a week later. As I write this I’m hoping I don’t wake to -16 °F again tomorrow as I did this morning, because you don’t go outside in that kind of cold, and it’s hard to chronicle what is happening in nature if you can’t get outside. In nearly eight years of writing this blog the weather has never stopped it, but this year could be different. I waited until it warmed to +14 ° and went out to take some photos, but an hour of that was all I could take. I must be getting old or maybe just tired of the cold; when I started this blog I could stay out most of the day if it was above 10 degrees but on this day it was more like work than fun.

But the cold can’t last forever; the earth will continue tilting toward the sun and spring will come once again. Meanwhile I’ll get outside when I can and if I can’t I might have to do a re-blog, which is something I’ve never done and don’t have the slightest idea how to do. It can’t be that hard.

If you’re wondering why I’m showing a photo of an old rock, it isn’t the rock I’m trying to show; it’s the skirt of ice it’s wearing. This stone is in the Ashuelot River and the river has frozen over from bank to bank in places. All I need to see is the river frozen over like that and I don’t need a thermometer to know it has been cold.

I see feathers all the time, but this is the first partridge feather I’ve ever seen. The partridge is an old world game bird that was introduced into the U.S. sometime around 1790. From what I’ve read it hasn’t been very successful here but it can do well on northern prairies and open farmland.  They forage in tall grass and whole flocks of them can often be very close but remain unseen, so that might help explain why I’ve never seen one. I hope they and all the other birds and animals survive this terrible cold. How they do so, I don’t know.

So that’s our look at December in New Hampshire. Maybe January will be warmer so we can all go outside once again.

Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost. ~A.S. Byatt

Thanks for coming by.

 

 

 

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Fall Fungi

After a cold October the first week of November has seen temperatures near 70 degrees each day and this has encouraged the crop of fall mushrooms. The oyster mushrooms in the above photo grew on the underside of a fallen tree. Though they often appear to have no stem oyster mushrooms have off center stems that usually grow out of the side of the log and are hidden by the cap.

Mushrooms are often eaten by tiny worms called nematodes that live on plant and fungal tissue, but not oyster mushrooms. Scientists discovered in 1986 that oyster mushrooms “exude extracellular toxins that stun {nematode] worms, whereupon the mycelium invades its body through its orifices.” What this means is that oyster mushrooms are carnivorous. They also consume bacteria (Pseudomonas and Agrobacterium) in order to get nitrogen and protein.

One of the things that attracts me to mushrooms is the wide variety of beautiful colors and shapes they come in. I think these pink and red ones that I saw growing out of the side of a log might be clustered collybia (Gymnopus acervatus,) but I’m not certain of that. My mushroom books say that clustered collybia is a common fall mushroom but I’m not sure that I’ve seen it.

Mushroom spores are carried by the wind so it is unusual to see them dropping to the forest floor like they have in the above photo. I’ve only seen this happen twice and each time it was on a still, humid day.

Jelly fungi like the witch’s butter (Tremella mesenterica) in the above photo seem to start appearing when it gets colder in the fall and many can be found right through winter, even though they sometimes freeze solid. I almost always find them on stumps and logs; often on oak. After a rain is the best time to find them.

If you roll logs over like I do you’ll see some astoundingly colorful examples of crust fungi, like the blue example in this photo. I find this one a lot on oak logs, especially. Though I’ve tried for a year now I haven’t been able to identify it, so if you know what its name is I’d love to hear from you.

Velvet shank mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes) are a common sight in winter because they fruit very late in the season and sometimes even during a warm spell in winter. I’ve seen them a few times when there was snow on the ground and it’s always a surprise. The orange caps of these mushrooms often shade to brown in the center. The stem is covered in fine downy hairs and that’s where this mushroom’s common name comes from.

These older examples of velvet shank mushrooms on the same tree looked as if they had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar but it turned out to be mold. Nothing is wasted in nature; everything gets eaten in one way or another.

Puffballs and little brown mushrooms vie for space on a log. The mushrooms reminded me of vanilla wafer cookies.

Milk white toothed polypore (Irpex lacteus) is a crust fungus common on fallen branches and rotting logs. The teeth start life as tubes or pores in the spore bearing surface, which breaks apart with age to become tooth like as the above photo shows. As they age these “teeth” will turn brown and that’s how I usually see them. This example was very fresh.

Lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) look like tiny beads of sunshine that have been sprinkled over logs, but they are really sac fungi with stalked fruit bodies. The term “sac fungi” comes from microscopic sexual structures which resemble wineskins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including cup and “ear” fungi, jelly babies, and morel mushrooms. Lemon drops start life as a tiny yellow disc and look as if they lie flat on the log, but each disc hovers just above the surface on a short stalk. As they age each disc will become cup shaped. The “citrina” part of the scientific name comes from the Latin citrin, and means “lemon yellow.” The smaller ones in the above photo are barely as large as a period made by a pencil on paper.

At first I thought this was some kind of strange crust fungus but as I looked closer I realized that it had to be a slime mold, which I don’t usually find this late in the year. After some digging I found that it is called the yellow-fuzz cone slime mold (Hemitrichia clavata.) The fruiting bodies of this slime mold open into goblet shaped cups filled with yellowish fuzzy threads which makes the mass look like felt fabric. Though it appears very orange to me my color finding software tells me that it is indeed yellow. Other examples I’ve seen in the past have been bright, lemon yellow.

I don’t know the name of this tiny mushroom I saw growing on a twig but its shape reminded me of the beautiful dome on the Taj Mahal in India. Wouldn’t it be something if the idea for that type of architecture originally came from a mushroom? I’m convinced that the idea for the beautiful and ancient Chinese blue and white porcelain came from silky dogwood berries (Cornus amomum,) pleasingly dressed in the same blue and white for a short time in summer.

Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. When mushroom spores grow they produce mycelium, which eventually produces fruit, which is the aboveground part that we see. The mycelium in the above photo grew on the underside of an oak log that was in contact with the soil. Most of the mycelium that I see are white but they are occasionally yellow like those pictured.

I think that the crust fungus in the above photo might be an example of an orange crust fungus (Stereum complicatum.) This small fungus has a smooth whitish underside with no pores. The complicatum part of the scientific name means “folded back on itself” and the above photo shows this example just starting that folding. It likes to grow on the logs of deciduous trees.

Wrinkled crust fungi (Phlebia radiata) lies flat on the wood that it grows on, much like a crustose lichen would, and radiate out from a central point. They have no stem, gills or pores and they don’t seem to mind cool weather; the two I’ve seen have been growing at this time of year. I think they’re a very beautiful mushroom and I’d like to see more of them.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. ~Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Thanks for coming by.

 

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A Walk Down a Forgotten Road

Last weekend I hiked an old class 6 road for several miles. Here in New Hampshire a class 6 designation means that the road isn’t maintained by either the state or the town and it could be rough going. Class 6 roads are also subject to gates and bars. This one might have been an old logging road or a road between towns long ago.

A lot of the hike was uphill.

There was a nice stream running alongside the road that looked like a good place to fish for brook trout. I wish I could show this spot to my father-he used to love fishing in places like this.

A deer had walked the road not too long before I did. This area is really out in the middle of nowhere so I’m sure many  different animals live here.

Since it was hunting season I wore a fluorescent yellow hat so people with guns could see me.

I saw some beaver ponds than I plan to re-visit next spring-several areas looked like prime orchid habitat. This beaver dam was about as high as I am tall and was holding back a very large amount of water. If it had let go while I was taking this picture I probably wouldn’t be writing this post. The largest beaver dam ever found is in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park and spans about 2,800 feet. It has taken several generations of beavers since 1970 to build and it can be seen from space. Imagine how much water it is holding!

I saw some nice beard lichen, as well as many other types. I think this is bristly beard (Usnea hirta.) According to my lichen book, studies have shown the usnic acid found in these lichens has antibiotic properties and, in some cases, is more effective than penicillin in treating burns and wounds.

I also saw some pinkish brown jelly fungus. Some types of this fungus are called wood ears because they resemble an ear. They can fruit throughout winter and it is said that they are edible but have little to no flavor. Why, I wonder, would someone bother to eat something that had no flavor? Especially something that might make them sick.

I saw witch’s butter, which is a yellow to pink to reddish orange or orange jelly fungus, growing on a plank that was part of an old wooden bridge that crossed the stream. I think this one might be an apricot jelly (Tremiscus helvelloides.)

Lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) are another type of fungus. These were so bright against this dark stump that it looked as if there was a spotlight on them. These start life as either flat disks like those in the photo or round orbs. As they age they turn more cup shaped. They are usually very small but grow in large groups.

These bracket fungi were brick red and a bit shriveled. I can’t seem to find them in any of my mushroom books.

I saw a tree that was trying to eat its neighbor.

Another tree had the biggest burl I’ve ever seen on it. This must have been at least 2 feet from top to bottom.  A wood turner could make quite a bowl from this one.  Burl grain is dense, deformed, and very hard, which is why it makes such a good material for bowls. Burl wood was a favorite of Native Americans, who used it for bowls, cups, and other objects.

I saw many evergreen ferns including intermediate wood fern (Dryopteris intermedia,) which I think this is. These ferns look much more fragile than evergreen Christmas ferns.

I think my favorite part of this hike was sitting beside still pools like this one, hearing nothing but beech leaves rattling in the wind. The serenity made the 6 hour walk even more worthwhile.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty . . . it beholds every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks for stopping by. Remember-there are hunters in the forest.

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