Leader for today’s
Ramble: Don

Authors
of today’s Ramble report: Linda and Don. Comments, edits, and suggestions for the
report can be sent to Linda at Lchafin (at) uga.edu.

Lichen, fungi, and animal identifications: Don

All the
photos that appear in this report, unless otherwise credited, were taken by
Don Hunter. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on
your screen. Not all of Don’s photos from today’s ramble made it into the
ramble report, so be sure to check out his Facebook album at this link.

Number
of Ramblers today: 25

Today’s emphasis: Exploring
the early spring woods along the White, Green, and Red trails

 Today’s reading: Don read from Thomas
Hardy’s “I Watched a Blackbird.”

I watched a blackbird on a budding sycamore

One Easter Day, when sap was stirring twigs to the core;

I saw his tongue, and crocus-colored beak

Parting and closing as he turned his trill;

Then he flew down, seized on a stem of hay,

And upped to where his building scheme was under way,

As if so sure a nest was never shaped on spray.

Common English Blackbird photo by David Friel

Show and Tell:

These weeks are “purple, purple, purple” season in Athens, when we are suddenly made aware of how very much Chinese Wisteria there is in the woods, thickets, and backyards in Athens. Yes, it’s beautiful…but…this section of a Chinese Wisteria stem (above), brought by Gary from one of the many areas he is freeing of invasives, illustrates how deadly this species is on our continent. The large vines strangle the trees they wrap around and their weight breaks the tree limbs they clamber over. Wisteria spreads by seeds (each of those lovely flower clusters may produce a pod with several seeds), by aboveground runners, and by underground stems – a triple whammy of invasive spread augmented by the absence of predators and diseases. There is a native Wisteria species (Wisteria frutescens) that does not occur naturally in the Athens area; it has smaller flower clusters and does not become invasive.

Announcements and other
interesting things to note:

Emily’s
birthday is Sunday, March 31! She turns 75! 

The 2024 reading list and meeting schedule for the Rambler book group is posted at the end of this report and also in the alphabetical list of topics to the right of this text as “Book Group 2024 reading list and meeting schedule.”

Bob Ambrose’s new book
“Between
Birdsong and Boulder – Poems on the Life of Gaia” is now available at Avid
Bookshop. This collection of poems covers the science-based story of the cosmos
in lyric form. For more info, take a look at this beautiful website.

Gary announced that the next Audubon meeting will be held at the Hargrett Rare
Book Library on Thursday, April 4, 7:00 p.m. at 300 S. Hull Street on north
campus. Jim Porter will discuss his exhibit “Sunken Treasure: The Art
& Science of Coral Reefs.”

Friday, April 12 through
Sunday, April 14, Canopy Studios’s Repertory Company will present “A Sense of Place,” an aerial dance celebration of the landscapes of Georgia and our deep-rooted
connection to the natural world. The Friday showing will be a special event
with original artwork by local artist Laura Floyd, and a reading by award-winning
Georgia author Janisse Ray. For Friday, pre-purchase tickets are online
only, and food and drink are included with the ticket price. The Friday event
begins at 6pm with the performance starting at 8pm. Other showtimes:  Saturday, April 13, 4pm. Saturday, April 13,
8pm. Sunday, April 14, 4pm.

Hot off the press! On March 4th, the North Carolina
Botanical Garden released a mobile app called FloraQuest: Carolinas & Georgia, a new plant identification and discovery app covering over 5,800 vascular
plants including graphic keys, dichotomous keys, habitat descriptions, range
maps, 33,000+ diagnostic photos, and a set of great places to botanize. It
doesn’t need an internet connection to run, so you can take it with you
anywhere. (Note from Linda: Later this year, I’ll organize a “how to” workshop for ramblers on how
to use this app.)

Today’s Route:  We left the
Children’s Garden and took the White Trail across the ROW to enter the woods. We took the White Trail to the Red Trail, following it to the Green
Trail, which we took back to the ROW, ending the Ramble.

Perfoliate Bellwort in a large patch at the intersection of the Blue, Green, and White Trails.

Perfoliate
Bellwort  leaves appear to be perforated by the stems, hence the name. This
unusual arrangement is laid down during the earliest stages of leaf
development within the bud at the growing tip of the stem. Within the
bud, some cells are programmed to become stem tissue, others to become
leaves. In this species, the lowermost cells that are programmed
to develop into leaves multiply, expand, then fuse around the group of
cells that are
destined to be the stem. The leaf and stem then develop together, with
those
leaf cells surrounding the core of developing stem while the rest of the
leaf expands outward.

Bloodroot is sometimes considered to be a spring ephemeral, that group of early spring wildflowers that complete their entire life cycle – leaf out, bloom, produce fruit, and disperse their seed – within a two-month period then go dormant till next spring. But Bloodroot does not disappear; its leaves persist well into summer and continue to expand, up to five inches in some cases. It does share one important feature with true spring ephemerals: its seeds are spread by ants.

The White Trail is bordered in some areas with Haircap Moss, one of the most common mosses in our area. It can reach quite a height for a moss – up to 12 inches the books say though I’ve never seen it more than about 3 inches. Below, it has just produced new stems with fresh leaves. Mosses are non-vascular plants  – there are no specialized tissues for conducting water. But Haircap Moss stems do have a central zone of water-conducting cells which allows it to attain its great height (for a moss).

Aubrey discovered this stunning toothed crust fungus, called Asian Beauty, on a dead, fallen Northern Red Oak. Don (showing his caving roots) described it in his Facebook post as “…a beauty, with long, cream-colored teeth. It looks much like flowstone, with stalactites, covering the walls of a cave.” Native to Asia, it has spread widely and was first discovered in North America in 2009.

A White-lipped Globe snail found protection in the loose, decaying wood beneath the bark of the Northern Red Oak with the toothed fungus.

Avis discovered a New York Scalewort, a species of leafy liverwort, growing near the base of an American Beech. Liverworts are primitive plants that, like mosses, lack vascular tissue. The leaves of leafy liverworts are only one cell thick; they absorb moisture directly into their cells by osmosis from the surface on which they grow. Many liverworts that grow on trees resemble mosses, but when viewed with a hand lens, you can see that their tiny leaves are in two rows on opposite sides of the stem with a third row of smaller leaves often present on the underside of the stem. The stems of leafy liverworts are usually conspicuously branched, as here. Moss leaves are spiraled around an unbranched stem.

Juneberry, a native species of blueberry that blooms very early, has green stems year-round; its newly emerging leaves are often outlined with red. The narrow flowers are often subject to nectar robbing by bees too large to enter the narrow opening.

A Script Lichen, so called because the fine, spore-producing structures (lirellae) form black lines across the smooth, gray body (thallus) of the lichen. This one was growing on the bark of a Beech tree on the Red Trail.

Black Sooty Mold on the lower limb of an American Beech Beech trees host other organisms besides lichens, in this case a fungus called Black Sooty Mold. The fungus grows on the “honeydew” excreted by a colony of Beech Blight Aphids that live on a higher branch. These are the cottony-white aphids we see occasionally dancing on Beech trees at the Garden. If you’ve never seen them dance, please watch this video. Neither the aphids nor the fungus pose a serious threat to Beech trees.

Returning on the Green Trail, ramblers visited one of the few Shagbark Hickories that occur in the Garden, probably due to the amphibolite bedrock that underlies the woods along here. Shagbark Hickory is a calciphile, a plant that likes the higher pH soils that form over amphibolite, limestone, or other calcium-bearing bedrock. Shagbark Hickory bark is indeed shaggy, peeling away from the trunk in long, narrow plates. Even so, you can still discern in the photo above the diamond-shaped or braid-like ridges that characterize the bark of most hickories.

Three-parted Yellow Violets also prefer soils with higher levels of calcium. Despite the name, they occasionally have leaves that are not divided into three segments but are triangular in outline (below, photo by Mason Brock), sometimes even on a plant that also has divided leaves.

Violet Wood Sorrel in a dense patch in a low spot beside the Green Trail. It will soon flower, then rest through the summer, and flower again in the fall.

Wild Ginger flowers (“little brown jugs”) emerge at the same time as the new leaves but are usually hidden under leaf litter. An old leaf from last year can be seen fading away in the background on the right.

Purple Deadnettle (left), Henbit (center), and Ground Ivy (right)

Emerging from the woods into the full sun of the right-of-way brings a whole new suite of spring wildflowers. “The Three
Amigos” is Don’s fond name for three plant species that grow together and
flower at the same time in the right-of-way and in many other disturbed areas around Athens: Purple Deadnettle, Henbit,
and Ground Ivy (or Gill-over-the-ground). All three are European imports that
grow abundantly (weedily?) in disturbed ground though are not (yet) invasive in
natural areas. All three are in the mint family: their stems are square in
cross-section, their leaves are opposite, and their flowers have tubes that
open out into a two-lipped flower. The lower lip is usually dotted with a contrasting color to guide potential pollinators to the nectar at the base of the tube. Purple Deadnettle and Henbit are erect
plants up to 15 inches tall (usually half that), while Ground Ivy trails across the ground.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES
Ginkgo     Ginkgo biloba

Stinking Hellebore     Helleborus
foetidus

Perfoliate Bellwort     Uvularia
perfoliata

Bloodroot  Sanguinaria canadensis

Haircap Moss     Polytrichum commune

Northern Red Oak     Quercus rubra

Asian Beauty (toothed crust fungus)     Radulodon
copelandii syn. Hydnum copelandii

White-lipped Globe Snail     Mesodon
thyroidus

New York Scalewort     Frullania
eboracensis

Elliott’s Blueberry     Vaccinium
elliottii

American Beech     Fagus grandifolia

Script lichen     Graphis sp.

Hop Hornbeam     Ostrya virginiana

Shagbark Hickory     Carya ovata

Three-parted Violet   Viola tripartita
Violet Wood Sorrel     Oxalis violacea

Mayapple     Podophyllum peltatum

Wild Ginger   Hexastylis
arifolia

Black Sooty Mold     Scorias spongiosa

Purple Deadnettle     Lamium purpureum

Henbit     Lamium amplexicaule

Ground Ivy     Glechoma hederacea