On the day that shows off the three-leafed clover — the St. Patrick’s Day’s shamrock — what are the odds of finding a lucky four-leafed one?  It’s harder than you think.

First of all you have to find clover.  Clover used to be common in every lawn because it was mixed with grass seed to provide natural fertilizer for the grass.  But now clover is absent because lawn care products poison all broad-leafed plants.  Clover is broad-leafed so it dies, too.  No luck for the folks with “perfect” lawns!

Then you have to find the odd ball four-leafed mutation among a sea of three-leafed plants.  On white clover (Trifolium repens) there are usually three leaflets per leaf.  (That’s one leaf on the stem).  But sometimes there’s a mutation and a recessive gene expresses into four.  What luck!  Even rarer and luckier, five leaflets.

On your first hunt through the clover patch, you have a 1 in 10,000 chance of finding a four-leafed clover and a 1 in a million chance of finding the five-leafed variety, according the Minitab statistics blog.   In other words, you’re lucky to find one.  If you do, mark the spot because more lucky leaves are likely to appear on that plant.

Looking for four-leafed clovers today in March’s still-brown grass may be a challenge but here are some tips to help you search.

And save yourself some time.  Don’t look for luck in a perfect lawn.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 3.0.  Click on the image to see the original)

In two months of freezing weather the wingstem’s papery seed pods have worn away.  The seeds are exposed and the heads are bowed, poised to drop.

I know they’ve changed because the pods stood straight up on January 1.

The seeds are ready for Spring … when it arrives.

(photos by Kate St. John)

Shelf mushrooms frown on a dead ash tree.

Is this a comment on the weather?

(photo by Kate St. John, taken at at Raccoon Creek State Park)

Though this arrangement reminds us of autumn’s beauty, none of the plants are from North America.

• The translucent Silver Dollars are the seed pod remnants of Lunaria annua, a flower native to the Balkans and southwest Asia.
• The orange Chinese Lanterns are the papery fruit containers of Physalis alkekengi, a plant native to southern Europe, southern Asia and Japan.
• The woody branches with orange berries are Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) originally from Asia, invasive in North America.

These plants are here because they’re pretty.

(photo by Kate St. John)

22 October 2014

This may look like an aspen forest but it’s a single tree, 14,000 years old … maybe 80,000 years. The age is in dispute.

At the Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania we were wowed by the news that this stand of quaking aspen, covering 106 acres near Utah’s Fish Lake, is a single “tree.”  All the trunks are shoots from a single clonal root.

Discovered by Burton V. Barnes in 1968 and nicknamed The Trembling Giant, Barnes used morphological clues to determine this Populus tremuloides was from one clonal root.  In the 1990s Michael Grant studied it further and named it Pando.  DNA proves it to be one plant hosting 40,000 stems and weighing 13.2 million pounds.

Quaking aspen is excellent at regenerating from its root system, coming back stronger than ever with more shoots from the same root after it’s cut or burned. Wildfire and low rainfall are probably why this huge aspen is doing so well in Utah.

Pando’s given age on the NPS website is 80,000 years old but there are many theories. No one knows for sure.

p.s. If you want to visit Pando in central Utah, here’s where it is –> Pando tree location.

(photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

It’s a stellar year for bush honeysuckle berries.  The stems above were just a small part of the huge display at Wingfield Pines last week.

Can you count the berries?

Birds like to eat honeysuckle fruit so these berries will disappear over the winter.

Too bad this plant is invasive.

(photos by Kate St. John)