One advantage of botanizing the same place over and over again is that you get to know what grows where. You remember a plant that draws attention in the spring, forget it in the summer when it’s boring, then notice it again in fall. Because it’s in the same location, you know what it is.
The identity of this dangling blue fruit was a puzzle until I remembered that it’s hanging from the fringetree that put on a floral show in May.
Each flower can become a blue fruit.
(photos by Kate St. John)
Any flower with the word “death” in its name is probably poisonous and deceptively beautiful. This one fits the bill.
Mountain deathcamas or alkali grass (Anticlea elegans) is a threatened native plant found in limy sandy soil, in fens, wet meadows, beaches, on hillsides and canyons in the Great Lakes area and western North America. A member of the trillium family (Melanthiaceae) it blooms in June through August so today, August 31, is probably too late to see it.
Dianne and Bob Machesney visited Cedar Bog, Ohio in July to catch up with the plant in bloom. (Dianne’s photo above.) Here’s another look at it from Wikimedia Commons, photographed at Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada.
Enjoy the plant’s beauty but never eat it! The entire plant contains a deadly alkaloid. Ingestion causes coma and death. Yikes! It earned its name.
(photo at top by Dianne Machesney. Second photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)
This yellow vine — called dodder (Cuscuta sp.) — wraps itself around other plants, inserts its “teeth” into a host, and sucks out water and nutrients. Yes, dodder is a parasite but it doesn’t kill its host. It might even be performing a service.
Learn how dodder finds a host, benefits from fungi, and may help the hosts protect themselves in this 13 minute video by Adam Haritan at Learn Your Land.
(photo by Kate St. John, video by Adam Haritan at Learn Your Land)
August is the perfect time to watch pokeweed change from flower to fruit.
Read about its metamorphosis in this vintage article: Pokeweed In Stages.
(photo by Kate St. John)
What do red petunias and lemons have in common?
They share a cell mechanism that regulates acid.
Ronald Koes at Univ. of Amsterdam discovered that red petunias have a vacuole proton pump that concentrates acid in their flower cells. Without the acid, those petunias would be blue.
He then examined DNA in a variety of citrus fruits, from sweet to very sour, and found that the sour ones have the same cell mechanism.
This discovery gives fruit and flower breeders a DNA marker for achieving desired colors and flavors.
Are red petunia flowers sour? … I’m not going to taste them to find out.
Read more about this discovery in Science Magazine.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons)
Tiny spines line every stem of this flowering plant as its yellow-green flowers reach for the camera.
Can you guess what plant this is?
Hint: Stay away from it!
In a few weeks this plant will be very aggravating. Those tiny green balls are solidly attached to the stems right now but soon they’ll dry out and grab onto your clothes and your dog if you brush past the plant. They’re the fruits of Virginia stickseed (Hackelia virginiana).
Virginia stickseed is so inconspicuous in bloom that we barely notice it at this stage.
The flowers are tiny …
When fertilized they become small burs made of four nutlets facing each other. The outer surface is like velcro.
To give you an idea of their size, I pulled some fruits off the stem. It was hard to detach them because they haven’t dried out yet in early August.
Just wait until they turn brown!
p.s. There’s another less common native plant called small flowered agrimony with a similar fruit. Read more about it in this vintage blog: Slightly Aggravating.
(flowering plant photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original. All other photos by Kate St. John)
Perhaps you already know this but it was news to me: Cinnamon repels ants.
Cinnamon comes from the dried inner bark of a tropical evergreen, the cinnamon tree (Cinnamomum sp.). Ants would eat these trees alive if they could but the cinnamon genus evolved a very effective defense: two chemicals, Cinnamaldehyde and Cinnamyl alcohol, that are toxic to ants. Ants stay away from cinnamon.
In this 9-minute video, the guy from You Can Science It shows that even swarming, warring ants will drop what they’re doing when confronted with cinnamon. He theorizes that it changes their messaging from “Kill the other colony” to “Oh no! It’s cinnamon!” (video begins where he starts discussing cinnamon. Click here for the full video.)
Yes, cinnamon repels ants but it has to be fresh and you have to use a lot of it.
Read more about this experiment and the research behind it in this 2015 blog post at You Can Science It.
(photo and illustration from Wikimedia Commons, video from You Can Science It on YouTube)
29 July 2019
Yesterday in Schenley Park, as we saw several white-tailed deer quite close to us, I remarked that the number of deer in Schenley is too high for the park’s habitat. How can you tell if there are too many deer in your neighborhood? Take a look at the arborvitae.
Many species of arborvitae (Thuja spp.) are planted as privacy hedges including our native Thuja occidentalis or northern whitecedar.
In the wild and in our yards Thuja trees are a favorite food of white-tailed deer. They browse it from the ground up to the height of their outstretched necks.
When the number of deer is in balance with the landscape, arborvitae have a normal tapered shape. You’d never notice that the deer are eating them.
When there are more deer than the landscape can handle, their browsing is intense. The trees are cropped close to the trunk — even down to the bark — because the plants can’t replace their branches fast enough.
If your arborvitae trees look like the row shown at top, there are too many deer in your neighborhood, the landscape is out of balance. “Too many” can happen fast. Deer can double their population in just two to three years.
I photographed that row of damaged trees just six blocks from my house. Yes, my city neighborhood has too many deer now. We could protect our trees with netting as described in this video. Or we could give up and never plant arborvitae again.
p.s. There are too many deer everywhere in the eastern U.S., even in the forest. Read more here.
(photo by Kate St. John)
Puzzled by these red berries?
They’re the fruit of Amur or bush honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) that looked like this in June.
The flowers are white when they bloom. They turn yellow when fertilized.
Red fruits from white flowers.
(photos by Kate St. John)