Early April Flowers

I saw a plant with pretty little blue flowers on it that I haven’t seen before. I think it might be called heartleaf (Brunnera macrophyllas,) which is also called Siberian bugloss and great forget-me-not. It’s a perennial garden plant native to the Caucasus that apparently prefers shade.

The flowers were very pretty and did indeed remind me of forget-me-nots.

Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule) gets its common name from the way chickens peck at it. The plant is in the mint family and apparently chickens like it. The amplexicaule part of the scientific name means clasping and describes the way the hairy leaves clasp the stem. The plant is a very early bloomer and blooms throughout winter in warmer areas. Henbit is from Europe and Asia, but I can’t say that it’s invasive because I rarely see it. I’ve read that the leaves, stem, and flowers are edible and have a slightly sweet and peppery flavor. It can be eaten raw or cooked.

This is the first Forsythia blossom that I’ve seen this year. Forsythias shout that spring has arrived and it’s hard to ignore them because they are everywhere. I think you’d have a hard time finding a street in this town that doesn’t have at least one. Forsythia is a plant that nurserymen agree does not have a fragrance, yet some say they love the plant for its fragrance and others say they can’t stand its odor. I’ve never been able to smell one, but I don’t correct those who think they do. If an imagined fragrance seems real to the person doing the smelling, then so be it. Forsythia is a native of Japan and was under cultivation as early as 1850 in England. It is named after William Forsyth (1737-1804), the Scottish botanist who co-founded the Royal Horticultural Society in London. The shrub is said to forecast the weather because as the old saying goes “Three more snows after the Forsythia shows.” I’m hoping it isn’t true.

I’m seeing a lot of chickweed blooming now. I’m not sure if this is common chickweed, which has shiny leaves or mouse ear chickweed, which has hairy leaves. I do see some hairs but they look like they might be coming from the bracts rather than the leaves. In the end it doesn’t matter because it’s a pretty little thing that I’m always happy to see so early in spring.

One of my favorite spring bulbs is striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides, var. libanotica.) Since blue is my favorite color I’m very happy to see them. But I don’t see many; they border on rare here and I hardly ever see them. The flowers are about the same size as the scilla (Scilla siberica) flowers I think most of us are familiar with. They’re beautiful little things and though catalogs will tell you that the blue stripes are found only on the inside of the blossom they actually go through each petal and show on the outside as well as the inside, as the unopened buds in this photo show. I think it must be their simplicity that makes them so beautiful.

Glory of the snow (Chionodoxa forbesii,) doesn’t appear on this blog very often because I only see it occasionally. They remind me of scilla but the flowers are twice the size. I’ve read that they come from south-west Turkey. Though they are said to be one of the earliest blooming spring bulbs I’ve seen quite a few others that are weeks earlier.

That little crocus in the upper right told me that it was just about time to say goodbye for another year but I didn’t really want to hear it. I’ll be sorry to see them go.

Magnolias are blooming and they aren’t looking too frost bitten. Some of these flowers are intensely fragrant. You can just see one of the beautiful purple buds that these flowers come from off to the left.

Someone remarked that they were surprised that I hadn’t been seeing more pollinators, but seeing them and capturing them with a camera are two different things. I’ve seen plenty of them but so far this is the first that was willing to pose. That blossom in the lower right just wanted to do its own thing, apparently. Obviously a leader and not a follower.

The pollinators are doing their job, judging by the amount of seeds I’ve been seeing.

The purple flowers of ground Ivy (Glechoma hederacea), which is in the mint family, have a very light minty scent that isn’t at all overpowering unless you mow down a large patch that has taken over the lawn. Lawns are one of its favorite places to grow and so it has been labeled a terrible weed and kicked to the curb. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and rushes to fill it. I would add that nature also abhors bare ground and so has plants like ground ivy rush to fill it. That’s something that many don’t understand-if a lawn is doing well and is thick and lush weeds can’t get a foothold and won’t grow because there is too much completion. It isn’t a plant’s fault that its seed fell on a piece of bare ground in what we might call a lawn. 

Gosh I thought, have I never seen bleeding heart foliage? I’ve been in a lot of gardens and yes, I’ve seen lots of dicentra foliage, but never like these. The color was beautiful, I thought.

American elm (Ulmus americana) flowers form in small clusters. The flower stems (pedicels) are about half an inch long so they wave in the slightest breeze and that makes them very hard to get a good photo of. They are wind pollinated, so waving in the breeze makes perfect sense. Each tiny flower is about an eighth inch across with red tipped anthers that darken as they age. The whitish feathery bits seen here and there are the female pistils which protrude from the center of each elm flower cluster. If the wind brings it pollen from male anthers it will form small, round, flat, winged seeds called samaras. I remember them falling by the many millions when I was a boy; raining down enough so you couldn’t even see the color of the road beneath them.

Here is a closer look at the male anthers. They’re a pretty plum color for a short time. Male flowers have 7 to 9 stamens with these dark anthers. Each male flower is about 1/8 of an inch across and dangles at the end of a long flower stalk (Pedicel.)

I keep vacillating between red maple and silver maple when I see seeds (samaras) forming with white hairs on them. I think the answer might be that when very young red maple samaras are bright red with white hairs which are lost as they age, and that’s what is confusing me. You can see the white hairs in these buds which are just showing samaras, but you won’t see them for long because they disappear in just a couple of days. They’re really quite beautiful and worth looking for.

There is a very short time when the first leaf of skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) really does look like cabbage but you wouldn’t want it with your corned beef. It comes by its common name honestly because it does have a skunk like odor. Whether or not it tastes like it smells is anyone’s guess; I don’t know anyone who has ever eaten it. I’ve read that eating the leaves can cause burning and inflammation, and that the roots should be considered toxic. One Native American tribe inhaled the odor of the crushed leaves to cure headache or toothache, but I wonder if the sharp odor didn’t simply take their minds off the pain.

A passing glance might tell you that you had stumbled onto a large group of dandelions, but unless you looked a little closer, you’d be wrong.

A closer look would tell you this isn’t a dandelion at all; it’s a coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara.) One way to tell is the lack of leaves at the base of the flower stalk, because coltsfoot leaves don’t appear until after the flowers have finished blooming. They’re very pretty little flowers but they aren’t with us long. Depending on the weather and how hot it gets I’ve seen them disappear in two weeks. Coltsfoot is native to Europe and Asia and was brought here by early settlers. It has been used medicinally for centuries and another name for it is coughwort.

Coltsfoot flowers are often smaller than dandelions and they are usually flat, rather than the mounded shape of a dandelion. But the real clincher is the stem, which is scaly like that seen here. Dandelion stems are smooth.

Ice out on Half Moon Pond in Hancock came about a month early this year. It’s so nice to see the water again. You can also see a dusting of snow on Mount Skatutakee there in the background. Skatutakee is thought to be an Abenaki (Algonquin) word for fire, according to the book Native American Placenames of the United States By William Bright.

Not even 24 hours before this photo was taken all I saw were buds when I visited the place where the spring beauties (Claytonia virginica) grow, but this day I saw many blossoms. Soon there will be thousands of them carpeting the forest floor. They’re such small flowers; each one is only slightly bigger than an aspirin, but there is a lot of beauty packed into a small package.

I always try to find the flower with the deepest color. I’ve read that it is the amount of sunlight that determines color in a spring beauty blossom. The deeper the shade, the more intense the color, so I look for them in more shaded areas. I’ve seen some that were almost pure white but no matter where I find them they’re always beautiful. Another name for them is “good morning spring.”

I should let everybody know that, though New Hampshire has a “stay at home” order like most states, we are still able to go outside for exercise as long as we don’t do it in groups. I’m lucky enough to still have a job so I’m also outside at work all day and not breaking any rules by bringing the beauty of nature to you each week. I almost always go into the woods alone even without such an order in place and I meet very few people there, so for now there is no real danger involved in keeping this blog going.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~Thornton Wilder

Thanks for coming by. Stay safe everyone.  

 

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Things I’ve Seen

After an extended nice warm January thaw we were brought back to reality by a sleet / freezing rain / snow/ rain storm that immediately froze into concrete like ice, making it treacherous to walk just about anywhere. This was the view across Half Moon Pond in Hancock to Mount Skatutakee, taken by cell phone the next morning. The pond Ice was cold but the air was warm, and that meant fog.

It wasn’t fog but a cloud that tried to hide the summit of Mount Monadnock at Perkin’s Pond in Troy recently. There is still very little snow on this, the sunny side of the mountain. Every time it snows up there the sun melts it before it snows again, resulting in the least snowy Monadnock summit I’ve seen in a while.

My thoughts turned from the lofty heights of mountaintops to the lowly depths of puddle mud when I found this. I don’t know if the mud froze and made these patterns or if ice on the puddle made them before it melted and then evaporated. Mud puddles can be very interesting things.

The white cushion moss (Leucobryum glaucum) growing on a boulder made me want to reach out and pet it, and so I did. Though it looks like it might be stiff and prickly it’s actually quite soft. White cushion moss gets its common name from the way it turns a whitish color when it dries out so even though it was surrounded by ice this one was very dry. A perfect example of the winter desert when, though there is plenty of snow and ice, it’s too cold for any melt water to benefit plants.

Crowded parchment fungus (Stereum complicatum) lived up to its name on this log. The complicatum part of its scientific name means “folded back on itself.” This fungus often grows on fallen oak limbs and parasitizes some types of jelly fungi. It causes white rot of the heartwood when it grows on standing trees.

I spoke about finding a very young milk white toothed polypore (Irpex lacteus) in my last post. Since then I’ve seen older ones and this is one of them. The “teeth” are actually ragged bits of spore bearing tissue. They start life as tubes or pores and break apart and turn brown as they age. Milk white toothed polypores appear very late in the year and are considered “winter mushrooms.” Look for them in the undersides of tree branches.

I’ve been looking for turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) that were wearing something other than brown all year and I finally found some that looked bluish gray. They were a little dry I think, because of their wilted looking edges, or maybe they were just old. This fungus been used medicinally by the Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans for thousands of years and the FDA has approved them for trials on cancer patients. They’re found in forests all over the world from Europe to Asia in the US and Russia.

These mushrooms were well past their prime but I didn’t care because I loved their color and texture and the way they looked as if they had been sculpted and bronzed. In death they were far more beautiful than they had been in life.

Birds aren’t eating staghorn sumac berries but they never seem to in this area until the end of winter. I’ve heard that birds shun them because they’re low in fat, but I wonder if that’s true of all birds because when birds like red winged blackbirds return in spring the berries disappear quickly. It’s a head scratcher because Jerry from the Quiet Solo Pursuits blog in Michigan says that the birds there gobble them up.

Birds haven’t eaten these rose hips either but they were as big as grapes, so maybe swallowing them is a problem. Fresh or dried rose hips are higher in vitamin C than citrus fruits and they can be used in many recipes, including a tea that is very soothing for a sore throat. The seeds inside rose hips should always be removed before use though, because they have a hairy covering that can be irritating. They can cost as much as $25.00 per pound in health food stores, which is more than the price of a rose bush, so it is worth growing your own if you have a fondness for them. The best time to harvest rose hips is after the first frost because frost removes some of the tartness. Choose fruit that is firm and has good, deep color. These examples were not firm but they had plenty of color.

These cherries were the size of peas, so it wasn’t size that turned the birds away from them. I think they were chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) which are dark purple / black when ripe, but I wonder if these might have frozen before they had a chance to ripen. Robins, thrushes, grosbeaks, woodpeckers, jays, bluebirds, catbirds, kingbirds, and grouse eat chokecherries, and so do mice, voles, chipmunks, squirrels, skunks, foxes, deer, bear, and moose. The inner bark of the chokecherry was used by Native Americans in the smoking mixture known as kinnikinnick to improve the taste of the bearberry leaf, which was the chief ingredient for many tribes.

I don’t see many red elderberry bushes (Sambucus racemosa) but I’m always happy when I do because then I get to see their chubby plum colored buds, which are some of my favorites. Later on the plant will have bright scarlet fruits that birds love. The berries are said to be toxic but they were cooked and eaten by Native Americans so I’m sure they knew how to cook them in such a way as to remove the toxicity. They also used them medicinally. Red elderberry is one of two elderberries native to New Hampshire. The other is the common or black elderberry (Sambucus nigra V. canadensis) which has black berries and isn’t toxic.

I had to go and visit one of my favorite lichens; the poplar sunburst lichen (Xanthomendoza hasseana.) It grows on a tree near a retention pond in Keene, right next to a shopping mall. I’ve visited it off and on for years now and it has never stopped producing spores. The sucker like, cup shaped bits are its fruiting bodies (Apothecia) where the spores are produced. Will it ever stop producing spores? After watching it do so for about 4 years now, I doubt it. In fact, it could go on for millennia:

Another sunburst lichen, the elegant sunburst (Xanthoria elegans) was exposed to ultraviolet radiation, cosmic radiation, and the vacuum of space for one and a half years and when it was brought back to earth it grew on as if nothing had happened. Many believe that lichens are virtually indestructible and are therefore as close to immortal as any earthly being can be.

As I finished admiring the poplar sunburst lichen my attention was drawn to another lichen that seemed to be winking at me. It was a star rosette lichen (Physcia stellaris), which has dark brown apothecia that are often pruinose. Pruinose refers to a white, waxy, powdery coating like that found on blueberries, plums, and first year black raspberry canes. I’ve noticed by watching smoky eye boulder lichens, which also have pruinose apothecia, that the coating can reflect light in different ways, sometimes appearing gray and at other times more blue. These examples were kind of blue gray but it was a cloudy day.

I keep running into black birches (Betula lenta) with what appears to be a deformity in their buds. I wouldn’t call it witches broom but the buds grow in a tightly packed cluster which isn’t normal, judging by the other buds on the trees. I haven’t been able to find out anything about it from any source, so if you happen to know I’d love to hear from you.

This is what a normal black birch bud looks like. Birch beer was once made from the black birch and so was oil of wintergreen. If you aren’t sure if the tree you see is a black birch just chew a twig. If it’s a black birch it will taste like wintergreen. So many trees were taken to make oil of wintergreen that black birch is still hard to find in many areas today.

I saw something on a tree that seemed very pale for this time of year. Most mosses are a deep green in winter so this chartreuse color really stood out. After a little research I think it is a liverwort called flat-leaved scalewort (Radula complanata.) I’ve read that it is common on trees and shrubs but I’ve never seen it. Plants are usually flattened, either forming patches like the one seen above or single stems creeping among mosses.

A closer look at the liverwort shows round, flattened, overlapping leaves which are quite small. Each one is no more than 1/16  of an inch across. The even smaller, darker leaves look to be part of the same plant but I can find very little information on this liverwort. It is said to like sunny, sheltered, moist conditions and will sometimes grow on streamside rocks. Liverworts are epiphytes that take nothing from the trees they grow on. I’ve read that they were the first land plants to evolve about 500,000 million years ago and are the oldest living land plants.

The days are finally getting longer but it’s still too dark to do any serious photography before or after work. I took this shot of ice covered Half Moon Pond in Hancock at 7:30 one recent morning and it looks like the sun was setting rather than rising. The lack of light on weekdays leaves only weekends for taking photos and lately you can barely find the sun, even on a weekend. Our weather predicting groundhog Punxsutawney Phil just predicted six more weeks of winter (which just happens to coincide with the six weeks of winter left on the calendar) but the days are getting longer and not even old Punxsutawney Phil can stop that. I’m very much looking forward to being able to spend more time in the woods.

The days are short
The sun a spark
Hung thin between
The dark and dark.
 ~John Updike

Thanks for stopping in.

 

 

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Things I’ve Seen

The above photo makes me feel that I should say good morning, so please consider it done. I saw this scene on my way to work one morning but since I don’t bring the camera that I use for landscape photos to work with me, I had to use my cellphone. It was a cold morning but the pastel sky was plenty beautiful enough to stop and gaze at. My color finding software tells me it was colored  peach puff, papaya whip, and Alice blue. How bare the trees are becoming.

The swamp dewberries (Rubus hispidus) are certainly colorful this year. In June this trailing vine blooms with white flowers that look a lot like strawberry flowers. The fruit looks more like a black raspberry than anything else and is said to be very sour. Native Americans had many medicinal uses for this plant, including treating coughs, fever and consumption. Swamp dewberry, as its name implies, is a good indicator of a wetland or moist soil that doesn’t dry out.

Some of the smaller oaks are hanging on to their leaves but they’re dropping quickly from the larger trees now.

Jack frost has come knocking. These crystals grew on my windshield overnight and though I wasn’t happy about the cold that made them I was happy to see them, because I love looking at the many  shapes that frost crystals form in.

Frost had found these mushrooms and turned them to purple jelly. I’m not sure what they started life as.

Frost rimmed the edges of these wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana) leaves too. There is a lot of beauty to be found in the colder months.

At this time of year I always start rolling logs over, hoping to find the beautiful but rare cobalt crust fungus (Terana caerulea,) but usually I find this lighter shade of blue instead. After several years of trying to identify this fungus I’ve finally found a name for it: Byssocorticium atrovirens. Apparently its common name is simply blue crust fungus, which is good because that’s what I’ve been calling it. Crust fungi are called resupinate fungi and have flat, crust like fruiting bodies which usually appear on the undersides of fallen branches and logs. Resupinate means upside down, and that’s what many crust fungi appear to be. Their spore bearing surface can be wrinkled, smooth, warty, toothed, or porous and though they appear on the undersides of logs the main body of the fungus is in the wood, slowly decomposing it. They seem to be the least understood of all the fungi.

While rolling logs over to look for blue crust fungi I found these mosses that had been blanched almost white from having no sunlight reach them. They reminded me of something I’d see on a coral reef under the sea. I’m guessing that they originally grew on the tree in sunlight before it fell, and when it fell they ended up on the underside of the log. The odd part is how they continued to grow even with no sun light. That urge inside of plants that makes them reach for light must be very strong indeed.

We seem to be having weekly rainy days now and the drought’s grip on the land is slowly easing. One showery day at about 1:00 pm a sun beam peeked through the clouds just long enough and in just the right spot to light up Mount Skatutakee in Hancock. I always trust that sunbeams falling in a concentrated area like this will show me something interesting because they always have, so now I’m going to have to climb Mount Skatutakee. From what I’ve heard it takes 4 hours but at my pace it will most likely take 6 or more; I’m sure there will be lots of wonders to see. The name Skatutakee is pronounced  Skuh – TOO -tuh – kee and is said to come from two Native American Abenaki words that mean “land” and “fire,” so there might have once been a forest fire there. It certainly looked like it was burning on this day.

We can’t see the wind but we can often see what it has done. In this case it blew a dead plant stalk around in a complete circle and the stalk marked the river sand as it twirled around and around. It’s one of the more unusual things I’ve seen lately.

I don’t see many stinkhorn fungi and I’ve wondered if that was because I wasn’t looking in the right place. This example was sticking out of a very old and very rotted yellow birch log. It is the common stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus) and I have to say that, even though stinkhorns are said to have an odor like rotting meat, I didn’t smell a thing when I was taking its photo. The green conical cap is also said to be slimy but it didn’t look it. This mushroom uses its carrion like odor to attracts insects, which are said to disperse its sticky spores.

It’s friend took a turn. Whether it was for the better or worse I don’t know. The old birch log it was on must have had 8-10 different kinds of mushrooms growing on it.

False turkey tail fungus (Stereum ostrea) looks a lot like true turkey tail fungus (Trametes versicolor) but it doesn’t have pores on its underside and I find that it often comes in shades of orange. It always helps to look at the underside of fungi when trying to identify them.

Eastern larch trees, also called tamarack larch or just tamarack, (Larix laricina) turn brilliant orange yellow in the fall and are one of the few conifers that shed their needles in winter. They like to grow in wet, swampy places and seeds that fall on dry ground usually won’t germinate. Tamarack was an important tree to Native Americans; some used branches and bark to make snow shoes and others used the bark from the roots to sew canoes. The Ojibwe people called the tree “muckigwatig,” meaning “swamp tree” and used parts of it to make medicine.

Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) is a native evergreen with small, heart shaped leaves on creeping stems which grow at ground level. In spring it has white trumpet shaped flowers that grow in pairs and share a single ovary. In the fall it has bright red berries which are edible but close to tasteless. I leave them for the turkeys, which seem to love them. Bobwhites, grouse, red foxes, skunks, and white-footed mice are also said to eat them.

The unusual fused ovary on the partridgeberry’s twin blossoms form one berry, and you can always see where the two flowers were by looking for the dimples on the berry.

Poison ivy berries are ripening to white but until I saw this photo I didn’t know how it happened. It looks as if there is a brown shell around each white berry, and it looks as if the shell falls away to reveal it. Many songbirds eat the white berries, and deer eat the plant’s leaves. In fact there doesn’t seem to be an animal or bird that the plant bothers, but it sure bothers most humans by causing an always itchy, sometimes painful, and rarely dangerous rash. I get the rash every year but I’m lucky that it stays on the part of my body that touched the plant and doesn’t spread. That usually means a hand, knee, or ankle will itch for a week.

An oak leaf had fallen with an apple gall still attached. Apple galls are caused by a wasp (Amphibolips confluenta) called the oak apple gall wasp. In May, the female wasp emerges from underground and injects one or more eggs into the mid-vein of an oak leaf. As it grows the wasp larva causes the leaf to form a round gall. Galls that form on leaves are less harmful to the tree than those that form on twigs, but neither causes any real damage.

Both the leaf and gall together weighed next to nothing and the hole in the gall told me that the resident wasp had most likely flown the coop.

I don’t know its name but the hill on the other side of half-moon pond in Hancock still shows a little color. Even so, fall is nearly over now. We’ve had frosts, freezes and were lucky enough to have Indian summer twice and though we rarely talk about it we all know what comes next in the natural progression of the 4 seasons. But it’s only for 3 months, and the weather people now tell us that it will be “normal.”

Every corny thing that’s said about living with nature – being in harmony with the earth, feeling the cycle of the seasons – happens to be true. ~Susan Orlean

Thanks for coming by.

 

 

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