Today’s Ramble was led by Dale Hoyt.
Today’s post was written by Dale Hoyt.
Don was absent today so the photos are limited.
30 Ramblers met today.
Today’s reading:
Dale read the October 24th entry from Donald Culross Peattie’s An
Almanac for Moderns:
ON THIS day
in 1632 was born at Delft Antonj van Leeuwenhoek, that delectable old Dutchman
who had the enviable first look at things through a microscope. Not its inventor, he was a self-taught lens
grinder who stepped up the power of the microscope from a magnification of ten
times to two hundred and seventy diameters.
He remained all his life
(which lasted over ninety years) something of the shrewd and self–made
business man, and though he would tell his English friends, who elected him to
their learned society, how to make lenses, he would by no means send them even
the least of his microscopes, and he frequently
refused to visitors as much as a peek through one
of his vast private collection.
Working
so jealously, it would have been easy enough for a
charlatan to describe wonders that were not
there; but it
seems that Leeuwenhoek never misrepresented
anything save that
in the male spermatozoon he imagined (probably quite sincerely)
the outlines of a sort of embryo. First at the high-power microscope, he became
the discoverer of the protozoa or one-celled
animals, of the sex cells of mammals, of the bacteria, of the crystalline lens of the eye, the striation of the
muscles, the structure of wood; he was the first actually to see the circulation of the blood, and discovered that some
insects reproduce without fertilization.
He was no scholar, but an
inquisitive note-taker. Much of what he saw he knew not how to interpret,
due partly to the state of knowledge at the time. But
even for his day he was not well educated, and betrayed an obstinate self-sufficiency.
Yet in some cases, as the identity of the red corpuscles, he guessed right when Malpighi and Swammerdam, his contemporaries, went
wrong in their
surmises.
Today’s route:
From the Arbor down the walkway through the Shade Garden, then into the Dunson
Garden, exiting to the access road above the Passionvines. From the
Passionvines we walked toward the river on the power line RoW until we reached
a sunny spot and then returned via the spur trail to the Children’s Garden.
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Beech fruits with spiny husks gather at the edge of the sidewalk
(photo by Emily Carr) |
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When the Beech fruit splits open the nuts fall free.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
American Beech trees are dropping their fruit (that
contains beech nuts). The golden-brown fruit husk has four segments and is
covered with short, curved spines; the 1-3 nuts contained within are
three-sided. The nuts seem to be more abundant this year that in any of the
previous nine years we have rambled. The reason may be that the trees have
finally reached the age at which they reproduce. North American Silvics says,
“Beech ordinarily begins to produce a substantial amount of seeds when about 40
years old, and by the time it is 60 years old may produce large quantities.
Good beech seed crops are produced at 2- to 8-year intervals.”
By the way, North American Silvics is a wonderful
resource of information about the native and naturalized trees of North
America. The
two volumes (conifers and hardwoods) can be downloaded as pdf files from this
website or you can simply use the online version.
Some areas of the Garden were in cultivation until 1968
when the land was acquired by the University. The larger Beech trees are
probably old enough to be producing fruit, but the smaller (younger) trees may
still be coming of age.
The perennial question arose: was Beech-Nut chewing gum made
from beech nuts? Wikipedia
tells us that the company that made the gum started out as a ham- and
bacon-producing enterprise in 1891, known as Beech-Nut Packing Company. The
chewing gum line was introduced in 1910. Another internet source that lists
discontinued candies and gum says Beech-Nut
Spearmint and Wintergreen gum are no longer available. Taken together, this
suggests that Beech-Nut was a brand name and not a component of the chewing
gum.
The only other reference to beeches I can remember is
that Budweiser advertised their beer as “beechwood aged.” I assumed that meant
the barrels in which the beer was brewed or stored were made of beechwood.
Wrong! Here is the truth, according to the website “11 Things You Might Not
Know About Budweiser:”
You’ve probably heard the
phrase “beechwood-aged” to describe Budweiser, but you’ve never tasted a note
of beechwood in your glass. As part of Budweiser’s longstanding production
process, the beer is aged in tanks with spiral strips of beechwood. This step
isn’t meant to add woody flavors to Budweiser—it is simply a technique that’s
used to put more of the yeast in contact with the beer. The chips of beechwood
used for the process have been treated and sterilized so they won’t impart any
flavors of their own, but introducing a substrate like the beechwood into the
aging process can help remove undesirable flavors from the finished beer.
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A red oak group acorn (L) and white oak group acorn (R)
(photo by Emily Carr) |
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A Scarlet Oak acorn with cap; note the “squatty” shape – it’s about as wide as it is tall. Scarlet Oak is in the red oak group.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
Acorns seem to be less common this year. Perhaps this
is due to the long, rainless stretch we’ve had this summer. Our White Oak tree
has been prematurely dropping acorns for a month or more. These are still green
in color, not the tan or brown you’d expect for a ripe nut.
Two weeks ago we discussed the characteristics of trees
in the Red and White oak groups. I’ve copied that here, so you won’t have to go
back to see the information:
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Acorn
characteristics
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Group
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Leaf lobes
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Mature
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Germinate
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Tannin levels
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White Oaks
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Rounded
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First year
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In Fall
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Lower
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Red Oaks
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Pointed, with bristle
tip
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Second year
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Spring of next
year
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Higher
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Tannins are bitter tasting compounds. If you’ve ever
tasted a persimmon before it’s ripe you know how it “puckers” your mouth. That
was tannin that did that. When squirrels are preparing for winter they gather
acorns and bury them for later retrieval. White Oak acorns are frequently
eaten, instead of being buried. When they do bury them, the squirrel will often
bite off the bottom end of the acorn, where the plant embryo is located, thus
preventing the acorn from germinating. Red oak acorns are buried intact.
Tanning. The word “tan” is derived from
the ancient leather making process in which animal skins were soaked in water
with the ground up bark of oak trees. This treatment prevented the skins from
rotting and made them strong, supple and waterproof. From such tanned hides
many vital objects were made: shoes, bridles, harnesses and clothing. It is
inconceivable that people in northern Europe could have survived winter without
leather clothing or footware. No one knew why tanning worked, they just knew
that it did. (For a great read about the historical importance of oak read Oak
The Frame of Civilization, by William Bryant Logan (W. W. Norton, 2005).
It’s a fascinating read.)
The active ingredient of oak bark is a substance now known
as tannin. It is a bitter-tasting substance that irreversibly binds to
proteins. That property is why the oaks produce it. Bark is not the only place
tannins are found – they are also produced in oak leaves and the acorns.
Caterpillars that eat oak leaves ingest tannins along with food. The tannins
not only make some of the protein in the leaf tissue unavailable, they also
bind to the digestive enzymes in the gut that would digest the food. As a
result it takes a caterpillar longer to grow to maturity the higher the tannin
concentration. And the oaks can up the ante. When an oak leaf is being eaten it
sends a signal out to other leaves and even those that are not being eaten will
increase their tannin content. There is even evidence that nearby trees can
increase their tannin contents if a neighboring tree is attacked by herbivores.
There are other differences between members of the Red
& White Oak groups and our retired forester, Jim, told us about the
difference in the heartwood between these two groups of trees.
Trees have two kinds of wood, sapwood and heartwood. The
difference is most visible when you look at a cut stump. The heartwood is in
the middle and usually a darker color than the outer rings of the cut surface. The
width of the heartwood is different for each species of tree. As a tree grows
it adds a ring of sapwood to the outer surface of the trunk and each branch each
year. The purpose of sapwood is to carry water and food to the leaves and roots.
But only the outermost rings of sapwood are active. Older sapwood, produced in
earlier years, dies and is filled with resins and phenols, which make it a dark
red-brown in color. In the white oak group the conducting vessels become filled
with balloon-like structures called “tyloses” that block off the dead
vessels, making it more difficult for fungi to spread through the heartwood.
The red oak group does not develop these tyloses, so the conducting vessels in
the heartwood remain open. Jim said that one of his forestry professors vividly
demonstrated this by blowing smoke into one end of a red oak board. The smoke
emerged from the other end. This is why red oak is not used to make water
barrels or the parts of boats that are exposed to water. Visit this website to
see photographs of red and white oak wood: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/distinguishing-red-oak-from-white-oak/
Mast is a general term applied to the nut crops of
forest trees, such as beech, oak, hickory, chestnut etc., and originally referred
to the nuts eaten by pigs. It is Old English in origin and not related to the
term masticate which comes from the Latin, according to the Oxford English
dictionary. The amount of mast varies widely from year to year. This is not surprising
– you would expect a tree that expended a lot of energy producing nuts one year
would have to build up its reserves for one or more years before producing
another large crop. What is surprising is that in some species big mast years
tend to be synchronized over a very large area. The ecological consequence of
simultaneously producing a large number of nuts is that seed predators (the
animals that eat the nut crop) may be overwhelmed. When nuts are super-abundant
the nut eaters may not be able to consume all of them. In a mast year all the
nut eaters would grow fat and be able to produce more young than in a lean
year. But in the year following a large mast there would be little nut
production and the offspring of the previous year would face a famine. After
several years of low nut production the seed predator population size
stabilizes at a low level and then, bang! Another mast year comes along and the
nut eaters again can’t eat the entire crop. The thing that makes this strategy
work is the coordination – every tree in the forest needs to be investing in
nut production at the same time. How this coordination is achieved is presently
unknown. Speculation: we know that different trees share a common mycorrhizal web
of fungi. We also know that chemical signals can be sent and received through
this “wood wide web.” Perhaps synchronous masting is coordinated by these
forest mushrooms. I need to emphasize that this is merely an idea lacking any
evidence to support it.
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Squirrels love to eat the rich nut meat of hickories.
Mockernut (L) and Red/Pignut (R)
penny for comparison
(photo by Dale Hoyt) |
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Other side of the hickory nuts above.
Mockernut (L); Reg/Pignut (R)
Note the difference in size and heavy ridges on Mockernut.
(photo by Dale Hoyt) |
This has been a poor year for hickory nuts in the Garden.
Several kinds of hickories are found in the garden but the commonest are Red Hickory and Mockernut Hickory. Mockernut has a thick husk and the nut inside has ridges.
Red Hickory has a smaller, rounded nut and thin husk.
Our American Witch Hazel trees are not
doing very well. They should have produced flowers by now, but the lack of rain
this summer may have discouraged them.
Do you wonder how this small tree got its name? A
book by Mary Durant (Who Named the Daisy? Who Named the Rose?, p. 210,
1976, Dodd, Mead & Co.) explains it all:
WITCH HAZEL has nothing
whatsoever to do with witches, despite the plant’s mystic knack as a divining
rod for water and precious ores. The old name is quite prosaic, no magical
spells here. Witch comes from wych, a
variant of the Anglo- Saxon wican, to
bend. (This is also the root word for wicker, which is woven from bendable or
pliable branches.)
The name witch-hazel was
given to the shrub because the leaves resembled those of the English elm tree
with long, drooping branches that was known as the wych-elm; that is, “the
bending elm.” And the wych-elm was also called wych-hazel, because its
leaves resembled those of the hazel tree. (The origins of elm and hazel, both
Old English, are uncertain.) Over the years, “wych” was transformed
into “witch.” (The other kind of witch comes from the early English wicca, a wizard.)
If you’d like to see what the Witch Hazel flowers look
like, this
website has many striking photographs.
Another mystery about Witch Hazel – if it blooms in the
winter what pollinates the flowers? This is especially problematic farther
north where it flowers when the ground is covered by snow. Famous naturalist Bernd
Heinrich discovered that “winter moths” were probably the pollinators when he
found clusters of them on Witch Hazel flowers during a Vermont winter.
Winter moth is the name given to a group of moths that emerge
from their cocoon in the fall, mate and spend the winter as adult moths. In the
spring they lay eggs on the buds and newly emerging leaves of their host
plants. Then the adults die. The remarkable thing about the moths is that they
are able to fly in cold weather. They are able to raise their body temperature
to the level necessary for flight by “shivering” their flight muscles.
If you leave your porch light on during the winter you
may find a few winter moths attracted to it.
Passionvines or “Maypops” have many fruits that
are beginning to ripen. Some enjoyed stomping on them to see if they might pop.
Is that the origin of the name? It turns out that this is an example of
“folk etymology.” Mary Durant, author of Who Named the Daisy? Who Named
the Rose?, answered the question:
“Maypop is the anglicization of
the Indian maracock,
as the Virginian tribes called it, the name having
made its way from the Tupi Indians of
South America, up through the Arawak and
Carib tribes, and into North America. In the original Tupi, the name was maraca-cui-iba
— the “rattle fruit” –
because of the gourd-like fruits whose seeds rattle when the fruit is dried.”
The following links should
help satisfy your thirst for knowledge about the Purple Passionflower:
All
about passionflower, including medicinal use. (Great photographs)
Starting
passionflower from seed.
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A single Gulf Fritillary caterpillar was found today.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
We found two Daddy Longlegs on the top of a wooden fence
post. Daddy Longlegs are called Harvestmen in England and are members of the
order Opiliones in the class Arachnida. They are distantly related to spiders
and scorpions. Like the other arachnids they have 8 legs, but no antennae.
Instead, the first pair of legs act as sensory organs and are moved about as
they walk, as though they were feeling their way. One urban legend about Daddy
Longlegs still persists: some people insist that they have the most dangerous
venom of any creature. Where this started is a mystery. Daddy Longlegs don’t
even have venom glands.
We were treated to a flock (swarm, gaggle) of Grackles in
the adjacent trees. They are probably migrating through our area. Many
blackbirds migrate in large numbers and in mixed species flocks.
Now for something completely different. I thought
it would be interesting for everyone to search the area for something that they
were curious about or found interesting. Then tell the rest of us why they
found it interesting or why they were curious about it.
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Jim holds a Pokeweed stalk.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
Jim found the red stem of Pokeweed and told us about the
importance of the plant to people living in rural areas. The first flush of
leaves were often the earliest greens available to rural people. A great source
of vitamin C, but preparation was complex because the entire plant is very
poisonous and the leaves had to be pre-treated to remove the toxin. The berries
were also a source of ink. (I mistakenly said that the Declaration of
Independence was written with poke berry ink. Both the Constitution and the
Declaration were written with iron gall ink, which was used as a permanent ink
through the early part of the twentieth century.)
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Clematis seed heads.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
Several ramblers found the seed clusters of our native Clematis.
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David holding a Smilax vine.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
David had a Greenbrier (Smilax) and told us of the
enormous size of the underground tuber of a Smilax he dug up.
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Several ramblers found late season White Asters.
(photo by Emily Carr) |
