Nature Post!
Not much in the way of fungi today. Actually, these pictures are from two different walks... a short one near the lake and a longer one out on the other trail I go to occasionally. I find some interesting things there because it's a totally different ecosystem... lots of temporary water sources that are dried up by this time of year, different varieties of plants... and I found some interesting things.
ANYWAY.
This time of year is a transitional season, with most of the spring flowers turning to fruits, the midsummer flowers hitting their peak, and the late summer flowers just getting ready to burst out. The very familiar pokeweed is an example of this transition... I've been watching them grow since spring, and flower a few weeks ago, but now they've got little green berries. In another few days or a week they will start to turn deep black and will be enthusiastically eaten by birds. They are most recognizable with the berries on them, but after years of watching them, I like seeing them in transition like this.
Difficult to identify this brown crusty fungus. There are quite a few species that match the description, and strangely, all of them go by common names such as "brown crust fungus". I do know that it's a perrenial polypore, and that the larger holes visible on its surface are older pores, while the more actively growing surface is covered with smaller pores. They are specifically decayers of already dead wood and don't invade living trees, so they have to wait till other fungi begin the decomposition process.
Dogwood shrubs are an extremely important food resource for animals throughout the summer, fall, and winter, and these ones aren't even fully ripe before they start to vanish. The ones that make it through to winter usually turn either dark blue or white and they are key to the survival of non-migratory birds.
Wild grapes. Animals will eat them too, but they're still rather hard and probably very bitter. They're not sweet even when ripe... domestic grapes have been bred for their higher sugar content. Wild grapes don't waste energy producing all that extra sugar when they don't need it... animals will eat them anyway.
For those of you who live in non-farming parts of the world, it's hard to understand the incredibly vast areas of land dedicated to the growth of corn. The only reason the strip down the middle isn't corn (it's soy) is because corn is an extremely resource-hungry plant and rapidly strips the soil of nitrogen, which legumes like soy or timothy can replace by virtue of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live symbiotically in nodules on their roots.
Corn is THE crop here. It's not for human consumption... it's for animal feed (mostly cattle). The wispy bits at the top disperse pollen, and the silky hairs are there to capture pollen and transport it to the kernels. While pretty much everyone knows that, not everyone knows that every single kernel on an ear of corn has its OWN hair, and if that hair does not get a grain of pollen, that kernel will not develop. That's one of the reasons corn is planted in massive, dense monocultures... it makes sure that every kernel will get pollinated.
Ironweed usually ranks with the Kings of September, but it often acts as their herald by beginning to bloom in late July and early August. They bloom for a long time and are incredibly resilient. These ones will be invisible in a few weeks as the goldenrods that surround them begin to bloom.
Once purple thistles, these tufts now look more like little round sheep needing to be sheared. They haven't dispersed yet, and the seeds are probably still ripening. Once they are fully stocked with all the nutrition the plant can pack into them, the plant will sever its ties to them and they'll become airborn.
I never get tired of the gorgeous deep purple of ironwood, a common wildflower but such an exotic-looking beauty.
If ironweed's arrival heralds the approach of the late summer flowers, this entire field of eight-foot Joe Pye weed stands as a testament to the fact that the midsummer royals have not surrendered their crowns yet.
It seems impossible to walk along the edge of a cornfield without finding horse nettle, a nightshade with poisonous berries and leaves. Besides being toxic, it is also ruthlessly relentless, and no amount of mowing, weeding, or pesticides will get rid of it unless you are extremely persistent. Once established, it does not want to go away. I like the flowers.
Most jewelweed flowers are orange, but this is either a different species or a subspecies, and the flowers are a pretty yellow. Flowers with a cavity like this attract bees to climb into the space looking for nectar... you can even see the little tab at the top of the opening that coats the bee's back with pollen as it rummages around.
Not all the maples in the area have the brown spots that seemed to be everywhere last year, but those that do seem more heavily affected. This is a young maple and it may be less resistant, or just being closer to the ground may expose it to falling airborn spores.
I thought this might be a late-stage knapweed, but the leaves are quite wrong... it's definitely a bee balm, but the natural ones are nearly always red, so this is probably either a garden escapee or a hybrid. Both are fine... the garden varieties have mostly only been modified for color and they serve just as well as sources of food for bees and other insects.
The May apples, kings of the mid-spring forest, are now barely hanging on. Most of the single-umbrella ones are gone, but the double-umbrella reproductives have to hold on a bit longer... they need to survive long enough to keep pumping sugars and starches into their solitary fruit until it's ripe. Producing only one fruit means the plant invests a lot of energy into it, and these reproductives will hold on until the fruit is ripe... even though the fruit of this particular one has already been stolen.
A different species of Joe Pye weed predominates in this drier area... the ones near the lake have thicker, hollow, darker-colored stems. These ones have just started blooming. Spreading out the prime flowering season may be one way to avoid excessive hybridization, since there is no biological barrier to it.
Ironweed thrives along the sides of dusty roads, and like the other late summer bloomers it's just getting started.
For looloo! Here is some boneset finally starting to get the pretty little white streamers that appear when the flowers are fully open.
Goldenrods are the undisputed Kings of September, but they are already under attack. By the time they mature at least a third of the stems will bear one of these galls. The plant doesn't seem to object, and affected plants flower just as prolifically as their undisturbed cousins.
The gall process is a balance between insect and plant, in which chemical signals from the insect modify the plant's growth. In this case, it looks the the insect's signals may have driven the plant stem to expand a little faster than it could tolerate, and the gall split open. I haven't seen this before but one would expect that such a delicate balance would occasionally malfunction.
Not many wildflowers are this vivid a shade of pink, and these do not grow around the lake, so I had to do some tracking down. It turns out they are Dianthus armeria, a native of Europe and Asia and an invasive escapee from gardens in North America. It is not a terribly problematic invasive as it makes use of extremely rough soil that has been leeched of nutrients and stripped of topsoil, making it a companion to chicory, ironweed, and the other plants that thrive along dusty, stripped, naked, gravel roadsides. The common name in many places usually include the word "pink", for obvious reasons.
The pretty flowers of wild clematis, with common names ranging from "virgin's bower" to "traveler's joy". Regardless, it is lovely when flowering and very disorderly-looking when it goes to seed.
Not clear what took this conifer down... it appears healthy and I couldn't find any evidence of damage from fungus. Perhaps a windstorm hit it the wrong way. Falling large trees like this one are a primary cause of damage to other trees.
This looks a bit like wild phlox and I could have happily written it off as such... but it's very late in the season for phlox, which makes sense, since it's not phlox. The distinctive way that the petals bend strongly backwards from the center of the flower are characteristic of Saponaria officinalis, also known as soapwort and bouncing bet. It is more usually pinkish than white, but it's all the same. The stems and roots can be used to produce soapy lather when ground up with water, and the plant has medicinal uses in various parts of the world. I wonder how many times I've passed it and mistaken it for a late phlox.
This one required identification, but with the petals and the neat-looking little centers, it didn't take too long to track it down as Euphorbia corollata, also known as flowering spurge (which sounds somewhat vulgar). Euphorbia in general are often considered to be pests. This one joins the other plants in the last few pictures in that it favors poor soil, especially raw, rough, nutrient-deficient soil, and it is extremely drought-tolerant. It's very interesting to find so many plants I'll never see near my lake, because it is the drainage basin for a large watershed and the soil around it is never dry.
While the skunk cabbage around the lake is holding its own, the same plant here is rapidly failing under the dry heat, and what in the spring seemed like endless fields of skunk cabbage have become browning messes.
This milkweed flower is quite finished, but it has done its job... the small pod beneath carries fertilized seeds, and by fall it will grow and split open, releasing the tufted seeds to be dispersed by the wind.
This may be one of the strangest things I've ever found. This is some sort of nut tree, probably, and I thought these little things were fruit, but fruits don't grow on the underside of leaves. They're galls, but they're bizarre, fuzzy galls and nothing like anyting I've ever seen before.
This single plant is massively infected and the leaves are heavily burdened with these misshapen, slightly fuzzy spheres.
Just one more picture, because it's astounding that one plant can support that many galls on its leaves. I have no idea what created them and haven't had much luck finding out, but they are bizarre and marvelous.
Lovely wild red bee balm, a favorite of bees, butterflies, and everything else that likes nectar. Red is a highly visible color to most insects.
The odd lumps of split bark in this tree represent battlegrounds where a fungus has attacked the living layer of cells beneath the bark, causing it to bulge and swell. The tree will struggle to quarantine these affected areas, and if successful can survive for quite some time, but eventually the fungus usually wins.
Beavers have been at work here, although this is a swampy area at any time of year. Their work may produce interesting changes in the local system if they continue to dam all the little tributaries and make a semi-permanent body of water. This isn't a very big dam and these may be young beavers that will move on to bigger things.
I'll leave you with this oddity, a branch that has decided to splice itself across a gap between two trees (they may be the same tree underground, but it's still bizarre-looking). I can't tell for sure which tree originated the branch or what caused it to be absorbed into the other, but it does appear to be connected in a fully living fashion to both of them.
ANYWAY. Have a lovely evening/morning/night/day/whatever.
.
.
.
ANYWAY.
This time of year is a transitional season, with most of the spring flowers turning to fruits, the midsummer flowers hitting their peak, and the late summer flowers just getting ready to burst out. The very familiar pokeweed is an example of this transition... I've been watching them grow since spring, and flower a few weeks ago, but now they've got little green berries. In another few days or a week they will start to turn deep black and will be enthusiastically eaten by birds. They are most recognizable with the berries on them, but after years of watching them, I like seeing them in transition like this.
Difficult to identify this brown crusty fungus. There are quite a few species that match the description, and strangely, all of them go by common names such as "brown crust fungus". I do know that it's a perrenial polypore, and that the larger holes visible on its surface are older pores, while the more actively growing surface is covered with smaller pores. They are specifically decayers of already dead wood and don't invade living trees, so they have to wait till other fungi begin the decomposition process.
Dogwood shrubs are an extremely important food resource for animals throughout the summer, fall, and winter, and these ones aren't even fully ripe before they start to vanish. The ones that make it through to winter usually turn either dark blue or white and they are key to the survival of non-migratory birds.
Wild grapes. Animals will eat them too, but they're still rather hard and probably very bitter. They're not sweet even when ripe... domestic grapes have been bred for their higher sugar content. Wild grapes don't waste energy producing all that extra sugar when they don't need it... animals will eat them anyway.
For those of you who live in non-farming parts of the world, it's hard to understand the incredibly vast areas of land dedicated to the growth of corn. The only reason the strip down the middle isn't corn (it's soy) is because corn is an extremely resource-hungry plant and rapidly strips the soil of nitrogen, which legumes like soy or timothy can replace by virtue of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live symbiotically in nodules on their roots.
Corn is THE crop here. It's not for human consumption... it's for animal feed (mostly cattle). The wispy bits at the top disperse pollen, and the silky hairs are there to capture pollen and transport it to the kernels. While pretty much everyone knows that, not everyone knows that every single kernel on an ear of corn has its OWN hair, and if that hair does not get a grain of pollen, that kernel will not develop. That's one of the reasons corn is planted in massive, dense monocultures... it makes sure that every kernel will get pollinated.
Ironweed usually ranks with the Kings of September, but it often acts as their herald by beginning to bloom in late July and early August. They bloom for a long time and are incredibly resilient. These ones will be invisible in a few weeks as the goldenrods that surround them begin to bloom.
Once purple thistles, these tufts now look more like little round sheep needing to be sheared. They haven't dispersed yet, and the seeds are probably still ripening. Once they are fully stocked with all the nutrition the plant can pack into them, the plant will sever its ties to them and they'll become airborn.
I never get tired of the gorgeous deep purple of ironwood, a common wildflower but such an exotic-looking beauty.
If ironweed's arrival heralds the approach of the late summer flowers, this entire field of eight-foot Joe Pye weed stands as a testament to the fact that the midsummer royals have not surrendered their crowns yet.
It seems impossible to walk along the edge of a cornfield without finding horse nettle, a nightshade with poisonous berries and leaves. Besides being toxic, it is also ruthlessly relentless, and no amount of mowing, weeding, or pesticides will get rid of it unless you are extremely persistent. Once established, it does not want to go away. I like the flowers.
Most jewelweed flowers are orange, but this is either a different species or a subspecies, and the flowers are a pretty yellow. Flowers with a cavity like this attract bees to climb into the space looking for nectar... you can even see the little tab at the top of the opening that coats the bee's back with pollen as it rummages around.
Not all the maples in the area have the brown spots that seemed to be everywhere last year, but those that do seem more heavily affected. This is a young maple and it may be less resistant, or just being closer to the ground may expose it to falling airborn spores.
I thought this might be a late-stage knapweed, but the leaves are quite wrong... it's definitely a bee balm, but the natural ones are nearly always red, so this is probably either a garden escapee or a hybrid. Both are fine... the garden varieties have mostly only been modified for color and they serve just as well as sources of food for bees and other insects.
The May apples, kings of the mid-spring forest, are now barely hanging on. Most of the single-umbrella ones are gone, but the double-umbrella reproductives have to hold on a bit longer... they need to survive long enough to keep pumping sugars and starches into their solitary fruit until it's ripe. Producing only one fruit means the plant invests a lot of energy into it, and these reproductives will hold on until the fruit is ripe... even though the fruit of this particular one has already been stolen.
A different species of Joe Pye weed predominates in this drier area... the ones near the lake have thicker, hollow, darker-colored stems. These ones have just started blooming. Spreading out the prime flowering season may be one way to avoid excessive hybridization, since there is no biological barrier to it.
Ironweed thrives along the sides of dusty roads, and like the other late summer bloomers it's just getting started.
For looloo! Here is some boneset finally starting to get the pretty little white streamers that appear when the flowers are fully open.
Goldenrods are the undisputed Kings of September, but they are already under attack. By the time they mature at least a third of the stems will bear one of these galls. The plant doesn't seem to object, and affected plants flower just as prolifically as their undisturbed cousins.
The gall process is a balance between insect and plant, in which chemical signals from the insect modify the plant's growth. In this case, it looks the the insect's signals may have driven the plant stem to expand a little faster than it could tolerate, and the gall split open. I haven't seen this before but one would expect that such a delicate balance would occasionally malfunction.
Not many wildflowers are this vivid a shade of pink, and these do not grow around the lake, so I had to do some tracking down. It turns out they are Dianthus armeria, a native of Europe and Asia and an invasive escapee from gardens in North America. It is not a terribly problematic invasive as it makes use of extremely rough soil that has been leeched of nutrients and stripped of topsoil, making it a companion to chicory, ironweed, and the other plants that thrive along dusty, stripped, naked, gravel roadsides. The common name in many places usually include the word "pink", for obvious reasons.
The pretty flowers of wild clematis, with common names ranging from "virgin's bower" to "traveler's joy". Regardless, it is lovely when flowering and very disorderly-looking when it goes to seed.
Not clear what took this conifer down... it appears healthy and I couldn't find any evidence of damage from fungus. Perhaps a windstorm hit it the wrong way. Falling large trees like this one are a primary cause of damage to other trees.
This looks a bit like wild phlox and I could have happily written it off as such... but it's very late in the season for phlox, which makes sense, since it's not phlox. The distinctive way that the petals bend strongly backwards from the center of the flower are characteristic of Saponaria officinalis, also known as soapwort and bouncing bet. It is more usually pinkish than white, but it's all the same. The stems and roots can be used to produce soapy lather when ground up with water, and the plant has medicinal uses in various parts of the world. I wonder how many times I've passed it and mistaken it for a late phlox.
This one required identification, but with the petals and the neat-looking little centers, it didn't take too long to track it down as Euphorbia corollata, also known as flowering spurge (which sounds somewhat vulgar). Euphorbia in general are often considered to be pests. This one joins the other plants in the last few pictures in that it favors poor soil, especially raw, rough, nutrient-deficient soil, and it is extremely drought-tolerant. It's very interesting to find so many plants I'll never see near my lake, because it is the drainage basin for a large watershed and the soil around it is never dry.
While the skunk cabbage around the lake is holding its own, the same plant here is rapidly failing under the dry heat, and what in the spring seemed like endless fields of skunk cabbage have become browning messes.
This milkweed flower is quite finished, but it has done its job... the small pod beneath carries fertilized seeds, and by fall it will grow and split open, releasing the tufted seeds to be dispersed by the wind.
This may be one of the strangest things I've ever found. This is some sort of nut tree, probably, and I thought these little things were fruit, but fruits don't grow on the underside of leaves. They're galls, but they're bizarre, fuzzy galls and nothing like anyting I've ever seen before.
This single plant is massively infected and the leaves are heavily burdened with these misshapen, slightly fuzzy spheres.
Just one more picture, because it's astounding that one plant can support that many galls on its leaves. I have no idea what created them and haven't had much luck finding out, but they are bizarre and marvelous.
Lovely wild red bee balm, a favorite of bees, butterflies, and everything else that likes nectar. Red is a highly visible color to most insects.
The odd lumps of split bark in this tree represent battlegrounds where a fungus has attacked the living layer of cells beneath the bark, causing it to bulge and swell. The tree will struggle to quarantine these affected areas, and if successful can survive for quite some time, but eventually the fungus usually wins.
Beavers have been at work here, although this is a swampy area at any time of year. Their work may produce interesting changes in the local system if they continue to dam all the little tributaries and make a semi-permanent body of water. This isn't a very big dam and these may be young beavers that will move on to bigger things.
I'll leave you with this oddity, a branch that has decided to splice itself across a gap between two trees (they may be the same tree underground, but it's still bizarre-looking). I can't tell for sure which tree originated the branch or what caused it to be absorbed into the other, but it does appear to be connected in a fully living fashion to both of them.
ANYWAY. Have a lovely evening/morning/night/day/whatever.
.
.
.