Tag Archives: flora

Nature

The Last Plants to Bloom

Goldenrod, image courtesy of the author, Fall 2016.
Goldenrod, image courtesy of the author, Fall 2016.

Which native plant is the last to bloom before the onset of winter?  Everyone knows Chrysanthemums, but they aren’t native to Northern Michigan.   Certainly, goldenrod blooms late, as do asters.  Mostly goldenrod has finished by the time our most elegant aster, the New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) begins to bloom.

newenglandasterIt can be found growing in moist places in the sun, its hairy leaves clasping the stem giving away its identity even before the flowers appear.  When they do open, they present a glorious purple, sometimes almost a deep red.  They do bloom late, sometimes as late as mid-October, but they are not the last to flower.

Jerusalem Artichokes, flowering, CC0.
Jerusalem Artichokes, flowering, CC0.

Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), a native sunflower, show their bright yellow flowers at about the same time as New England Asters.  Standing as tall as seven feet, they prefer open fields, forming dense thickets of flowers as they spread from underground rhizomes—which make a fine food if the preparer has enough time and energy to clean and cook them.  Jerusalem artichokes grow tall, but will not be confused with the more common sunflower used for seeds enjoyed by humans and birds alike.   Jerusalem artichokes, (sometimes called ‘sunchokes,’ brighten our lives at a time the days grow shorter and shorter, but they aren’t the last to bloom.

Witchhazel, image courtesy of the author, October 2016.
Witchhazel, image courtesy of the author, October 2016.

The last to bloom is witchhazel (Hamamelis virginiana), a small tree that grows at the edge of the forest or as an understory tree.  Its leaves are distinctive with wavy margins, never toothed as most leaves are.  Its flowers become most apparent just after its leaves have turned yellow and fallen off.  Four thin yellow petals can be seen hanging from twigs sometimes as late as November.  They aren’t as spectacular as the New England aster or the Jerusalem artichoke, but they give us joy that a plant has the fortitude—or foolishness?–to brave days of 45 degrees at a time when pollinators are all dead or sleeping.

Witchhazel Blossom, image courtesy of the author, Fall 2016.
Witchhazel Blossom, image courtesy of the author, Fall 2016.

Witchhazel not only cheers us up at the end days of autumn, but it presents itself as a useful and interesting plant–useful, because its extract gives us an important astringent used in folk medicine, a treatment useful wherever swelling is a problem—and interesting because it can explosively shoot out its seeds from their capsules.  Earlier in autumn they do just that.  At such times it might be a good idea to wear safety glasses when walking in a grove of witchhazel because seed missiles can fly 30 feet in the air, certainly with enough force to put out an eye!  (I hope readers know me well enough to suspect foolery).

Let us take joy in the last flowers of autumn.  It will be many months before the crocuses send up their bold stalks in March.

Richard Fidler is co-editor of Grand Traverse Journal.

Nature

Lichens: A Broken Piece of Life, Wretched bits of being

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O broken life! O wretched bits of being,
Unrhythmic, patched, the even and the odd!
But Bradda still has lichens worth the seeing,
And thunder in her caves—thank God! Thank God!
– Thomas Edward Brown, quoted in Lichens of North America, p. 3

More than 24,000 souls are buried in Oakwood Cemetery on Eighth Street.  Their monuments fill sixty acres all told, the earliest ones dating from the 1860s.  They are made of limestone, granite, and even zinc, the last material only used for a few persons buried between 1885 and 1890.  Draped urns, lambs, weeping willows, angels, passages of Scripture—even baby shoes—are carved on them, symbols of grief and the hope of life to come.  Besides these human expressions of emotion are marks Nature herself bestows upon the stone as a reminder of continual change: lichens.

Foliose lichen, characterized by their leafy appearance. Image courtesy of the author.
Foliose lichen, characterized by their leafy appearance. Image courtesy of the author.

Lichens are informally called “moss” by most people, but are different from that organism.  Mosses have leaves and stems, for one thing, and lichens do not.  A moss is a single organism, every cell with moss DNA, while a lichen is like a chimera (an animal made up of two different kinds—like a centaur).  Its body is made of a fungus which has captured a colored food-making element, an alga or a kind of bacteria. Often forming a crust or spreading as a leaf-like thallus over a stone monument, many of them are stunning, especially when examined under a ten-power lens.

We think of organisms only when they impact our lives and, in this regard, lichens are no different from other living things.  What good are they?  What harm do they do?  What is their role in nature?  These questions tug at us even as we admire their beauty.

We can’t eat them, though a few cultures—like the Inuit–manage to extract scant nourishment in extreme habitats like the arctic.  They colonize our statues and monuments, their slender filaments penetrating even hard granite to a few millimeters and softer limestone to a depth of 16 millimeters (more than a half inch).  Lichens are colonizers: they move onto unfriendly substrates like tree bark, barren soil, or rock, creating patches of organic matter which are taken over by more complex plants like mosses and ferns.  They are pioneers.

Crustose lichens form a crust that strongly adheres to the substrate (here, a granite tombstone), making separation from the substrate impossible without destruction. Image courtesy of the author.
Crustose lichens form a crust that strongly adheres to the substrate (here, a granite tombstone), making separation from the substrate impossible without destruction. Image courtesy of the author.

Lichens are not friends to sextons of cemeteries.  Degrading statuary and carvings, they make inscriptions hard to read, obscuring names and dates.  Only the scattered zinc monuments are free of the problem, that surface providing scant toeholds for colonization.  Inscriptions on the oldest stones are scarcely legible, so encrusted with green and orange lichen growth that observers vainly scratch them away to capture the names and dates of persons long forgotten.

Yet we should not despise lichens, for they charm us with their intricate structure.  Under the lens, some of them present an array of disks aimed upward, not to catch something from above but to give something off: spores.  Called apothecia, these miniature dishes produce millions of fungal spores which enter the streams of the wind.  Upon landing in a fertile place, they send out tiny threads and wait for the landing of the right bacteria or algae, photosynthetic cells responsible for growth. 

A variety of lichens, clinging to tombstones at Oakwood Cemetery, Traverse City. Image courtesy of the author.
A variety of lichens, clinging to tombstones at Oakwood Cemetery, Traverse City. Image courtesy of the author.

Slowly the colonies grow, and we should be glad, since lichens only thrive wherever the air is pure and clean.  It is well known that tree trunks downwind from polluting industries are bare of lichens.  When our tree trunks are bare of them in Northern Michigan, when gravestones stand without those round patches of sage green, orange, and yellow, then we will know that the air has gone bad.  We should take joy in the lichens around us.

Books of most interest to readers are Michigan Lichens by local author Julie Medlin and the ponderous Lichens of North America by Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff.  Both of them may be found in the Traverse Area District Library.

Richard Fidler is co-editor of Grand Traverse Journal.

Nature

Horsetails and Snake Grass: Relics Before the Dinosaurs

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fidler-snakegrassforest
A veritable forest of snake grass, or horsetails.

We have all seen them, on the beach or in ditches, but we walk on past them without a thought.  If we know them at all, we call them “snake grass” for their banded stems lacking apparent leaves.  As kids, we  pulled them apart at the joints, noting the empty, hollow canal that runs up the center.  Hollow stems suggest many uses to children—whistles, building materials for sand castles, girls’ hair ties, toothpicks, and more.  Not having lost the capacity for play, they find much to do with the things we have come to ignore.

Not that all adults ignore them.  Campers recognize one species as a choice pot scrubber out in the woods, the scouring rush, Equisetum hyemale.  Its stiff ridged stems take grease and dirt of pans without shredding.  Players of instruments like the bassoon and oboe prepare their reeds with strokes of the scouring rush and craftsmen in Japan use it for a fine sandpaper.

Snake grass, or horsetails as they are known by many, get their roughness and strength from silica in their stems—you can see the tubercles with a ten-power lens.  Some species have more than others: one, the Smooth Horsetail, scarcely has any at all.

The Dutch find value in horsetails, mostly in maintaining the dikes that keep their land dry.  The plant has deeply rooted rhizomes (horizontal underground stems) which bind the soil, a helpful aid in reinforcing walls that keep the sea out.  A weed anywhere else, it is an asset in Holland.

fidler-horsetail
The roots of a horsetail plant the author carefully revealed from the swampy depths.

The common name “horsetail” requires explanation since the above-ground parts of the plant in no way resembles any part of the horse’s anatomy.  If you have the patience to dig down into the mud out of which the horsetail species known as “pipes” grows (and, I confess, I did just that at some sacrifice of blood to mosquitoes), you can discover how they came to take on the “horsetail” name.  The rhizome is jointed just like the stem, and out of each joint a tuft of roots grows–which, in aggregate, look pretty much like a horse’s tail.  Perhaps “snake grass” is the more reasonable name given the difficulty with exposing the “tail.”

A less common species of snake grass, or horsetails, Equisetum sylvaticum has a lacy appearance.
A less common species of snake grass, or horsetails, Equisetum sylvaticum has a lacy appearance.

Horsetails are not particularly successful as green plants go: they consist of one family with one genus and only a scant 15 species.  Michigan has eight and all of them be found in the Grand Traverse area.  Always they seem to prefer wet places—ditches, beaches, swamps, and marshes.

Horsetails were not always the weak sisters of the plant world.  Giant members of the horsetail family that reached heights of 45 feet are preserved in the coal beds of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.  Before the dinosaurs, before the flowering plants, they dominated the land in variety, abundance, and sheer size.  Alas for them, they now grow in neglected places separated from the great ecosystems of hard and softwood forests, plains and desert, tundra and bog.

Seed-producing plants won out in the long run, the conifers, hardwoods, and grasses occupying the greatest stretches of land.  Horsetails make spores, those produced in small cones that lie at the tips of the shoots.  They drift about in the wind, the luckiest ones arriving at a moist warm place to grow.  There they grow into miniscule green bodies that produce eggs in one place and sperms in another.  The sperms swim to fertilize the egg—and a new horsetail is born.  However, horsetails can avoid the whole process by having a piece of the rhizome break off and root elsewhere.

A common version of horsetail in the Grand Traverse region, E. Ferissii, the bane of beach owners.
A common hybrid of horsetail in the Grand Traverse region, E. Ferissii, the bane of beach owners.

Horsetails—snake grass–are not esteemed by those who wish to keep their beaches well-groomed.  Their roots are hard to tear out—remember the Dutch and their dikes?—causing them to reappear after great effort has been exerted to remove them.  Still, we should appreciate their good qualities: they scour, they sandpaper, they can be tied.  Not only that, they provide a glimpse into a different world 350 million years ago.   If you see a millipede hanging out among the stems of horsetails, you might be looking out on a scene enacted 380 million years ago.  Horsetails deserve our respect for their venerable age.

Richard Fidler, when not elbow-deep in swamp mud,  can be found editing “Grand Traverse Journal”.