The reading this
week, a poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), was provided by Hugh Nourse: 

The Dalliance of the Eagles

SKIRTING the
river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)

Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,

The rushing amorous contact high in space together,

The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,

Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,

In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,

Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,

A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,

Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,

She hers, he his, pursuing.

This morning we took the White trail to the power line
cut, turned left and went downhill to a Trumpet Vine and then returned uphill,
pausing to examine some insects where the White trail enters the woods. Then we
continued up the power line to the fence, turned left, following the fence to
the White trail and returned in the woods back to the Arbor.

The Trumpet Vine (also called Trumpet Creeper),
Campsis radicans, has conspicuous red trumpet-shaped flowers – just right for
attracting hummingbirds. But pollinators are not the only animals attracted to
these flowers. Careful examination will reveal numerous ants hanging out on the
surface of the flower buds and, later in the season, on the surface of the
long, bean shaped seed pods. The ants are in search of nectar, but not from
inside the flower. The nectar they find is secreted by the plant on the surface
of the flower buds and the seed pods. These “extrafloral nectaries” are thought
to attract ants to defend the plant from attack by herbivorous insects and
especially those that might try to eat the developing seeds. There is currently
no direct evidence that this is the case for the Trumpet Vine, but many other
plants have extrafloral nectarines and in some of these the evidence for ant
defense is quite good.

Walking up the hill we passed a stand of very healthy
Pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, with
a developing inflorescence. Most parts of this plant are poisonous, but the
young shoots and leaf tips can be eaten if properly prepared (boiling with at
least two changes of water).

Where the White trail
enters the woods we found several different types of insects feeding on the
freshly emerged leaves of a Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera). Viewing them
with a hand lens is an exciting experience. We saw aphids and the nymphal
stages of a treehopper as well as several forms with fuzzy, waxy secretions
that conceal part of their bodies. (Yesterday I found a aphid lion, the larval
stage of the Green Lacewing (Chrysopa sp.). It has sickle-shaped jaws that
pierce the skin of its aphid prey and suck them dry. It then sticks the husks
of its victims on its back, apparently to serve as camouflage.) Lacewings are
Neuropterans, related to Doodlebugs.

It took us over an hour to walk up the rest of the
power line to the fence, there were so many plants in bloom – summer has
finally arrived! Perhaps it’s best to just list the plants seen: 

The Wild Bergamot was especially abundant. 

As we wandered up the path we met several Botanical
Garden workers engaged in plant rescue efforts. This part of the Garden is
being converted to a Piedmont Prairie and the initial steps involve removal of
much of the broad leaved herbaceous vegetation. (This means, in large part, the
Wingstems that grow so abundantly in the power line cut. We’ll miss their
colorful yellow and white flowers that provide masses of color during the
summer before the goldenrod and ironweed begin blooming.)

Finally, into the woods to cool off and look for
mushrooms! And there were mushrooms galore, especially Chanterelles which
glowed orange against the light and dark browns of the leaf litter. Besides the
Chanterelles we encountered Amanitas and Russulas as well as others that
perplexed us. We need an experience mushroom collected to join us some time and
give us a little guidance.

On the way back we noticed the fruits of two plants
in the shade garden: Camellia and Sweet Shrub. Both surprised us – none of us
had ever seen the fruits of these plants before.

Then it was on to Donderos’ for iced beverages and
the reconstruction of the list of plants we had observed.

Note: There will be no Nature Ramble next week (next
Thursday falls on July 4). Hope to see you all again on July 11.

The reading this week was provided by
Carol Nourse and is from The Garden,
by Freeman Patterson, p. 100:

If it weren’t for
fungi the planet would soon cease to function, probably within minutes.  Like many other fungi, Amanita mushrooms are important to
the collective health of the forest, though I’ve also found and photographed
them in open areas, where other species also live and do their work, often in
gardens. For example, the delicious Agaricus,
often called the “meadow mushroom,” is common wherever there is
decomposing manure of farm animals.

…………..

The visible part of
mushrooms, those weird constructions I love to photograph, are the reproductive
organs. However, the daily work of most species is carried out by mycelia:
fine, fibrous, root-like hairs that invade dead wood and other material,
causing it to decay. Then bacteria take over and complete the process of making
it part of the soil again. One day it occurred to me that we all garden with
fungi and bacteria to a greater extent than we do with shrubs and herbs and
grasses.

The
route:  We went through the Shade Garden and on to
the white trail.  Just past the Power
Line Right of Way we took the Green Trail, then continued to the right on the
White Trail to a large group of Chanterelle Mushrooms. Then we returned the
same way we came.

Our first stop was under the Power Line
on the White Trail.  Gary identified the
white button mushrooms as Puffballs. He told us they should be eaten when the
inside is white, before it becomes yellow. They must be cooked to get rid of dangerous
alkaloids before eating.

Under the power line we also found a False
Caesar’s Mushroom (Thank you Sandra for working with the mushroom guide and
finding some of these names) (Amanita
parcivolvata).  As we rambled along,
we found many more mushrooms than we could name. We only managed to identify about
five. We found many individuals of Black footed Marasmius (Marasmiellus nigripes), a
really interesting small, white mushroom growing on a twig (and eventually
found growing on the trunk of a tree) that had dark thread-like projections
emerging from the wood below the mushroom itself. There were so many
interesting mushrooms to see that we were hardly moving on the Green Trail. We
wanted everyone to see the Chanterelles, we decided to move on to where they
were growing and then come back along the Green Tail at a leisurely pace. Gary
said the Chanterelles (Cantharellus
cibarius) were excellent eating. There were quite a number of them at this
site. We turned around and started back.

The first stop on the way back was for a
mushroom that looked like a Chanterelle, but was growing on wood and not on the
ground. Gary noted that this one was poisonous. I could not find latin name of
the poisonous Chanterelle-looking mushroom. 
But we did find the name (Thank you Sandra) for the red mushroom
bursting out of a white covering, American Caesar’s Mushroom (Amanita caesarea). One of the slime
molds and a coral mushroom were seen along the Green Trail on the return.

In addition to mushrooms we noted several
rattlesnake ferns (Botrychium virginianum),
partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) not
blooming, and pipsissiwa (Chimaphila
maculata). We also identified several trees:  Southern Red Oak (Quercus falcata), Scarlet Oak (Quercus
coccinea), mockernut hickory (Carya
tomentosa), pignut hickory (Carya
glabra), shagbark hickory (Carya
ovate), and a tulip tree (Liriodendron
tulipifera).

Don Hunter found our last mushroom off
the trail:  Silver Ear Fungus or White
Jelly Mushroom (Tremella fuciformis).
Gary said that Jelly mushrooms were edible.

As we walked by the old flower garden we
saw wild petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis). 

Returning to the Arbor, we dispersed with
many retiring to Donderos for coffee and snacks. This was a very pleasant day
with eye-catching mushrooms even if we could not identify most of them.

Hugh

Today’s
reading was from Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 1956. This short piece was originally
written for Women’s Day magazine. Ms. Carson intended to expand it later, but
died before this could be done. A short paragraph follows (Roger was her
grand-nephew):

When Roger has visited me in Maine and we have walked in these woods I have
made no conscious effort to name plants or animals nor to explain to him, but have just expressed my own pleasure in what we see, calling his attention to this or that but only as I would share discoveries with an older person. Later I have been amazed at the way names stick in his mind, for when I show color slides of my woods plants it is Roger who can identify them. “Oh, that‘s what Rachel likes –that‘s bunchberry!” Or, “That‘s Jumer [juniper} but you can‘t eat those green berries-they are for the squirrels.” I
am sure no amount of drill would have implanted the names so firmly as just going through the woods in the spirit of
two friends on an expedition of exciting
discovery.

Today’s Route (mostly in the shade due to the
hot weather):

From the Arbor we went past the Dunson Native Plant Garden and
then on to the White Trail to the gate; left at the gate on the old service
road, past the Torreya project, then onto the Blue trail back to the White
trail.

Stuff we saw or talked about:

On the way
down the switchbacks to the Dunson Garden we paused to look at the galls on the
Witch Hazels (we examined these on May 16; see the Ramble Report).

The Black
Cohosh was still blooming even though the inflorescence had fallen over (see
this Ramble Report for more on Black Cohosh).

On the White
trail we stopped where an American Beech and a Hophornbeam stand side-by-side,
making comparison of the leaves easy. The branch of this Beech is low and
exposed to more sun than is usual and its leaves are not typical of the Beech
leaves we normally observe. Because of the increased sun exposure they are
thicker, darker and feel tougher. They are “sun”
leaves. This is typical for many trees – the leaves we see low to the ground
are usually shade leaves – thin, wider
and larger than the leaves in the canopy. The sun leaf thickness is due to an
extra layer of photosynthetic tissue that develops when a leaf is exposed to
high levels of light.

Another
thing we noticed was an absence of fruit on the Hophornbeam. Last year at this
time we saw lots of the hop-like clusters of maturing seeds on these trees.
Many of the canopy species exhibit a pattern of fruit production called masting. (Mast is the collective name for the fruits of all tree species in
an area. The amount of mast varies considerably from year to year and the
mystery is that many trees over large areas synchronize their mast production.
Such years of heavy seed production are called mast years. We usually think of
the masting habit in terms of the canopy species like oak, chestnut, or beech.
But some of the subcanopy species, like Hophornbeam also have the masting
habit. This year is not a mast year for the Hophornbeam.)

We puzzled
over some saplings with compound leaves that I at first thought were alternate
(they were not). When we realized that it had opposite, compound leaves we
decided it must be an Ash, probably a Green Ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica).

Along the
way we noticed a few flowers: Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron strigosum), Spiderwort (Tradescantia sp.), Deptford Pink (Dianthus armeria), Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) and Wild Petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis).

We also
noticed a lot of fire ant (Solenopsis
invicta) nests that I can’t resist poking into. There is a reason behind my
madness. Fire ants frequently produce their reproductive castes (future queens
and males) in the spring or early summer and these are released from the nest
soon after a rain. Not many people have seen winged reproductive ants and I’m
eager to show them to everyone, but no luck today. After their mating flight
the inseminated queens separately fly off to a hopefully suitable site, land
and discard their wings. Each solitary queen then begins, by herself, to dig a
nest. She doesn’t feed, living off the energy she gets from metabolizing her
now useless flight muscles. If she’s lucky she will live long enough for her
first brood of workers to emerge and start to forage for food. Then she will
attend to her only function – laying eggs. I’ll tell you more about fire ants
on later rambles.

Finally we
entered the woods and escaped the sun. It must have been 10 degrees cooler, but
just as humid. (The coolness is not only due to the shade but the evaporation of
water from the tree leaves. It takes energy to turn water from a liquid to a
vapor and that loss of energy lowers the temperature considerably. It’s natures
air conditioning!)

Nothing was
seen blooming as we walked through the woods, so we paid attention to the trees
and looked for other things. We did manage to find a few mushrooms (fewer than
I would have expected, given all the recent rain.) One was a pretty white one
about 6 inches high and still fresh. It had the remains of a structure called
the veil on the stem below the cap.
Some mushrooms with veils are poisonous. Unfortunately, other poisonous
mushrooms lack a veil and some with veils are edible. Lacking expert guidance,
it’s probably better to not experiment.

You should
think of a mushroom as a single flower of a perennial plant whose body is
hidden from your sight. This “body” is a complex network of extremely fine
threads, called a mycelium, that ramifies and permeates the soil around the
visible mushroom, sometimes for many hundreds of feet or more. In some cases it
sets up a mutualistic relationship with the roots of trees or other plants,
giving its plant host mineral nutrients in return for sugars. Such mushrooms
are called mycorrhizal, which
literally means “mushroom root.” In other cases the mushroom secretes digestive
enzymes into the soil and absorbs nutrients that are released. These are called
saprotrophic fungi, meaning that they
feed on dead or rotting organic material.

We slipped
past the Florida Torreya (Torreya
taxifolia) protection plantings, noting only that they don’t seem to be
thriving. Then it was back via the Blue trail to Donderos’ (for those who could
stay) to enjoy cookies and beverages.

Dale

Today, we guessed correctly that the 30
percent chance of rain wouldn’t occur before we finished our walk.  To avoid mud because of the heavy rain last
night we went through the International Garden, the Physic Garden, Heritage
Garden, and Flower Garden to the short cut trail to the Orange Trail.  Then we went up the Orange trail to its end
at the upper parking lot.  We also took a
short side trip along the white trail before going to Donderos’ for
refreshment.

Hugh provided a reading from Janisse Ray’s
The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  I think most were a little non-plussed.  It wasn’t what they expected:

“A
junkyard is a wilderness.  Both are
devotees of decay.  The nature of both is
random order, the odd occurrence and juxtaposition of miscellany, backed by a
semblance of method.  Walk through a
junkyard  and you will see some of the
schemes a wilderness takes–Fords to one section, Dodges in another, or older
models farthest from the house–so a brief logic of ecology can be found.

“In
the same way, an ecosystem makes sense: 
the canebrakes, the cypress domes. 
Pine trees regenerate in an indeterminate fashion, randomly here and
there where seeds have fallen, but also with some predictability.  Sunlight and moisture must be sufficient for
germination, as where a fallen tree has made a hole in the canopy, after a
rain.  This, too, is order.

“Without
fail in a junkyard you encounter the unexpected — a doll’s head, bodiless; a
bike with no handlebars; a cache of wheat pennies; thirty feet of copper pipe;
a boxy ’58 Edsel.  Likewise, in the
middle of Tate’s Hell Swamp you might look unexpectedly into the brown eyes of
a barred owl ten feet away or come upon a purple stretch of carnivorous
bladderworts in bloom, their BB-sized bladders full of aquatic microorganisms.

“In
junkyard as in wilderness there is danger: 
shards of glass, leaning jacks, weak chains; or rattlesnakes,
avalanches, polar bears.  In one as in
the other you expect the creativity of the random, how the twisted metal
protrudes like limbs, the cars dumped at acute, right and obtuse angles, how
the driveways are creeks and rivers.'”

Our theme for today was ferns, since most
forest plants have finished flowering and the meadows have not quite started
yet.  Bracken ferns in the International
Garden were our first stop.   

First we
reviewed the different parts of a fern: 
The frond is made up of a blade (the “leafy” part) and a stipe (the stem that holds up the
blade.)  The blade has a rachis (the
main vein) and is usually subdivided into smaller pinnae
(singular: pinna) that are each attached to the rachis by a vein.Sometimes the pinnae are themselves subdivided, partially or completely, into pinnules that are attached to the midvein of each pinna.

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) is deciduous (meaning the fronds do not
persist through winter) and occurs in almost every county in Georgia.

In the Endangered Plant Garden we found New
York Fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis)
has a blade whose pinnae are shorter at both ends than they are in the
middle.  The Botanical Society taught me
that people in Manhattan are so busy that they burn their candle at both ends –
an easy way to remember New York Fern. 
New York Fern is deciduous.

In the Indian Garden there were two ferns
of interest:The first is probably the most common
fern in the Garden — Christmas Fern (Polystichum
acrostichoides). It has sori (spore producing structures) on the undersurface
of the pinnae at the ends of some fronds (these are called fertile fronds).
Each of the pinnae are shaped like a Christmas stocking with the toe toward the
rachis. Christmas Fern is also quite common in the mountains and piedmont of
Georgia but less so in the coastal plain. 
We see it all year as it is evergreen (not deciduous). 

The second was Royal Fern.  Fertile pinnae are absent at this time of year.  The fronds look more like a locust tree than
a fern.  Usually found in wet, acid soils
(I have found them in the depressed wetland near Track Rock Gap).  Occurs throughout most of Georgia.

The two wildflower and the native grass
beds in Flower Garden elicited some comments. Currently blooming are several
Coneflowers (Echinacea sp., Rudbeckia sp.and Ratibida sp.) and mints (Monarda
sp.).  One of the fun plants blooming was
Horse Mint (Monarda punctata).  It did have the usual mint square stem.  I do not believe it was quite in full bloom
because I do not remember seeing the yellow petals interspersed between the pink
ones.

On the Orange Trail our next find was the
Broad Beech Fern (Thelypteris
hexagonoptera).  It is described as bipinnatifid,which means that the pinnae
are almost “cut” through to the rachis and each pinna is pinnately almost cut
through to the midvein. This produces a rachis with “wings” between the pinnae,
a diagnostic feature for this species. 
It is common in the mountains and piedmont of Georgia but only found in a
few counties in South Georgia.

The next fern was the Southern Lady Fern
(Athyrium asplenoides).  Someone said that it looked very delicate,
and that is a characteristic of this fern. 
This fern tends to cluster, each frond arching, and deciduous.  The rachis can be yellowish green to
reddish.  The blade is broadest near the
base.  It is bipinnate to tripinnate,
finely cut and looks delicate.  It is
found throughout Georgia, except in the sandy pineland in Southeast Georgia.

A break from the ferns was finding a
number of white avens (Geum canadense).  We have seen the rosette that comes in very early
spring, but not the flower, which just bloomed this week.

We also noticed the warty bark of a young
tree, Sugarberry (Celtis laevigata),
a type of Hackberry.

We found several Rattlesnake Ferns (Botrychium virginianum) along the Orange
Trail.  The blade is ternate and
triangular in shape.  It is bipinnate to
tripinnate. The fertile stalk arises from the where the blade branches,
actually the base of the blade.  You will
remember that a fern that looks similar comes up in the fall and the fertile
stalk is attached below the base of the Blade, and is called a Grape Fern.

We looked a long time for the common
Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron),
which was the last fern we found on the Orange Trail. It is common throughout
all of Georgia, with the exception of the Southeastern Coastal Plain. One
characteristic is the shiny dark brown rachis (almost looks black).  Like the Christmas Fern some of the fronds
are partially fertile with sori on the back side of the pinnae.  Each pinna has an ear like projection next to
the rachis.  It is deciduous.

There was some time left so we scooted
out the White Trail across the road to check out the blooming Wafer Ash or Hop
tree (Ptelea trifoliate, which is not
an ash).  There was quite a group of
them.  We could not name the family at
the time.  Looking it up, I found it to
be in the Rutaceae, or Citrus family, which includes the Prickly Ash, Hercules
Club, and Hardy Orange.

We then retired to Donderos’ for
conversation and refreshment.

Hugh