Leader for today’s Ramble: Linda
Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today: 32
Today’s emphasis:  Seeking What We Found along the White Trail Spur, the Orange Trail Spur, the Orange Trail, the Purple Trail, the Purple Trail Spur and the lower Flower Garden
Reading:  Dale read an excerpt from the July 14th entry of An Almanac for Moderns, by Donald Culross Peattie:

Bee droning; white clouds in full sail for an open sea of blue, and the odor of clover, honeyed and familiar and reminding one of all the summers gone by-that is July.
The clover plant is such a common thing that nobody praises it as it deserves to be praised, this fragrant, hardy, ubiquitous plant that leaves the soil richer than it found it. . . .
The place to look for the astonishing in Nature is amongst common things. The clover with its dense head of two-lipped flowers exactly suited to the long tongues of butterflies and some bees, sustains a symbiotic relationship with insects quite as much as the orchid. The roots of the clover harbor colonies of nitrifying bacteria which improve the soil, as important or more so than the fungi in the roots of orchids. Where orchids are scarce and useless, clover creeps over the surface of the world, invading our continent and the Antipodes, leaving the world better than it found it, nourishing cattle, alluring bees and butterflies, and trooping down the dusty roadsides where haughtier flowers will not consent to grow.

Show and Tell:
Richard brought an Osage Orange to show.  It has been known by a variety of common names in addition to Osage Orange, including hedge apple, horse apple, the French bois d’arc and English transliterations: bodark and bodock, also translated as “bow-wood”; monkey ball, monkey brains, yellow-wood and mock orange. Due to its latex secretions and woody pulp, the fruit is typically not eaten by humans and rarely by foraging animals. Richard described it as an anachronistic “ghost of evolution,” persisting since the time when large megafauna such as ground sloths and mammoths would have subsisted on such large fruits. For more on this interesting phenomena, see: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/anachronistic-fruits-and-the-ghosts-who-haunt-them/

Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:
1.      Emily gave us an update on the Nature Ramble shirt printing.  She will send out instructions for ordering and pick-up or delivery.
2.      Emily offered to include any rambler who so requests in her contacts in case you are running late and needed to call to find out where we can be found once you arrive.
3.      Emily announced that if you are a new Rambler and want to get on the email list for Dale’s blog post and other announcements, see her at some point during the Ramble and she will add you to the email list.
4.      Bob Ambrose put in a pitch for a book he recently enjoyed, Finding the Mother Tree:  Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest  by Suzanne Simard.

Today’s Route:   We left the arbor and headed through the Children’s Garden and followed the White Trail Spur down to the Orange Trail Spur which we followed to the Orange Trail.  From this point we headed left, down river, to the Purple Trail.  We took it up to the connector to the lower Flower Garden and took it, heading up to and through the Heritage Garden and then on a direct route back to the Visitor Center/Conservatory.

Today’s post was written by Linda Chafin.

OBSERVATIONS:
 

Children’s Garden, Food Plants Section:

Creeping Cucumber, or Melonette

”       On our way to the White Trail Spur, we stopped in the Children’s Garden to admire a densely sprawling tangle of the slender vines of Creeping Cucumber, or Melonette. This is a native species in the cucumber family, Cucurbitaceae, with fruits that resemble miniature watermelons. It has recently become popular in organic gardening circles. Eve warned us that while the fruit is edible when green, it is a powerful laxative when ripe and purplish-black in color.

White Trail Spur:

Black-footed Marasmius

”       Many downed twigs and branches sported rows of small, delicate mushrooms with white caps and black, slender, springy  stalks.  They are probably Black-footed Marasmius.

Pinesap

Closeup of Pinesap flowers

”       While searching the leaf-littered slopes along the Spur Trail for Crane Fly Orchid, ramblers discovered the plant of the day: Pinesap! This plant has not been documented at the Garden since 8 July 1976, when Bruce Hammerslough, a volunteer who created the Garden’s tiny herbarium, collected and preserved a specimen. (Here’s a plea for recognition of the importance of herbaria – and other natural history collections – to our knowledge of natural history.) The species had been collected in Clarke County only once before, in 1968, so this seems to be a rare plant in Clarke County (and other Piedmont counties as well), though it is fairly common in the mountains. Like its single-flowered relative, Indian Pipes (Monotropa uniflora), Pinesap is entirely without chlorophyll and cannot carry on photosynthesis. While Indian Pipes are a ghostly white color, Pinesap stems and tiny, useless leaves range in color from yellowish-tan to pink to red. For centuries, it was believed that these achlorophyllous plants were “saprophytes” drawing nutrients from rotting wood buried in the soil and leaf litter. In fact, there are no plants with the ability to break down organic matter to extract nutrients. There are parasitic plants which are directly attached to a living host, but Pinesap is actually in a three-way relationship among trees and fungi. Pinesap and its relatives draw nutrients from an underground network of fungi that extracts carbohydrates from the roots of a tree that does the work of photosynthesis for all three members of this menage á  trois. We know from the work of many researchers such as Suzanne Simard that the fungi “gives back” to the trees by acting as an underground communication and nutrient-sharing network sometimes called the “wood wide web.”

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Fruits of Jack-in-the-Pulpit

”       A large patch of five-leaved Jill-in-the-Pulpits are growing on both sides of the Spur Trail, each with 5 leaflets per leaf and a small cluster of green, unripe berries held at the top of a stalk. Members of this species have the ability to change gender – one year a plant may be a Jill, the next a Jack. If rain and nutrients were abundant the previous year, a plant’s underground storage organ (a corm) will be enlarged with carbohydrates that can support a large, fruit-bearing, female plant. Fruiting is a much more nutrient-expensive process than producing pollen, so small-cormed plants bear male, pollen-producing flowers. Female-flowered plants are taller and usually have five leaflets, while male-flowered plants are shorter and have three leaflets; non-flowering plants are smaller than both of those and have three leaflets. The corm is drained by the process of bearing fruits, and these plants will often be male-flowered the next spring. Plants in this genus may live up to 20 years, changing their gender from year to year, depending on conditions and the size of their corms. The green fruits we saw today will soon mature into shiny, red berries that are eaten by birds including Wild Turkeys.

Chanterell

”       As usually happens in wet years at the Garden, chanterelles are popping out of the leaf litter just about everywhere we went today.

Orange Trail Spur:

Woodland Spider Lily (A possible escapee from the Dunson Garden)

.

Coral Tube Slime Mold

Coral Tube Slime Mold on a damp, decaying log. Not a coral nor a mold, but definitely slimy, slime molds are placed in the kingdom Protista along with amoebae and algae.

Cross-veined Troop Mushrooms

Orange Trail:

Virginia Dayflower In the same family as spiderworts, their pale blue flowers also last only for a day.

Common Elderberry with umbels of green fruit.

Once ripened, the dark purple fruits of Common Elderberry provide a feast for birds and a source of wine for humans. (link)

Late Blooming Thoroughwort

Yellow Crownbeard Opposite leaves

Wingstem Alternate leaves

Yellow Crownbeard, with opposite leaves, contrasted with Alternate-leaf Wingstem. Both have obviously winged stems.

American Pokeweed in bloom. The round, green ball in the center of the flower is the ovary which will ripen into a dark reddish-purple fruit that is an important food source for songbirds as they get ready for their southward migration. The leaves and stems are toxic and rarely eaten by mammals.

Eastern Anglepod

One of Georgia’s six species of milkvine, Eastern Anglepod, oozes white latex when injured as do all members of its family, Apocynaceae. Often referred to as sap, the latex is entirely different from sap and is held in a system of tubes (lactifers) that are separate from the plant’s vascular tissue. As with the closely related milkweeds, the latex is rich in cardiac glycosides intended to poison caterpillars and other insect herbivores. Despite the presence of toxic latex, milkvines are not used by Monarch butterflies as a host plant.

Sensitive Fern

Last season’s fertile ffrond.

Jewelweed A harbinger of late summer and fall wildflowers, is just beginning to flower in the floodplain.

River Oats, AKA “Fish-on-a-pole.”

Virgin’s Bower clematis, with its sharply toothed leaflets. The similar but highly invasive Sweet Autumn Clematis has smooth leaflet margins. Gary mentioned that he has treated much of the invasive species at the Garden and has noticed the scale tipping to more native than invasive where the invasive used to be the more common species.

Green Ash fruits

Green Ash with its paddle-shaped fruits is common in the Middle Oconee River floodplain.  Green Ash is a wetland species while White Ash is found in uplands. It’s easy to confuse Green Ash with Box Elder, both floodplain species with opposite, compound leaves. Their bark is also similar. However Green Ash leaflets have smooth margins, and Box Elder leaflets are toothed, suggesting that we should always carry binoculars in the field.

Box Elder

Box Elder leaves, especially those with only 3 leaflets, resemble Poison Ivy leaves. Roger showed us that if you fan the leaflets of Box Elder (a maple tree, despite its common name), it forms a “typical” maple leaf shape.  Not recommended for people who are highly allergic to Poison Ivy since this method required handling the leaves!  Also, like all Maples, the leaves are opposite on the stem, while Poison Ivy leaves are alternate.

Lurid Sedge fruits are held in a short spike below the male, pollen-producing spike

Guttation

Guttation

Guttation: During the day, water is constantly moving through the bodies of plants, pulled up from the roots through the plant’s vascular system and out into the leaves, stems, flowers, and fruits. This process is a result of water evaporating from tiny pores called stomates; as water evaporates from the surface it pulls more water up behind it. But at night, the stomates are closed. Then, if atmospheric humidity and soil moisture are high, water builds up in the plant and is forced out through special cells (called hydathodes) that line the margins and some surfaces of leaves. This process is called guttation. Look closely at wet leaves in the morning and you can tell the difference between dew, which has condensed randomly on leaves, and guttation which produces droplets along the margins of the leaf, often at the tips of teeth.

False Death-Cap mushroom.

Nigroporous vinosus mushrooms

Lower Flower Garden:

Short-toothed Mountain Mint

Short-toothed Mountain Mint was attracting bees in a bed in the lower Flower Garden. Mountain-mints are flowering throughout the mountains and Piedmont now and are often hard to tell apart. Most have white bracts associated with the flower heads (hence the common name Hoary Mountain-mints), and many have pale green lower leaf surfaces that contrast with the dark green color of the upper leaf surface. This species is characterized by the dark green color of both leaf surfaces and the somewhat flattened flower heads.

Sculpted Resin Bee on the flower.

The Sculpted Resin Bee, a large leafcutter bee, is an Asian invasive, first reported in the U.S. in North Carolina in 1994.  Its rightful place on the “bad” scale is yet to be determined but it is known to appropriate Eastern Carpenter Bee cavities.  It is most easily identified by the dimpled abdominal sections and the bushy golden mustache across its face.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Osage Orange                             Maclura pomifera
Creeping Cucumber, Melonette   Melothria pendula
Cranefly Orchid                            Tipularia discolor
Black-footed Marasmium             Tetrapyrgos nigripes
Pinesap                                        Monotropa hypopithys, 

                                                     syn. Hypopitys lanuginosa
Jill- and Jack-in-the-Pulpit            Arisaema triphyllum
Smooth Chanterelle Mushroom   Cantharellus lateritius
Wingstem                                     Verbesina alternifolia
Woodland Spider Lily                   Hymenocallis occidentalis
Yellow Crownbeard                      Verbesina occidentalis
Coral Tube Slime Mold                 Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa
Cross-veined Troop Mushroom    Xeromphalina kauffmanii
Virginia Dayflower                         Commelina virginica
Late-flowering Thoroughwort        Eupatorium serotinum
American Pokeweed                     Phytolacca americana
Eastern Anglepod                         Gonolobus suberosus, 

                                                     syn. Matelea gonocarpos
Sensitive Fern                             Onoclea sensibilis
Jewelweed                                   Impatiens capensis
River Oats                                    Chasmanthium latifolium
Virgin’s Bower                              Clematis virginiana
Green Ash                                    Fraxinus pennsylvanica
Box Elder                                     Acer negundo
Lurid Sedge                                 Carex lurida
False Death-Cap Mushroom       Amanita citrina
Mushroom (NCN)                        Nigroporous vinosus
Short-toothed Mountain Mint       Pycnanthemum muticum
Sculpted Resin Bee                     Megachile sculpturalis
Spiny-backed Orbweaver            Gasteracantha cancriformis

Leaders for today’s Ramble: Dale & Don

Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today: 25
Today’s emphasis: The Piedmont Prairie restoration and its wildflowers.
Reading:  Page read a short excerpt from Tracking Gobi Grizzlies by Douglas Chadwick.

Here’s the deal with most of us grown-up naturalists.: While we can toss around Latin names and biological principles, there’s a huge part of us that’s still just an eleven-year-old on a treasure hunt. We’ll keep going all day on the chance of turning over a stone or peering around a bend to something that makes us say, “Ooooh!” and then, if we’re lucky, “What the heck is that: I’ve never seen anything like it before.” This impulse defines all kinds of adventurers. The difference is that the naturalist is captivated by the mystery of organisms, their majesty/intricacy/oddity/fantasticality. And their behaviors: “What’s it doing?”

Show & Tell  

One of our Ramblers, Rich Kimmich, sent me some photos of an unusual flower to share with you. A pair of Shasta Dasies that appear to be con-joined.

Conjoined Shasta Daisy flower heads?

The same pair of flower heads from the side.

The two flower heads appear to be sharing the same stem. The typical daisy has just one flower head per stem. I have no idea how this happened. Perhaps a split in the floral meristem? Your guess is as good as mine (maybe better).

Today’s Route: The sidewalk from the Arbor to the mulched White Trail path to the Dunson Garden, exiting on the road, then down the road, passing the Clethra and the Passion Flower vines, then up the power line right of way, passing the White Trail into the shade. Then back to our cars.

OBSERVATIONS:

Purple Passionflower

Structure of a Purple Passionflower. Beginning at the top: 1) Three club-shaped structures, (the swollen ends are stigmas and the “handles” are the styles). 2) A slightly swollen ovary, anthers 3) Five stamens (filaments & anthers) only 2 are visible. (photo by D. Hoyt)

Purple Passionflowers have an unusual floral structure. A vertical post rises from the center of the blossom, extending above the petals. About ¼ inch above the bottom of this post there is a circle of stamens with their anthers held horizontally, parallel to the floral disk. The distance between the anthers and the base of the flower, where the nectar is, is just right for large bee, like a Carpenter Bee, to contact the anthers when it visits to flower for nectar. On the other hand, a honeybee visiting the flower is too small to touch the anthers while getting nectar.

Above the circle of anthers the post is slightly swollen. This swelling is the ovary, where the ovules that will develop into seeds are found. Above the ovary the post splits into three parts, the styles, each ending in a swelling – this swelling is a stigma, the location where pollen must be placed to produce seeds.
 

Position of the Stigmas. When the flowers open in the morning the three styles are initially pointing upwards. In some flowers they remain in that position, whereas in others they soon bend downwards until their stigmas are at the same level as the anthers, in position to receive pollen. Flowers with upright stigmas are very unlikely to be pollinated because the distance between the stigma and the nectary where where the bees are foraging is too great for pollen transfer.

This video shows a Carpenter Bee getting nectar from a flower with flexed styles. (Please ignore the soundtrack on the video. I couldn’t figure out how to remove it.) Notice two things: 1) the bee is just the right size to brush its thorax against the anthers as it moves around the flower looking for nectar and 2) the stigmas are at the level of the anthers so,  as the bee moves about the flower, its thorax comes in contact with the stigmas. When that contact happens pollen grains are transferred from the bee’s thorax to the sticky stigma.

Review of flowering plant reproduction, for those who don’t remember.The summary above just focuses on the formation of the plant embryo.
The actual process of making a seed is more complicated, involving a
process called “double fertilization.” I’ll explain that at a future
date.

A pollen grain contains two sperm cells. One will fertilize the egg, the other will fuse with other cells of the ovule that will become the food for the developing  embryo. To deliver these sperms to an ovule in the ovary the pollen grain must first be placed on the stigma of the flower. There the pollen germinates and begins to grow a pollen tube. The tube grows through the style into the ovary, carrying the sperm cells with it. When the pollen tube reaches an ovule within the ovary it releases a sperm cell which then fertilizes the egg cell within the ovule. The other sperm cell fertilizes the cells that will make the embryo’s food.

Flowers with styles pointing upward will not be fertilized because their stigmas are too far away from the bees foraging for nectar. Such flowers are functionally staminate, or male, because they can produce pollen and transmit it to Carpenter bees, but cannot develop fruits and seeds because pollen is unlikely to reach their stigmas. Thus, there are two functional types of Passion flowers: hermaphroditic or bisexual flowers that can produce seeds and pollen, and staminate, or male, flowers that produce pollen only. Note that this applies to flowers, not to entire plants. A given plant is capable of producing both types of flowers.
 

Bisexual Purple Passionflower. The styles are curved so the stigmas can touch a nectaring Carpenter Bee. (photo by D.L.Hoyt)

A Purple Passionflower with erect styles and a Carpenter Bee foraging for nectar. The stigmas are too far from the bee to receive pollen so the flower will not produce any fruit or seeds. (photo by D.L.Hoyt)

Why should a passion vine produce male-only flowers? The flowers last only one day, so the energy required to make the flower is the same, no matter whether it is male or bisexual. The additional cost comes when the bisexual flower has been pollinated. Then it starts to form a fruit with a lot of seeds, a process that will take a month or more. Each fruit is a drain on the plants available energy; more fruits developing, less energy available to each one. If this idea is correct, you would expect passion flower plants to produce more male flowers as the season progresses.

To test this idea University of Florida researchers counted the number of each kind of flower in a patch of passion flowers over one growing season. In the second week male flowers outnumbered the bisexual flowers, approximately 170 to 150. In subsequent weeks the number of male flowers remained relatively constant (150-170) but bisexual flowers gradually decreased in number (from 150 to 75).  The growing season ended with male flowers twice as frequent as females.

The researchers also conducted a more direct test of their hypothesis by manipulating fruit production. Each day, after recording its sexual status, they clipped off the ovary of every flower that opened. These ovariectomized plants not only produced more flowers compared to the unclipped control plants (704 vs. 351), but they produced almost twice as many hermaphroditic flowers (63% vs. 36%). This is strong support for idea that the plants can manipulate the sex ratio of their flowers to adjust the number of fruits to the amount of resources available.

But why not just stop making flowers? That would leave all of the plants energy to the developing fruits. A plant has two ways of passing on its genes to the next generation: producing seeds and producing pollen. Making a flower is cheap compared to making a fruit. By making a male flower the plant continues passing its genes on via the pollen, thus increasing its chances of contributing some of its genes to the next generation. That’s what evolution is all about.
 

A pair of Extra-floral Nectaries at the base of a Purple Passiion flower leaf blade.

Extra-floral Nectaries (EFNs) are nectar producing tissues that are not located in a flower. They are often found on leaves but can be located in many different places. Passion vines typically have a pair of nectaries at the base of leaf blade. They are thought to attract ants and, in doing so, decrease the number of herbivores on the plant. One study tested the idea by removing all the EFNs from a group of Purple Passion flowers and leaving the control group undisturbed. Herbivore damage was less on the control group and higher on the experimental group. If you watch ants on a plant they are usually running here and there until they contact something edible. Ants are predators and being edible means being a bug or caterpillar or insect egg. These are either eaten on the spot or carried back to the nest. So anything that attracts ants will likely benefit a plant in the long run. It’s like a doughnut shop giving free coffee and doughnuts to the police. They are less likely to be robbed.

An ant on Purple Passion flower leaves.

A Carolina Anole stopping for a sip of dew and, perhaps, a tasty insect on a Purple Passion flower.

Carolina Anoles don’t (or won’t) drink water from a container. They get their water from dew or droplets on vegetation. They also obtain water from their insect prey. If you keep pet anoles you will need to spray their terrarium with water each day and more frequently if your house is very dry.
 

Swamp Rose Mallow

SwampRoseMallow
 At the bottom of the Dunson Garden a Swamp Rose Mallow was sticking a single blossom through the deer fence, giving us an opportunity to look at the characteristics of the Mallow family (Malvaceae)

(Following is from the July 28, 2016, Ramble Report by Linda)

“An economically important family, the Malvaceae includes cotton, okra, and hibiscus, including the old fashioned landscape plant, Rose-of-Sharon or Althea (Hibiscus syriacus). Two mallow species were blooming at the lower end of the Dunson Garden:  Rose Mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), with its white, purple-throated flowers, and Red Hibiscus (Hibiscus coccineus), with huge, deep red flowers.

We took a look at the characteristic arrangement of Mallow Family reproductive parts. The stalks of the stamens are fused into a column that surrounds the pistil and projects well out from the center of the open flower. Near the top of the column, the anthers curve outwards. Above the stamens, the stigmas emerge at the tip of the column. We tried to figure out how pollinators, in their quest for nectar, manage to brush against both the anthers and stigmas, which seem widely separated from the “eye” of the flower where nectar is produced in most flowers. A bit of internet searching later revealed that Hibiscus flowers don’t produce nectar, so the pollinators are not bumbling around at the base of the flower at all. Pollinators are interested only in the pollen and, in their climbing around the top of the column, manage to transfer pollen. Whew.

Finally, we took a look at another characteristic feature of the Mallow Family: the epicalyx. The flower has the typical whorl of colorful petals and green sepals, but surrounding the base of the calyx is another whorl of 8 or 10 narrow, green structures that curve up. Function?  Who knows? But this is another example of those ubiquitous structures called “bracts” that we see in so many flowering plants. A bract is a broad term used to describe any leaf-like structure associated with (but not part of) a flower, and can take a variety of shapes and sizes and colors (think: red leaf-like things surrounding poinsettia flowers).”
 

Hairy Cats Ear

Hairy Cat’s Ear is easily mistaken for Dandelion, probably because they bloom right after Dandelion finishes and they both are found in disturbed areas, i.e., lawns. The flowers are very similar to Dandelion, but the flower stalks are quite different. Dandelion’s flower stalk is tan and hollow and supports only one flower head. Cat’s Eart has green, solid flower stalks that usually branch to support two or more flower heads.

Silvery Checkerspot

Silvery Checkerspot is very similar to another butterfly, the Pearl Crescent. The diagnostic character is also pretty esoteric. To see this you’ll have to click on the photo above to enlarge it. Look at the hind edge of the second pair of wings. You’ll see is is bordered with a series of white dash “-” marks, .Just inside the white dash marks there is a solid dark gray or black band that runs along the margin of the wing.Just inside the black marginal band is a series of black spots. On the right hind wing I count six of these spots. Look closely at the third spot from the left, It has an open, white center, making it more of an “o” than a spot. If you look at the upper surface of the left wing the second spot from the right has an open center. If the butterfly you’re looking at is a Silvery Checkerspot at least one of those hind wing black dots will have an open center. 

Common Whitetail, male Females have brown abdomen and extra wing bands on wing tips.

Common Whitetail is the dragonfly we often see on Rambles. Newly metamorposed males have brown abdomens, like the females. As they age the dorsal surface of the abdomen becomes white. Females do not undergo this change..

American Lady

The American Lady butterfly looks a lot like the Painted Lady. The surest way to distinguish them is to look at the underside of the hind wings. American Lady has two large “eye” spots; Painted Lady has a row small, approximately equal size eye spots on the margin of the hind wings. The two species are different in other ways:

Painted Lady is highly migratory and its caterpillar feeds on Thistles; American Lady is non-migratory and larval host plant is Pussytoes.

Leafcutter Bee

Leafcutter Bees gather pollen on the underside of their abdomen. They are about the same size as a Honey Bee, but are black and gray in color and lack the pollen basket on their hind legs. They are solitary bees, each female building and provisioning her own nest. The nest is in a hollow, usually in soft wood or a plant stem. The female cuts semicircular pieces from thin, smooth leaves and uses them to build a cell that contains one egg and pollen for her larva. They are efficient pollinators and used for some greenhouse crops.

Thynnid wasp

Thynnid wasps prey on the grubs of scarab beetles. The females of some species are wingless and the males carry them in the air while mating. When the female finds a beetle grub she stings it, paralyzing the grub. She then lays an egg on it and seeks out more grubs.
 

Mason Wasp

Mason Wasps (AKA Potter Wasps) are solitary wasps. Each female provisions her nest with prey items she stings and paralyzes. She lays an egg on one and then seals the chamber off with a plug of mud. Some Mason Wasps, like this one, use pre-existing cavities, like hollow plant stems or holes drilled in a block of wood. Other kinds build a beautiful, hollow spherical nest from mud. 

The “bird’s nest” stage of Queen Anne’s Lace.

Queen Anne’s Lace scarcely looks like it did a few weeks ago. The flat topped, white umbels have collapsed inward, forming a “bird’s nest.” Later the “bird’s nest” will relax and open up, freeing the bristly seeds to catch a ride on a passing item of clothing or a furry body.

It is considered a category 3 invasive in Georgia: 

“Exotic plant that is a minor problem in
Georgia natural areas, or is not yet known to be a problem in Georgia
but is known to be a problem in adjacent states.” Georgia Exotic Pest Plant Council

Spittlebug concealed in its spittle shelter.

A spittlebug with its spittle removed.

Here is a great video about Spittlebugs. It should answer all of your questions.

Littleleaf Sensitive Briar

The following passage was sent to me by Rambler Toni Senori. It’s from Evangeline, Part the Second, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

As, at the tramp of a horse’s hoof on the turf of the prairies,
Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa,
So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,
Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it

Blackberry Stem Gall

Galls are abnormal growths of plant parts. They can be caused by a variety of agents: viruses, bacteria, insects, mites. Many galls are caused by insects and have a consistent location and shape. How this is achieved is not, at present, known. It must be something that is unique to each different kind of insect that interacts with the plants hormones to produce such a consistent result. The Blackberry Stem Gall is produced by a small wasp in the family Cynipidae, a large family of gall-making wasps. These wasps insert one or more eggs into a plant part. The plant responds by producing an abnormal growth that shelters the wasp larva and provides it with food. After several molts the larva pupates and later the adult emerges and chews its way out of the plant.

Chicken of the Woods

This large mushroom was found growing at the base of a Northern Red Oak in the Dunson Garden. It may be parasitic on the tree. This species is reported to also be saprobic (feeding on dead material). It causes a brown rot.
  
SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Sweet Pepperbush                      Clethra alnifolia
Eastern Carpenter Bee                Xylocopa virginica
Common Eastern Bumble Bee    Bombus impatiens
Purple Passion Flower                 Passiflora incarnata
Carolina Anole                             Anolis caroliniensis
Red ant                                        Hymenoptera: Formicidae
Swamp Rose-mallow                   Hibiscus moscheutos
Wild Petunia                                 Ruellia caroliniensis
Hairy Cat’s Ear                             Hypochaeris radicata
Mountain mint                               Pycnanthemum sp.
Yellow Crownbeard                       Verbesina occidentalis
Loblolly Pine                                 Pinus taeda
Poison Ivy                                     Toxicodendron radicans
Trumpet Vine                                 Campsis radicans
Carolina Desert Chicory                Pyrrhopappus carolinianus
Common Whitetail                         Plathemis lydia
Beebalm                                        Monarda fistulosa
American Lady                              Vanessa virginiensis
Silvery Checkerspot                      Chlosyne nycteis
Leaf-cutter bee                              Megachile sp.
Thynnid Wasp                               Myzinum obscurum
Mason Wasp                                 Euodynerus foraminatus
Queen Anne’s Lace                      Daucus carota
Spittlebug                                     Hemiptera: Cercopidae
Bowl-and-doily Spider                  Frontinella pyramitela
Littleleaf Sensitive Briar                Mimosa microphylla
Heal-all                                         Prunella vulgaris
Blackberry                                    Rubus sp.
Grey-headed Coneflower             Ratibida pinnata
White Thoroughwort                     Eupatorium album
Rosepink                                      Sabatia angularis
Chicken-of-the-Woods                 Laetiporus sulphureus
Chanterelle mushroom                Cantharellus sp.
 

Leader for today’s Ramble: Dale
Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today:  25
Today’s emphasis:  “Seeking What We Find” on the Purple Trail.
Reading: An excerpt from: Trees: Their Natural History, 2nd ed. by Peter A. Thomas, 2014, p. 376:

The value of trees
Over their long history, trees have played an important part in our lives that goes beyond just the supply of wood. Trees have been (and still are) sacred to many peoples; oaks were sacred to the European Druids, baobabs (Adansonia digitata) to African tribes, the ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) to the Chinese and Japanese, sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) to N American first people, and monkey puzzles (Araucaria araucana) to the Pehuenche people of Chile. Indeed, many of our words and expressions are derived from a close association with trees. Writing tablets were once made from slivers of beech wood (Fagus sylvatica), and ‘beech’ is the Anglo-Saxon word for book. Beech is still called ‘bok’ in Swedish and ‘beuk’ in Danish. Romans crowned athletes with wreaths of the bay laurel (Laurus nobilis); this was extended to poets and scholars in Middle Ages, hence Poet Laureate. Similarly, Roman students were called bachelors from the laurel berry (baccalaureus) leaving us with bachelor degrees (baccalaureate) and, since Roman students were forbidden to marry, unmarried bachelor males.

Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:

• Emily has been in touch with Satisfactory Printing about getting a new run of the “Nature Ramblers” T-shirts last available in 2015. The design and layout would be the same (“Nature Ramblers”, “Seeking What We Find”, and a dragonfly), but it may be possible to have more choices of style and color. More details will follow.
• 
  

  Nature Ramblers T-Shirt, 2015 vintage 2021 edition will have same design but different styles, colors.

   

• This morning I heard my first Katydid calling from the trees in the parking lot.
• Last Tuesday I heard the first annual or “dog-day” cicada calling from the parking lot trees.
• Jim McMinn recommended a book, American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation, by Eric Rutkow. It’s a history of the how the trees and forests have impacted America over the last 400 years.
  

Today’s Route: Starting with the International Garden Flower Bridge and the Bottlebrush Buckeye we walked through the China and Asia section to the head of the Purple Trail, then toward the river through the first deer gate to the first Purple Trail Flower Garden spur back to the steps up to the Heritage Garden.
Today’s Route:   We left the arbor and headed down the paved path to and over the Flower Bridge, moving through the China and Asia Section to the Purple Trail trailhead.  We followed the Purple Trail  down to the Purple Trail-Flower Garden Spur and took it up along the edge of the Flower Garden and to the steps leading up to the Heritage Garden.  We then made our way through Freedom Plaza and on to the back patio entrance to the Visitor Center.  Scattered groups then engaged in some post-Ramble socializing before folks headed home or out to lunch.

OBSERVATIONS:

Flower Bridge:

Only a few flowers remain on the Bottlebrush Buckeye.

A few Bottlebrush Buckeye fruits are starting to develop.

Bottlebrush Buckeye is for all practical purposes finished blooming. We could only find a few dozen blooms high up on the tree. Out of the thousands of flowers there are a few fruits starting to form. Almost all are on the upper reaches of the inflorescence because that is where the “perfect” (the flowers with both male and female reproductive structures) flowers were found. Buckeye fruits are large and represent a heavy investment on the part of the plant. Perhaps that is why the number of perfect flowers is so few.

China and Asia Section:

Forest Spotted Orbweaver

We are beginning to see spiders on our Rambles, probably because they have finally grown to the size that their webs have become noticeable. Most of the web building spiders are annual, i.e., the eggs overwinter in a protective silken structure, hatch in spring and the young spiders grow into maturity during the summer, dying in the fall after mating and laying eggs.  

The capture web spun by the Forest Spotted Orbweaver looks disorganized in the center, where the spider sits. I thought that it might be an early attempt by an inexperienced web builder, but scanning the photos of this species on the internet showed that all of this species build a similar messy web. Other orbweavers spin a web with a distinctively different type of silk in the center, called a stabilimentum. (Look for this in the Yellow Garden Spider web, later in this report.)

Purple Trail

With the bark wet from rain and dew it is difficult to see the sap wells in this section of the trunk of a Hophornbeam.

The Hophornbeam is one of the most common subcanopy trees in the Botanical Garden natural areas. And almost all of them show signs of having been visited by Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, a type of woodpecker. The Sapsucker is a winter resident, returning north in the spring to nest and raise their young. While here they have the habit of drilling sap wells in the trunks of trees. These are a group of shallow holes spaced about 1/2 inch apart that encircle the trunk. The sap wells provide a slightly sweet drink and also attract insects that are eaten by the birds. 

The tree soon blocks the sap flow and the sapsucker has to peck a new series of holes. Their favorite trees eventually become riddled with former sap wells from top to bottom. 

It appears that no one knows how the bird selects its trees: it could be trial and error or it could be taught by observation of other birds or learned from the parents.

Smooth Chanterelle

Avis discovered a Chanterlle mushroom growing beneath the Hophornbeam. These fungi are cherished by cooks and gourmets.

Beech leaves have wavy edges.

Buds are developing at the base of leaves. By fall they will be 2-3 times as long and sharp pointed.

American Beech trees have three features that, together, make them unique among the trees in this area: leaves with wavy edges, long, pointed buds and smooth, gray bark. Those wavy edges can be remembered by this aid:”Where do you find the waves? At the beach!” Get it?

Beech Blight Aphids The fluffy white material is wax secreted by the aphids.

Beech Blight Aphids are always entertaining. Disturb the branch they are feeding on and they begin to perform their boogie-woogie dance, waving their waxy adornment in the air. It is thought that this unified display might protect the colony members from attack by predators and/or parasitoids.

Here’s a link to a short video that shows the “boogie woogie” aphid dance. Don also has a video recording of these aphids in his FB album (link at the start of this post.)

These aphids don’t seem to do any great harm to the Beech tree. There is another organism that is dependent on them: a fungus. It grows on the sugary droppings that accumulate beneath the aphid colonies. Initially it looks like a black stain but will develop into something that looks like a black kitchen scrub pad.

Asiatic Oak Weevil

Asiatic Oak Weevil is not restricted to Oaks. They feed on other trees in the same family, Fagaceae, to which Beeches belong. The adult weevils hide in leaves that caterpillars have folded together, They feed from the leaf margin inwards.

A polypore fungus on a well rotted piece of wood.

Destroying Angel A deadly poisonous mushroom

Don pointed out the characteristics of a deadly poisonous mushroom, the Destroying Angel. Never eat a mushroom that looks like this. Starting at the bottom, there is a bulbous swelling that is found in most Amanita mushrooms. Toward the top of the stalk is a collar-like structure called the partial veil. Above the partial veil is the cap with gills on its undersurface. The combination of these three features: gilled cap, partial veil and bulbous base means “don’t eat.”

An Inchworm, a caterpillar of the geometrid moth family hanging from an almost invisible silk thread.

Inchworms are almost never seen on their host plants because their shape and coloration make them look like part of the leaves they are eating or just another twig on a branch. They get their name, inchworm, from the way they walk: the rear end is brought up to the head end, making an inverted “U” shape. The claspers on the hind end then grasp the surface and the head end releases its attachment and extends forward in a straight line. It looks like the caterpillar is measuring the surface its crawling on, hence the “inchworm” common name.
In addition to resembling twigs and leaves, inchworms have another defense against being eaten: they drop off the tree they are dining on when danger threatens. Put yourself in the place of a tasty inchworm when a bird lands on your branch. If you jump you can fall out of danger. But when you hit the ground, you’ll be faced with another problem – where is your food? How will you find your way back to that tasty leaf you were munching? You could wander for hours and never even find your tree trunk.
A safety line is the solution. Like most caterpillars, inchworms can produce silk from silk glands in their head. When danger threatens, they start releasing a silken safety line from these glands. The inchworm glues one end of the silk to the leaf or twig and then jumps off. The weight of the caterpillar pulls the silk out of the gland as the caterpillar falls. It happens fast enough to fool a bird! Not only has the caterpillar escaped its predator, it has a way to return home – climb up the silken thread. I have watched inchworms climbing their safety lines and can tell you that it involves winding the thread up into a wad held by their thoracic legs, but I can’t provide any more details. Perhaps Ramblers with more acute vision can find the answer.

An earthworm, possibly a non-native.

Earthworms are difficult to identify. I initially thought that the one in the photo above might be a Crazy Worm (AKA Snake Worm, Jumping Worm). The problem with that ID is that it lacks a key character: a white ring around the body. This individual lacks that white ring, but it may just be immature. Crazy Worms can reach a length of 8 inches and, when held, feel very muscular, as though you were holding a snake, not a worm. I just don’t know enough to be very confident of that ID, so I’m avoiding it.

The Invasive Worm problem. Several Ramblers had heard of invasive worms causing damage to ecosystems and wondered if they were a problem here. The problem was first noticed in the parts of the country that had been covered by glaciers until 11-12 thousand years ago. These glaciated regions had no native earthworms. Thousands of years covered by ice miles deep exterminated all the earth worms in the soil underlying the ice. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated the newly exposed areas were earthworm free. Ecosystems gradually developed in these now ice-free areas. Mosses and ferns could colonize these areas with their spores that could be carried by the wind. Seed plants were not as easily dispersed but arrived, dispersed by winds and animals from the unglaciated areas. Earthworms are confined to the soil and are not easily dispersed, so the ecosystems of the glaciated areas developed without them in the soil. This meant that the organic matter in these soils decayed more slowly and, therefore, accumulated more than it would have in the presence of earthworms. The soils developed a deep duff layer of slowly decaying organic material and the plants adapted to these conditions.
Then came European man who introduced worms adapted to thousands of years of agricultural practice.
Many of the worms introduced were surface feeders and began to feed on the deep layers of duff that had developed. This caused a decline in the spring ephemerals, shrubs and trees that were adapted to the rich layer of duff.
This pattern was first seen in Minnesota and is now happening in the New England states.
The situation in unglaciated areas is not as clear or as well studied. These areas never lost their native earthworms so the invaders had to deal with established native species. In addition, earthworms disperse slowly; it takes many years for them to move a few hundred feet unless assisted by human activity.

Flower Garden:

Oak Apple Gall cut in half to show interior.

An Oak Apple Gall is produced when a small wasp lays an egg in the middle of an Oak leaf. The leaf responds by producing a spherical swelling about the size of a golf ball. But the swelling contains additional tissue in the center, suspended by fibers that run from the center to outer edge of the gall. The central matter is where the larval gall wasp feeds on the gall tissue. The central location is thought to provide protection against parasitic wasps who would lay an egg on the larval wasp. It would prevent parasites with short egg laying tubes from reaching the center of the gall.

Five-lined Skink

There are three species of Five-lined Skinks in our area; this is most likely the Common Five-lined Skink. At hatching all of them have five yellow stripes that run the length of the body and a bright, blue tail. As they age the stripes and blue tail get duller and duller until body and tail are a uniform shade of gray-brown.

Blackberry Lily with Honey Bee

Indian Pinks

Yellow Garden Spider The stabilimentum is the conspicuous stretch of zig-zag silk that runs vertically with the spider sitting in the middle.

Yellow Garden Spiders, like many other orb weaving spiders, produce a structure on their webs called a stablilimentum. Many ideas about the function of the stabilimentum have been proposed, but were hard to test. One hypothesis with experimental support is web damage prevention idea. The stabilimentum makes the web more visible and prevents birds from flying into the web and destroying it. This idea was tested in Florida. The investigators located 60 webs built by a kind of spider that builds a web at night and takes it down at dawn, rebuilding it the following night. By removing the spiders from each of the 60 webs at 2AM they had a set of webs that were unoccupied the following morning. Thirty of these were control webs and the other 30 had an artificial stabilimentum made of paper attached. They examined all the webs at 2hr intervals, starting at 6AM, and recorded whether the web was intact or damaged. The pattern was clear: by 8AM 60% of the unmodified webs had been damaged vs. only 20% of the artificial stabilimentum webs. By noon 93% of the control webs were damaged but only 40% of those with artificial stabilimenta.

These results are consistent with the idea that the stabilimenum reduces damage to the web.

Long-legged Fly Predators on other insects (aphids, springtails, mites, flies) in both larval and adult stages.

Furrow bee visiting Gazania (AKA African Daisy) flower.

Summary of Species Observed

Bottlebrush Buckeye                 Aesculus parviflora
Asian Green Dragon                  ??
Forest Spotted Orbweaver        Neoscona domiciliorum
False Cypress                           Chamaeciparis sp
Hophornbeam                           Ostrya virginiana
Smooth Chanterelle                  Cantharellus lateritius
American Beech                        Fagus grandifolia
Beech Blight Aphid                    Grylloprociphilus imbricator
Asiatic Oak Weevil                    Cyrtepistomus castaneus
White Cheese Polypore            Order Polyporales
Destroying Angel                      Amanita bisporigera
Geometer moth caterpillar        Lepidoptera: Geometridae
Deciduous Holly                       Ilex decidua
Asian earthworm                      ??
Blackberry Lilies                       Iris domestica
European Honey Bee              Apis mellifera
Indian Pink                               Spigelia marilandica
Amaryllis                                  Amaryllis sp.?
Yellow Garden Spider              Argiope aurantia
Long-legged fly                        Diptera: Dolichopodidae

Gazania                                   Gazania sp
Furrow bee                              Halictus sp.
Five-lined Skink                       Plestiodon fasciatus
Mountain Mint                         Pycnanthemum sp.

Leader for today’s Ramble: Linda
Link to Don’s Facebook album for this Ramble
Number of Ramblers today:  25
Today’s emphasis:  Ferns in the Lower Shade Garden and Dunson Native Flora Garden
Reading:  Linda read a poem by Walt Whitman, 1885:

The Voice of the Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:

I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, where, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the droughts, the atoms, the dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
and beautify it:
For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,
Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.

Show and Tell:

Eastern Hercules Beetle

Tom brought a pair of large, dead Eastern Hercules Beetles to show off.
 

Sumac Aphid Galls on Smooth Sumac

Red fruits on Smooth Sumac

Richard brought a Smooth Sumac with aphid galls on the underside of the leavlets, as well as the red fruit/berries from the top of the plant.

Announcements/Interesting Things to Note:

One of our Ramblers mentioned that he has been watching a Carolina Wren feed a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird at his place for the past two weeks.

 
 Katherine Edison mentioned seeing a rat snake and a Barred Owl at her small water feature in Five Points,.  Lot’s of trees, such as Five Points has, provide habitat for varied wildlife.

Today’s Route:   Our focus today was ferns. We left the arbor and headed down the paved path, next to the Children’s Garden comfort station, into the Lower Shade Garden and then through the Dunson Garden.  We returned for a social hour, with cookies, at the outdoor tables on the back patio of the Visitor Center conservatory.

OBSERVATIONS:
All the ferns seen in today’s Ramble are covered in this booklet by Linda. It contains photographs taken by Don Hunter as well as information about the life history, characteristics of different ferns and identification tips. This copy is made available on my Dropbox account. If you see a request to login just click the “X” in the upper right corner of the login box.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Camellia                                    Camellia japonica
Bottlebrush Buckeye                 Aesculus parviflora
Hosta                                         Hosta sp.
Southern Lady Fern                  Athyrium asplenioides
Christmas Fern                         Polystichum acrostichoides
Black Cohosh                           Actaea racemosa
Southern Shield Fern               Dryopteris ludoviciana
Spotted Orbweaver                  Neoscona crucifera
Royal Fern                               Osmunda regalis
Lady Fern                                Athyrium filix-femina
Southern Maidenhair Fern      Adiantum capillus-veneris
Sensitive Fern                         Onoclea sensibilis
New York Fern                       Thelypteris noveboracensis
Broad Beech Fern                  Phegopteris hexagonoptera
Goldenseal                             Hydrastis canadensis
Northern Maidenhair Fern       Adiantum pedatum
Painted Buckeye                    Aesculus sylvatica
Marginal Wood Fern              Dryopteris marginalis
Running (Ground) Cedar        Diphasiastrum digitatum