Have you ever noticed this hairy-looking vine?  Perhaps you’ve seen birds eating its berries.

What plant is this?

On Throw Back Thursday, learn about Winter Weeds: Poison Ivy.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

American Holly (Ilex opaca) occurs naturally in the eastern U.S. from New Jersey to Florida to east Texas.

I always see it in southeastern Virginia but rarely find it in western Pennsylvania.

If it’s present, you’ll notice holly in winter because it’s one of the few green plants in January.  Keep an eye out for it, even in Pennsylvania. This young plant was photographed in Lancaster County.

Happy holly days!

😉

(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)

I’m very fond of the color purple so I was captivated by these stunning berries on a bush in someone’s garden.  I’m not surprised that they’re called beautyberries.

Beautyberry (Callicarpa) is a mostly-tropical plant native to Asia, Australia, Madagascar, and the Americas.  American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) ranges from Maryland to Florida so garden plants here in Pittsburgh could be native cultivars or imported.

Amazingly, American beautyberry contains four chemicals that can be used as mosquito repellent.  USDA has patented the use of one of them: callicarpenal.

(photo by Kate St. John)

After weeks of dry weather it finally rained in late October and … wow!   Local wild food enthusiast and mushroom hunter, Adam Haritan, found a mother lode of giant puffball mushrooms in western Pennsylvania’s woods.

Join in his enthusiasm and learn about these edible mushrooms in his Learn Your Land video above. Subscribe to his YouTube channel to get periodic updates on mushrooms and edible plants.

And this weekend you’ll have an opportunity to learn from Adam Haritan in person when he presents “Late Autumn Foraging For Edible Wild Plants & Mushrooms” at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library on Sunday, November 5th, 2-4pm.  This free event is hosted by the Mt. Lebanon Nature Conservancy.  ( Map and info here.)

(video at Learn Your Land on YouTube)

1 November 2017

How do you tell the sex of a spicebush?  In autumn the females have bright red fruit.

Flowering plants (angiosperms) have different ways of reproducing:

• 90% of species have “perfect” flowers containing both male and female parts — stamens and pistils.  “Perfect” flowers are bisexual or hermaphrodites.
• Monoecious species have separate male and female flowers on the same plant.  Did you know that corn (maize) is monoecious?  The tassle on top is the male flower; the corncob grows from the female flower.
• Dioecious species have male and female flowers on separate plants.  Only 6% of flowering plants are dioecious, mostly woody species.

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) is dioecious but I didn’t know that when I encountered this explosion of spicebush berries in the Laurel Highlands.

Right next to the fruit-laden bush was another one with no fruit at all — just tiny green knobs, the buds for next spring.  Why?

Aha!  This plant is male.

If you know what to look for you can sex spicebush at any time of year but autumn is the easiest. In spring the spicebush flowers are so small that you’ll want a magnifying glass to see their tiny structures.

For closeups of male and female spicebush flowers click here at the Awesome Native Plants website.

(photos by Kate St. John)

October is cranberry harvest time in Massachusetts.  Last week at Cape Cod my sister-in-law took us to see a flooded cranberry bog, red with floating cranberries.

Cranberries are native perennial vines that grow in sandy soil.  Before mechanization people used to pick them by hand, crawling around on their hands and knees as shown in this painting of Nantucket in 1880.

Nowadays the harvest uses machines and this unique quality of the cranberry — it floats.

In the photo at top, my sister-in-law describes how the bog is dry during the growing season.  In the spring, honeybees are brought in to pollinate the cranberry flowers.  Then in October when the berries are ripe, workers flood the bog and use a thresher machine to knock the berries off the underwater vines.  The berries float, the workers corral the berries, and machines lift the cranberries out of the bog.

My husband went back a few days later to see the rest of the process.  Here the cranberries are corralled and shuttled up out of the bog into the large black truck.

This 5 minute video shows the entire process.

The cranberry harvest is underway this month in these northern states and provinces: New Jersey, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Quebec.

(photos of a Cape Cod cranberry bog by Kate and Rick St. John. Painting of The Cranberry Harvest on the Island of Nantucket, 1880 by Jonathan Eastman Johnson via Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original.  Video from True Food TV via YouTube)