This week in Schenley Park, the hillsides are dotted with the white plumes of False Solomon’s Seal.
False Solomon’s Seal is a perennial plant in the Lily family that grows in moist woods and thickets. It goes by many names including Solomon’s plume, False Spikenard, Treacleberry, Maianthemum racemosum and Smilacina racemosa.
The plant sprouts every year from creeping rhizomes so you usually find its long slightly zigzag stems in sizable clumps. The leaves’ upper surface is parallel to the stem so the plants lean to one side. Interestingly, an entire clump tends to lean the same direction, all of them showing their leaves to the sun and their white flowers to pollinating bees and beetles. It looks like the whole clump is doing “The Wave.”
False Solomon’s Seal produces red berries in the fall that are eaten by birds and rodents. People sometimes use the plant as a laxative and deer browse it occasionally but it’s not one of their favorites. Perhaps the deer know about its laxative effects.
So this is False Solomon’s Seal, but what plant is “true”… and why? Leave a comment with your answer.
(photo from Wikipedia. Click on the photo to see the original)
Miami Mist is blooming now in western Pennsylvania… but good luck finding it.
It’s so unusual in western Pennsylvania that botany buffs make special trips to see it. The only place I’ve seen it is at Enlow Fork. On Friday, Dianne Machesney found it for the first time at Raccoon Creek State Park where she took this picture.
Miami Mist (Phacelia purshii) is a strangely named flower. The word “mist” probably comes from its fringed leaves but the “Miami” part is a mystery.
The plant ranges from Ontario to Georgia but does not grow in Florida. My best guess at “Miami” is that it was named in Ohio or Indiana where the word “Miami” occurs frequently. There are three rivers (the Great Miami, the Little Miami and the Maumee), many towns and townships, a county and a university all named for the Miami tribe of Native Americans.
This hunch is bolstered by the flower’s scientific species name. Purshii refers to “Frederická Traugott Pursh, a Saxon explorer, collector, horticulturist and author who received plant collections from the Lewis and Clark expedition”(*) and was first to publish on them.
Meriweather Lewis began his expedition in Pittsburgh and rafted down the Ohio River to William Clark’s home at the Falls of the Ohio in Indiana. There they joined forces and solidified plans for the expedition they officially launched near St. Louis. I wonder if Lewis collected Miami Mist during that first leg of his journey… Of course, this is just speculation on my part.
Miami Mist is common in Kentucky and Tennessee but it’s rare here. If you find it this year, it may not be in the same place next year because it’s an annual plant.
Miami Mist keeps us guessing.
(photo by Dianne Machesney)
p.s. On the abundant side of the scale, I’ve been seeing a lot of Mayapple “umbrellas.”
p.p.s. The Fringetree is now blooming in Schenley Park.
On Tuesday I mentioned that Blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia verna) is blooming at Cedar Creek Park, but I didn’t show you what it looks like.
Here it is, with two pink flowers as rare as four-leaf clovers.
Blue-eyed Mary is typically blue and white but there are places where you can find pink ones. Dianne Machesney photographed these at Braddocks Trail Park in North Huntingdon Township where she says about 10% of the flowers are pink.
This weekend I’m going to Enlow Fork where 99% them are blue.
UPDATE: Sunday May 1 is the annual Enlow Fork Wildflower Walk, sponsored by the Wheeling Creek Watershed Association. (Enlow Fork’s full name is “Enlow Fork of Wheeling Creek.”) Click here for more information about the event. I was there Friday and yes, the Blue-eyed Mary are carpeting the ground!
The Cedar Creek valley was gorgeous. The eastern hillside was carpeted in white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum), the valley was coated in Blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia verna) and the western hill was a deep shade of blue, colored by Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) pictured here.
This is the week to see spring wildflowers in southwestern Pennsylvania. Don’t miss them!
In late April on a sunny day in western Pennsylvania you’ll find the forest floor carpeted with small pale pink flowers.
The flowers are actually white with tiny pink veins that guide insects to the center, “Follow this road to the nectar.”
These are Spring Beauties, a light sensitive flower in the Purslane family that doesn’t open unless the sun comes out. Needless to say, with all the rain these 1/2″ flowers haven’t had much “face time” lately.
There are two kinds of Spring Beauty in our area. The most common species is called simply Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) and has thin ribbon-like leaves. It’s quite easy to find in moist woods.
Carolina Spring Beauty (Claytonia caroliniana), pictured above, has wide oval leaves and is rare in western Pennsylvania. The leaves are the clue. The flowers are the same on both.
On the next sunny day — perhaps tomorrow — take a look in the woods for the beauties of spring.
Here’s a scary thought: Bush honeysuckle increases the risk of tick-borne disease.
It’s not only scary, it’s true!
A team of scientists with tick expert Brian F. Allan from Washington University in St. Louis conducted an extensive study of the relationship between ticks, deer and the invasive plant known as bush honeysuckle.
Though the study was done in the suburbs of St. Louis what they learned applies to Pennsylvania as well. Namely, that in dense stands of bush honeysuckle there are a lot more deer than usual, a lot more ticks than usual, and a higher proportion of the ticks carry disease.
More deer than usual? The researchers ran deer density counts inside and outside the honeysuckle areas. In the honeysuckle zone there were 5 times as many deer.
A lot of ticks? You bet! One of Brian Allan’s tick traps caught 5,000 nymphal stage ticks in a single location. Ticks don’t walk far to get a meal — less than 10 feet — so that spot in the honeysuckle was loaded and dangerous.
Even worse, when they ground up the ticks and tested the mash for bacterial and deer DNA, they discovered that ticks found inside the honeysuckle zone were 10 times more likely to carry bacterial disease than those outside — and they caught it from deer blood.
So why do deer like honeysuckle so much?
People used to think that deer liked honeysuckle for its berries but the researchers proved the deer don’t care about the fruit. Deer hang out in the honeysuckle because it provides great cover. It’s 18% denser than our native vegetation and it’s first to leaf out in the spring (it’s the only green shrub right now) and it’s last to lose leaves in the fall. Deer love it. They sleep there.
The result is that you’re much more likely to catch a tick-borne disease if there’s a lot of bush honeysuckle around. In Missouri you’ll catch Ehrlichiosis, in Pennsylvania, Lyme disease.
Bush honeysuckle is everywhere, especially in parks and gamelands.
But there’s one positive take-away. This news may prompt people to try harder to eradicate bush honeysuckle — and that would make our native plants very happy.
Despite the cold and potential for snow I keep looking for signs of spring.
There’s not a lot out there. I found small bittercress and coltsfoot blooming on south-facing slopes last Sunday and I found rosettes of these leaves, noticable because they had a purplish tinge all winter (photo at left) and now they’re turning green (photo at right).
This is Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) a biennial plant native to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Whether it hitchhiked to North America or was intentionally imported as a culinary herb (it tastes like garlic) it hasn’t been here all that long. It was first recorded on Long Island in the 1860s.
Since then garlic mustard has invaded the ecological niche occupied by our favorite spring plants. It easily becomes the dominant plant of forest and floodplain because:
It starts growing in the spring before our native plants dare show their heads.
Its seeds are viable for five years.
It produces allelochemicals that suppress the good fungi our native plants rely on, and
Deer don’t eat it. 🙁
So though I’m usually happy to find green leaves in March, these are not a good sign.
For more information on garlic mustard and what you can do about it, click here.
Despite the cold snap, here’s a happy sign of spring.
Yesterday the Botanical Society of Western PA hiked in the southeastern corner of Allegheny County and found snow trillium in bloom.
Snow trillum (Trillium nivale) is a small plant only 2-4″ tall that is so hardy it will even bloom in snow. It’s quite rare throughout its range and is considered vulnerable in Pennsylvania because it requires undisturbed habitat. Logging and mining threaten its existence.
Yow! It’s cold this morning! 18oF! Even so, there’s a spot of warmth in the woods.
Though it looks weird and smells bad, this plant is exciting to find because it’s one of the first to flower in the Spring.
This is eastern skunk cabbage, a wetland plant that’s found in northeastern Asia (Siberia to Japan) and northeastern North America (Quebec to Minnesota to the mountains of North Carolina).
Skunk cabbage has many names but most of them refer to its smell, a fetid odor that’s sure to offend if you break or tear the plant. Foetid is even in its scientific name: Symplocarpus foetidus. It smells awful to us but it’s attractive to scavenging insects who pollinate the plant and possibly seek it out for warmth.
Warmth?
Yes, skunk cabbage’s other claim to fame is that it generates its own heat, a talent called thermogenesis. The skunk cabbage spadix (the flower spike inside this purple spathe) can maintain a 60oF temperature while the outdoor temperature is 5oF. Scientists have theorized that the warmth attracts insects to come inside out of the cold.
Look for skunk cabbage now and remember where you find it. In late spring the flower disappears and in its place will be huge, bright green leaves that look so different that the plant is almost unrecognizable!
(photo by Sue Sweeney from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
