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)

On Throw Back Thursday:

This mushroom is easy to find right now.  It’s edible(*) and it tastes like chicken so it’s called Chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus).

I found a huge one years ago with a chicken-sized chunk taken out of it.  Apparently a mushroom hunter had been there ahead of me, as described in this 2010 article: Chicken of the Woods

But don’t listen to me when it comes to mushrooms.  (I know nothing!)  Learn about Chicken-of-the-woods in this video by Adam Haritan of Learn Your Land.

(*) Note that an “edible mushroom” can sometimes be poisonous.  Be sure you know what you’re doing!

(photo by Chuck Tague, video by Adam Haritan)

24 September 2017

In July and August I noticed something I’d never seen before along the trails of western Pennsylvania — scattered instances of leaves turning white.

The leaves had been green but now their tips or even whole branches are white. The plant below had advanced to the stage where some of the stems were completely white.

The condition is called chlorosis and it means the plant is not producing enough chlorophyll to look green.  Since chlorophyll uses sunlight to make food for the plant, it’s a sign the plant is in distress.  But why?

Causes of chlorosis are wide-ranging.  Here’s the list from Wikipedia:

• a specific mineral deficiency in the soil, such as iron, magnesium or zinc
• deficient nitrogen and/or proteins
• a soil pH at which minerals become unavailable for absorption by the roots
• poor drainage (waterlogged roots)
• damaged and/or compacted roots
• pesticides and particularly herbicides may cause chlorosis, both to target weeds and occasionally to the crop being treated.
• exposure to sulphur dioxide
• ozone injury to sensitive plants
• presence of any number of bacterial pathogens, for instance Pseudomonas syringae pv. tagetis that causes complete chlorosis on Asteraceae.

The white plants I’ve seen are isolated incidents among hundreds of green plants. Some of these causes would have created damage on nearby plants as well. It seems to me that these causes don’t apply: Poor drainage, Pesticides or herbicides, Exposure to sulphur dioxide air pollution, Ozone injury to sensitive plants [These are hardy weed plants.]

Interestingly, the plants I photographed are in the Aster Family (Asteraceae) and one of them has complete chlorosis.

Was the 2017 growing season especially bad for the bacteria mentioned above?  Or does chlorosis happen every year and I’ve just not noticed?

If you know more about this condition in the wild, please leave a comment.  I’m really curious!

(photos by Kate St. John)

Any trip outdoors this month will find a lot of goldenrods in North America.  Here are just a few of the species I’ve photographed over the years.  All of them are different.

Can I tell you their names? No. Goldenrods are notoriously hard to identify.

Above, a beautiful bushy goldenrod at Acadia National Park in Maine.

Below, the classic goldenrod shape in Pittsburgh: a tall plant with narrow alternate leaves and a tassel of yellow flowers on top.  To identify it I’d need more information than the photo provides.  For instance:  Do the leaves have two or three prominent veins?  Are they toothed or entire?  Is the main stem smooth or downy or both?

In the photo below: An unusual goldenrod shape photographed in Pittsburgh. The plant reaches out horizontally with flowers perched in clusters on top of the stem. The leaves are long and narrow.  Perhaps it’s blue-stemmed or wreath goldenrod.

This one is a stand-up spike of yellow flowers with egg-shaped alternate leaves, found in Pittsburgh.

Is this goldenrod the same species as the tall tassel above?  I don’t know.

I’ve never seen white goldenrods in Pittsburgh. This spike of white flowers was photographed at Acadia National Park in Maine.

And finally, a ball-shaped flower cluster with long leaves, growing in a granite crack at Acadia National Park.

So much variety.  So many goldenrods.  And often so hard to identify.

(photos by Kate St.John)

Early in June I noticed curled leaves on all the trees and bushes by a road in my neighborhood.  Though I suspected it was caused by herbicide I was puzzled that other plants were not brown and dead.  Why would someone use an herbicide that maimed but didn’t kill?  I forgot about it until I saw a photo of soybeans that looked the same way.

This summer, farmers from Arkansas to Ohio and North Dakota have experienced crop loss from a new formulation of the herbicide dicamba.  Dicamba has been used for a long time but this spring Monsanto, BASF and DuPont reformulated it for use with new genetically engineered dicamba-resistant soybeans.

The problem is this:  If your neighbor plants the new soybeans your fields could be affected.   The new dicamba volatilizes (evaporates) from the soil and leaves where it’s applied and drifts as much as half a mile causing crop loss and low yield in everything else including non-resistant soybeans, tomatoes, watermelons, grapes, pumpkins and other vegetables.

At first affected farmers were reluctant to report a problem caused by their neighbors but crop losses have been so severe — up to 80% — that Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee placed restrictions on dicamba use this summer and many have asked EPA to reconsider its approval.

I’ll never know if dicamba was used in my neighborhood but I know now that an herbicide can do this.

Meanwhile the leaves are still in distress.  I took these photos last week.

(photos by Kate St. John)

Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is such a deep red color that it looks like velvet.

From a distance you’ll see this perennial along streambanks, in wet places and swamps. The plant is as much as four feet tall.

It blooms in late summer and early fall, just in time for migrating hummingbirds to sip its nectar on their way south.

(photo by Kate St. John)