We had another
enormous (for us) turnout this morning — 30 Ramblers gathered at the arbor for
a ramble that started out chilly and turned balmy.

We had one
recitation and two readings contributed today.

Bob Ambrose graced
us with another of his poetic creations, An Old Field Encounter. Click here for the text of his poem.

Next was Tim Homan,
who read an excerpt about Wood anemones from one of his books. (Tim’s books are
more than just hiking guides. They contain a wealth of natural history
information.):

The
wood anemone is a true spring
ephemeral. Once pollination occurs, the sepals fall off and the
fruit quickly develops.
Soon afterward, the
leaves die back and all the above-ground green vanishes, leaving nothing but the memory
of them until the following spring.

This wildflower’s seeds often
disappear from sight too. Ants not only help disperse anemone seeds, they also
plant them in their well-aerated
tunnels. Like trilliums, the wood anemone has evolved tender, fleshy extensions
on the sides of their seeds that offer ants a nutritious food reward for their
effort, a process known as ant farming.
Not only does each seed come ready made
with a built-in food
bribe (called an elaiosome), but that fleshy food is also
shaped to serve as a handle, allowing the workaholic insects
to quickly march to underground safety
with the other-wise slippery seeds. After consuming
the edible handle
— obtaining more energy to haul in more anemone seeds — the ants ditch the impenetrable
seed casings in their fertile compost pile.
There the seeds
germinate and sprout, making more anemones and more ant food,
a beneficial
symbiosis for both.
Looking through
evolution‘s ever-adaptive eye, the result is the same as if the
seeds had sprouted six legs, walked away
from the competition of their rooted progenitors, then buried themselves in a fertile
underground spot away from seed predators.
Even with a liberal allowance of time, that is still not a bad trick for thebrainless.

Tim Homan, Hiking the Shining Rock & Middle Prong
Wildernesses, 2012, Peachtree Publ., pp. 232-233.

Catherine
Chastain supplied our other reading: a poem titled Burrows from the book Footprints
on the Roof: Poems About the Earth by Marilyn Singer, 2002, Alfred A.
Knopf.

          Burrows

Out in the country I walk
across towns

            I’ll never see:

mazy metropolises

            under the earth

             where rabbits hide from foxes

                 foxes hide from dogs

                 full-bellied snakes sleep snugly

            worms work uncomplaining

Where what you see is
nothing–

what counts is what you
smell

            or hear or feel

I try to tread softly:

            a quiet giant

               leaving only footprints

                      on the roof

Today’s route: 
Leaving the arbor, we made our way down through the Shade Garden to the
White Trail crossing the power line ROW. 
Entering the woods, we took the Green Trail and followed it to the
service road, then turned left and picked up the Blue Trail back to the ROW and
home to the arbor.

Shade Garden:

In the Shade Garden we stopped to look at a Northern red oak
and note the “ski trails” on the trunk. These are the light colored
tops of the bark ridges that run the length of the trunk. Referring to them as
ski trails is a mnemonic to help remember “Northern red oak”,
as ski areas are more numerous in the north. (If this doesn’t work for you make
up your own mnemonic.) The leaves of the Red Oak group are lobed and have sharp
points. Those of the White oak group are also lobed, but the lobes are rounded.
There is also another Red Oak group tree in this area that has ski trail bark:
Scarlet Oak. It’s leaves have much deeper spaces between the lobes, but the
lobes are still pointed. Some people maintain that they can tell the difference
between the Red and Scarlet oak ski trails, but I haven’t been able to convince
myself that I can.

Near the Northern red oak are two Witch Hazels, small trees
that are just beginning to develop flower buds. Witch Hazel is very unusual in
being the only tree in our area that blooms in the fall. Last year we found
these trees with blossoms on Nov. 14 on a morning ramble where the temperature
was 21 degrees!

We found a couple of Hickory fruits and nuts on the sidewalk
and passed them around for examination. The largest was from a Mockernut
hickory and had a very thick husk and large nut with ridges. The smaller nut
was from a Pignut hickory and smooth and rounded, except for a part that had
been eaten by a rodent.

White Trail:

The White trail between the road and the power line has many
young Hop hornbeams growing at its edge. The bark on these small saplings and
young trees is smooth and resembles that of young Black cherry. But Black
cherry leaves have very fine teeth along the leaf edges while the leaves of Hop
hornbeam are double serrate (meaning that the leaf edge has larger teeth and
each large tooth has a smaller tooth.) As the Hop hornbeam ages its bark
becomes rougher and looks like it has been used by a cat for a scratching post.

An American Beech tree was right next to the Hop hornbeam
and we noted the sharp pointed buds at the ends of the branches and the papery
leaves that have wavy edges. The mnemonic to help you remember this is that beaches
(beeches) have waves.

Nearby was a young Black cherry with its relatively smooth
bark that bears horizontal marks called lenticels. That smooth bark disappears
as the Black cherry ages, and the mature tree bark looks very different. We found
a mature tree growing next to the Green trail later this morning.

Post oak leaves

Just before the power line ROW we noticed another member of
the White Oak group — Post oak. Its leaves are in the form of a Maltese cross.
The wood of Post oak is very durable and was often used for fence posts, hence
the name.

Most of the wildflowers in the power line ROW have ceased
blooming except for the Dog Fennel and one Late purple aster with three pitiful
flowers.

Green Trail:

Vandalized American beech

On the Green trail we paused to look at some of our old
familiar tree friends: American beech and Mockernut hickory. We looked at beech
leaves earlier so here we noted the smooth gray bark that tempts so many people
to carve their initials in it. This activity is so wide spread and common that
carved initials are almost a distinguishing characteristic of the beech.

The Mockernut hickory bark is

Mockernut bark

very dark and the ridges form
elongate diamond shapes that are diagnostic of this tree. The mockernut has
compound leaves made up of 7 to 9 leaflets.

A White oak near the trail provided an opportunity to see
how the bark changes color and texture in a mature tree. White oak bark is
light in color but in older trees the lower bark is a little darker gray and is
checkered. As you go up the trunk the bark becomes lighter colored and changes
form into larger, shingle-like plates.

Don noticed a mature Hop hornbeam with the characteristic
“cat-scratch” bark. But he also noticed that the
“scratches” were

Twisted Hop hornbeam

twisted, spiraling around the trunk and not simply
running straight up and down. This tendency to turn as you go up the trunk is
very common in the wood of trees. It is why you have trouble finding a straight
piece of long wood in the lumber yard. Individual trees vary in the degree of
twist in their grain, but almost all trees twist in the same direction. Once,
out west, Emily and I were driving through an area where there were many dead
pine trees still standing. I only found one that twisted in the opposite
direction. If you followed the twist going up the tree trunk of this Hop
hornbeam you would twist to the left. This is clockwise, viewed from the top,
and is the direction that most trees twist. The twisting growth may have
something to do with strengthening the trunk to resist bending but I have never
seen a satisfactory answer as to why a clockwise twist would be any better or
worse than a counter-clockwise twist.

We found a small group of very shrubby Paw Paws. These are
either young Dwarf paw paw (Asimina
parviflora) or Paw Paw (Asimina
triloba), but we can’t be certain until next spring to see if they are
flowering. If they don’t bear flowers then they are Paw Paw, but if they have
small flowers then they are Dwarf paw paw.

 

False turkeytail mushrooms

Turkeytail mushrooms

Whenever you walk in the garden’s natural areas you will see
a lot of dead wood — twigs, tree branches, logs — fallen on the ground. Many
of these support the growth of fungi that are slowly digesting the dead wood.
You may think of this process as decomposing, but the fungi really are
digesting the wood. They are producing digestive enzymes that break down the
material that wood is made of in just the same way that our stomachs and intestines
digest our food. One of the commonest of these fungi is known as the Turkeytail
because it resembles the tail of an adult male turkey when it fans out its tail
to court a female turkey. But there are several different fungi that look like
turkey tails and we found two of the today: true Turkeytail and False
Turkeytail. They can be distinguished by looking at their lower surfaces. The
true Turkeytail has a porous lower surface while the False turkeytail has a
smooth lower surface. Unfortunately the color and pattern on the upper surface
is very variable, both within and between the two species so you have to check
the lower surface to find out which one you have.

Shagbark hickory bark

We found the very uncommon (in the garden) Shagbark hickory
in two places on the Green trail. As its name implies, it has very shaggy bark,
which means that the bark occurs in shingle-like plates that are loose on both
the top and bottom edges. At first glance you might think you were looking at a
White oak, but White oak bark plates don’t curl away from the trunk to the
degree that Shagbark does, and the plates are always tightly attached at the
top.

Pignut hickory is common in the understory here and can be

Pignut hickory leaf

distinguished from Mockernut by its thin, smooth leaf petioles (the stalk that attaches
the leaf to the tree), the presence of 5 leaflets and the absence of a strong
odor when the leaf is crushed.

Red maple leaf

Red Maple is also found here. The leaf is usually divided
into three lobes that are toothed. The petiole is often, but not always, red or
reddish. Other maples have leaves with 5 lobes and smooth margins (no teeth).

We also found a Red mulberry. Our field guide to trees told
us

Red mulberry leaves

to look for hair on the undersurface of the leaf — if present it is a Red,
if absent it is a White mulberry. A hand lens revealed some sparse hairs so
that came down on the side the a Red mulberry, but there were many people
skeptical of that conclusion.

Tuliptree leaf

Growing here on the Green tail (and many other places in the
garden) are Tuliptrees with their characteristic leaves. This tree is often
called Yellow poplar, but it is not a poplar and is only distantly related to
them. It is related to Magnolias. The wood is relatively soft and easily
worked.

Service Road:

Turning left onto the Service road from the Green trail we
found a small tree that looked like it might be a hybrid between Mockernut and
Pignut hickories. It had more leaflets that is typical for pignut and thinner,
smoother petioles that mockernut. The hickories are known to hybridize so it is
possible.

One of the Red Oak group trees is Scarlet oak and we found
several leaves that were almost certainly from Scarlet oaks — they had very
deep sinuses (the space between lobes) that reached almost to the mid-vein.

Fungus infected cricket

Another fungus-infected insect, a cricket this time, was
found dead, hanging from beneath a leaf. The spiky projections you see are the
spore producing structures of the fungus. I don’t know what type of fungus this
is, but some fungi of the genus Cordyceps
are known to infect other ants and alter their behavior. Life can be gruesome
somtimes.

We finally found an older Black cherry tree with its dark,

Black cherry bark

“smushed,
burnt potato chip”-looking bark. (Description compliments of Emily.)

There are some Sourwood trees alongside the service road and
they are beginning to turn a pale red color.

Moss sporophytes

On some of the disturbed soil at the edge of the road there are
two kinds of moss growing. One of these is producing sporophytes, a structure
that releases spores from the swelling on the end of stalk that grows out of
the leaf-like green body of the moss.

Splitbeard broomsedge

The service road runs into a clearing where it joins the
Blue trail. There are still Yellow crownbeard (the opposite-leaved wingstem)
blooming here among the grasses. One of the prominent grasses is Split beard
broomsedge (also called Splitbeard bluestem), looking very nice with its fuzzy
white seed heads.

From here we returned to the arbor and several of us
adjourned to Donderos’ for our usual coffee and conversation.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Common Name	Scientific Name
Northern red oak	Quercus rubra
American witch hazel	Hamamelis virginiana
Mockernut hickory	Carya tomentos
Hop hornbeam	Ostraya virginiana
American beech	Fagus grandifolia
Black gum	Nyssa sylvatica
Black cherry	Prunus serotina
White oak	Quercus alba
Post oak	Quercus stellata
Late purple aster	Symphyotrichum patens
Dog fennel	Eupatorium capillifolium
False turkey tail mushroom	Stereum ostrea
Shagbark hickory	Carya ovata
Paw Paw	Asimina triloba
Pignut hickory	Carya glabra
Red maple	Acer rubrum
Red mulberry	Morus rubra
Tulip tree	Liriodendron tulipifera
Hybrid hickory tree	mockernut/pignut
Scarlet oak	Quercus coccinea
Sourwood	Oxydendrum arboreum
Turkey tail mushroom	Trametes versicolor
Yellow crownbeard	Verbesina occidentalis
Splitbeard broomsedge	Andropogon ternarius