or A Portrait of a Very Rainy Day.

We’re off to Forsyth tomorrow morning to the Georgia Firefighters' Academy to learn a few things over the next three days so there’ll be no posts until Sunday or Monday. I leave you with this. Let us all wish the peepers a jolly time, and hope that Tom Delay and Jerry Falwell (bless their dark, shrivelled hearts) don’t show up to cart them off in a black maria.

This has been a 2-year rain, probably. 3" since 1am this morning, when I just had to get up to enjoy it. Needless to say, that’s quite a bit of water coming downslope, and we’ll expect more shortly, tonight, and all day tomorrow. Understand that except for the pleasant but usually small creek we named Sparkleberry Springs, all of the photos below would be of normally dry areas, maybe moist in the low parts, but no standing water.

We have a hiatus between rains. Let’s take a little walk.

You can orient yourself by viewing the Property Map. We’re at the south side of the house and then will head southwest toward the Big Gully. Lots of water accumulating south of the house; good for the buckeyes, good for the bald cypress and the bogs (below).


The water from probably ten acres flows down a dry creek and accumulates in a somewhat flat, low area that is normally quite moist - a good site for shade-loving, mesophilic, non-ungulophobic plants.


The water doesn’t stay there long - just below is the Big Gully. We figure it’s probably 30 or 40 years old, judging from the tree that sprouted at about ground level and is now doing the best it can (below right). The Gully, which is 10 or 15 feet across, about the same in depth, and 200 feet long, is a marvelous feature - I’m captivated by it. It’s essentially deerproof and will be the target of a lot of mesophilic plantings in the future.


Finally we come to the end, where runoff joins with Sparkleberry Springs. The Gully is usually dry, and Sparkleberry Springs is a gentle little brook, but on this day today it’s a Raging Torrent, a Cataract! And off they go! To Goulding Creek, just down the way, thence to Moss and Big Creeks, the Oconee River, the Altamaha River, and finally the Atlantic Ocean!


After a day or two, all will be back to normal.

Someone actually found last week’s weed posting useful, so here’s another.

Chaerophyllum tainturieri var. tainturieri, and that’s a mouthful. Common name is hairy-fruit chervil, but it really should be smooth-fruit chervil for this variety, and a bit of a close look confirms it. Also called wild chervil, southern chervil, or just chervil. Pretty short little ferny-looking plant and right now it blankets a lot of shady areas. It’s a native annual though, and therefore “good”. Apparently its roots are supposed to smell faintly of carrot.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, as it’s in the Apiaceae, the Carrot Family. That family used to be called Umbelliferae before the Great Name Change (just as the currently-named Asteraceae used to be called Compositae), and you’ll still find that nomenclature in older field guides and on some webpages. Umbelliferae, because the development of the umbel, a special inflorescence, produces flowers like the spokes of an umbrella. This can get ridiculously complex as in compound umbels in Queen Anne’s Lace.

It also exemplifies the problem with common names, as there is another wild chervil, but it’s Anthriscus sylvestris, same family. That one’s an introduced annual/biennial, and therefore “bad”.

So what’s it good for? Surely something. Caterpillar food? Probably not - why would a sane lepidopteran lay its eggs on an annual? As far as I know it’s not delicious, and a google search using the additional word “medicinal” yields an astonishing 9 hits, which as anyone knows would ordinarily give zillions of hits. Maybe someone knows something about this one.

You might say, well, I’ve heard of wild chervil being used as food, or medicinal, or whatever, but that’s yet a third species, aka honewort, Cryptotaenia canadensis, and again in the same family. Honewort is a native though, and its leaves are not dissected at all.

In the early spring you probably won’t find many short, ferny-leaved things with leaves as dissected as this and tiny white 5-petaled flowers.

I was reminded that it’s been about four years since I put in our last pond, a big sucker. All the dirt, let’s see, 1800 gallons worth?, went into building up the boring slope west of the house into terraces separated by curving paths. A lot of peat also went into enriching the clay soil, and the entire area is shaded by maples. It emulates a mesic, wooded forest slope environment. Among the plantings there are a number of trillium species.

Our first species of trilliums up, Little Sweet Betsy (aka, Little Bloody Betsy, which I much prefer, visions of Lizzie Borden dancing in my head), Trillium cuneatum, is in flower. The buds come up with the heavily mottled leaves and the sepals stay on for some time (lower left) and then draw back to reveal the three narrow chocolate-brown petals. This is var. cuneatum - there’s also a var. luteum which is yellow. I think this one is very dramatic.


Yet to come, painted trillium (T. undulatum), up but not flowering, and rose trillium (T. catesbei), not yet up.

The fruit, which will come later of course, is a capsule with many seeds. The seed coats produce a structure called an elaiosome, which is a fatty coating that attracts ants. Ants carry off the seeds to their little houses and gnaw off the delicious repast with which they have been seduced by the clever plant, and the trillium seeds, having been thus dispersed, germinate in a new location. There’s actually a word for this - myrmecochery - the practice of ants carrying off seeds.

Like all good monocots, trilliums (in the Lily family, Liliaceae), have flower parts in threes. Let’s take a closer look at those luscious sex organs just dripping with pollen:

I put the first three hummingbird feeders out last week, but not until this morning did we sight the first hummingbird of the season. The hummer was more interested in me, clad as I was. Standing on the deck I must have been hummer littlebrain sensory overload, an enormous flower promising an embarrassment of riches. Sorry, just a jerk in an orange sweatshirt!

Now the fun begins: six months of several dozen argumentative, feisty, hot-tempered flying nixies dissipating more energy squabbling than they could ever get out of the feeders.

Update: Click on the thumbnail image on the sidebar - I’m beginning to link the clickety symbols to photos and/or blog entries addressing locations.

For some months I’ve been working on a property map with map links to blog entries or pics. Although I haven’t hooked up the clickable points of interest yet, I’m going to go ahead and post the medium scale map. This is mostly for my own purposes at the moment. It’s in png format, which most all browsers should be able to see. The positions of the property lines and points of interest were determined with a GPS; the contours are crude but generally correct.

in the Potato Patch. Yesterday was a feverish effort to de-root the potato patch area and get the seed potatoes into the ground before the rains arrived, which we did and which they did during the night, long periods of mild thunderstorms and constant gentle rain which will continue through today. The spring peepers are out in force and all night were vigorously pronouncing everything as good as it can possibly be. Funny about them - the leopard frogs and bullfrogs (ob-Brian: Bufo, Bufo, Bufo!) found the ponds immediately, years ago but the peepers were late-comers. Our first ones, a couple of lonely bachelors apparently, arrived last year. Sounds like there are dozens out there tonight though!

Back to the potatoes. Ob-science: Solanum tuberosum, member of the Solanaceae, the nightshade family, including tomatoes, eggplants, peppers (though not black pepper - that’s a primitive paleoherb), and as well tobacco and petunias, and of course deadly nightshade! It’s all in the flowers if you just look!

From Mother Earth News:

All cultivated white potatoes are technically a single species: Solanum tuberosum of the plant family Solanaceae. It is closely related to six other domesticated subspecies that are cultivated only in the high Andes and to 230 or so wild relatives that diversified over prehistory into myriad forms and in almost every climate–even the warm semitropics–spreading to areas ranging from southern Nebraska to the coastal plains of Chile.

The great natural genetic diversity among Solanum varieties has let breeders develop potatoes that will thrive in nearly any climate but the deep tropics (the home of yams and sweet potatoes). And its great range of natural tolerances (to a variety of soils, climate extremes, insects, diseases, nutrition, and cultivation demands) lets modern hybridizers create new varieties to suit any need.

The genetic diversity and adaptability of S. tuberosum is of particular note today. Following its introduction to Europe in the 1500s, the potato spread rapidly. Today, it is the fourth most important food crop in the world, following rice, wheat, and maize (corn to us). Still, it is technically a monoculture: hundreds of varieties, but all of them a single species and susceptible to the same pests and diseases.

And in some ways this is the tragedy of the potato.


This year I purchased six heirloom potato varieties from Irish Eyes. I got Russian Banana, which is a fingerling variety, Norgold M, an early variety probably more suitable for the South, White Rose and Rose Gold (I remember a Grimm Bros story about this), which are mid season varieties, and two late varieties, Yellow Finn and All Blue (for fun). I don’t expect all of these to do well here, and really got the order in too late for proper early planting, but we’ll see.

Besides digging up the roots (see how big the root piles are getting now, about 7 feet!), the soil, very good soil, was still too heavy in clay to my mind, so four 3.8 cubic foot bags of peatmoss went in to lighten it up a bit. Ultimately about 75 seed potatoes went into the garden. I do love potatoes and growing them. I may not have worn green last week but my Irish ancestry pushes me to put out where it’s important. I notice from GrowItGold’s Companion Planting Chart that corn and beans go well with potatoes, so will probably plant one or both of those between the potato rows. Next year the corn and potatoes will have to rotate to another part of the garden.

So on the left we have the potato patch. Down and behind you can make out somewhat the Little Prairie Under the Power Line, which used to be useless lawn and is now several blueberry bushes, lots of sunflowers and asters, wild quinine, Ruellia, and currently a nice crop of daffodils. And on the right the currently accumulated piles of roots, trash grass, sumacs, and blackberries. I think they’re kind of attractive, myself.

The appearance of a snake, for me, is an event worthy of comment. From a young chile I was always fond of snakes. But I have no immediate idea of what this one might be. I’m thinking water snake of some kind. Clearly it’s a young'n, which makes id a wee bit difficult - I know most of the small adult snakes of this size. For awhile we fondled it and paged through Audubon and considered copperhead, which it could be (and what fun to imagine fondling a poisonous snake fearlessly), but I see no pits nor elliptical eyes. Very docile, friendly, pleased to get away from the cats. What a handsome fellow! Do enjoy, and offer comments.

It’s odd that I just mentioned him a couple of posts below, but maybe not - Wilbur Duncan, Professor Emeritus of the Botany Dept here at the University of Georgia was always very sweet to Glenn and me, and hardly a week goes by that his name isn’t evoked in our household in some matter or other. Just yesterday I was asking Glenn to give him a call on a matter of a particular species that someone was interested in. Three years ago Wilbur gave us a dozen acorns of Oglethorpe Oak, sometimes called Georgia Oak, one of his own discoveries, and we have several survivors planted in places of prominence.

We gradually bought all those books written and photographed by Wilbur and his wife Marion, and marvelous books they are, not dull and dry as taxonomic flora and far more engaging than simple field guides. I still recall finding our own Elephant’s Foot, Elephantopus tomentosus in his and Leonard Foote’s Wildflowers of the Southeastern United States, when I couldn’t identify it from any of my many conventional field guides. It’s worth mentioning that the aforementioned book was forewarded by then Governor Jimmy Carter, who wrote that as a child he had “experienced the constant and intimate fascination with the wild beauty of the woods, swamps and fields.” He went on to note that Duncan’s books had offered him what others didn't: an adequate and superlative guide to southeastern plants and wildflowers.

So our department head informed us today that Wilbur died this morning at the age of 94. He was an active researcher to the end, and the guy everyone went to when they wanted to know where a particular plant could be found. He was one of the reasons Glenn and I decided to follow in his footsteps, restoring a piece of land as much to its original nature as we could. We might have done this anyway, but I was utterly floored when I visited his home as a part of the Athens Tour of Homes one spring, and found that he was doing what I always wanted to do.

We’ll both have more to say about Wilbur Duncan.

"No man is an island, entire of itself..."



...but cats are a different matter.

I’m about as reluctant to waste bandwidth on posting about weeds as I was to learn what they were, which is to say just a little reluctant, but not very so here we go with a few that are around right now. They’re probably around you too, so this could be useful little compendium.

I have an acquaintance who says that he never weeds his garden before May. This is probably good advice - it never does any good, and what he’s weeding are almost certainly winter annuals. Winter annuals are kind of neat - they flower in the spring, produce and drop their seed, and then the seed remain dormant through the hot summer months. Sometime in the late fall or early winter, they germinate and produce in copious quantities the plants my friend refuses to weed. Often these cold-loving plants grow in the form of low rosettes and are important in terms of groundcover and food for small animals that venture forth during these times. None of the weeds below are natives, unfortunately.

The best of the lot is Geranium pusillum, small-flowered geranium, native to Europe. It at least has pretty flowers and nice foliage, and as a weed it isn’t terribly objectionable. When people hear “geranium” they’re usually thinking of the houseplant geranium, which are Pelargoniums, same family (Geraniaceae) but different genus. Pelargoniums are South African natives.

How many petals do you count? If you said 10, you’re wrong, there are 5, but they are deeply notched. All geraniums have five petals.


Here we have a common mint weed (the family Lamiaceae) that grows in profusion and produces little purple mint-type flowers with the lip and the landing pad for little bees and wasps. This is purple deadnettle, Lamium purpureum. It often grows in conjunction with another weed, Lamium amplexicaule or henbit deadnettle. The group photo was taken a week ago on a frosty morn.


Last but not least we have the edible common chickweed, Stellaria meadia in the pinks family Caryophyllaceae. This ultimately grows into large tangles, what a mess, and produces tiny five-petaled flowers (again, looks like 10, but not, just deeply notched). As Wilbur Duncan says of chickweed, “a complete list of birds that use chickweed as food would be a long one.”

Get thee to the Dharma Bums website and read the entry on watersheds. If you haven’t thought about your watershed (and yes, you do live in one, no matter where you are), then you should spend a little time finding a good online map and find out about it.

I wrote a few weeks ago about our watershed area. The concept that where you live and metabolize and excrete and dump your wastes is all drained by streams and creeks and ultimately feeds into rivers is a universal one, and one everyone should know. The idea that someone upstream from you is doing the same thing should make you think twice about what you’re feeding into your watershed.

So tell me about yours.

Here’s a plug for the Georgia Native Plant Society, probably one of the most worthwhile organizations of this type that we’ve gotten involved with. The GNPS is an extremely active organization with a Plant Rescue aspect, a Message Board, and a whole lot more, including periodic removals of invasive aliens. Their mission statement: “To promote the stewardship and conservation of Georgia’s native plants and their habitats through education and with the involvement of individuals and organizations”. All this for a measly $15 a year. If I have a complaint, it is flatly unfounded: it’s that the GNPS is primarily associated with Atlanta and that on those occasions when we join a plant rescue it involves a couple-hundred miles of travel. But recently some Athens individuals have been working to include plant rescues in this area, and that’s why my “complaint” is ridiculous. All it takes is individuals. One of the most delightful things about the GNPS is meeting other people who feel the same way you do about problems with invasive species and the merits of the native ones. It’s a great way to learn some things from people who know a lot, and to pass on information that you know that they don’t.

As I’ve said before I’m not a purist, and I’ve seen arguments denying the positive aspects of native plants as opposed to alien species and I’ve seen the arguments suggesting that there are negative upshots to plant rescue. I don’t completely deny validity to either of these arguments but rule that they are primarily specious and that any intelligent person can determine whether they apply in a given case.

Plant rescues: if you don’t know what these are, they are organized by the Society with cooperative developers who allow members to venture into the property and remove plants that would otherwise meet their ends with bulldozers. There are waivers to sign and rules to follow, and we cheerfully sign waivers and follow rules. You bet. If you don’t think the entire Atlanta area isn’t in danger of being dug up and replaced by parking lots, streets, sidewalks, and red-tips and bradford pears, think again.

We’ve found wild gingers, rattlesnake plantain, sweetspire, blueberries, various ferns, wild quinine, viburnums, chalk maples, and a huge number of natives that remain among our most prized plants. And we’ve found what I have pictured below - barren strawberry, Waldsteinia lobata, an endangered species.

So my suggestion is that if you’re interested in natives, find your local Native Plant Society, Botanical Garden, or other organization and get involved. Or start one yourself.

Barren strawberry is not going to be your succulent delicious Fragaria, assuming even it’s succulent and delicious. More than likely your Fragaria species is a miserly little fruit that is very difficult to control. Not so Waldsteinia.

This is a well-behaved little plant that has just produced little yellow flowers, one of our first flowering plants of the season. Yes, it’s somewhat homely, but so what? Just look at that great little groundcover on the left, and how 'bout them flowers on the right? Don’t think they’re great? Well what about the hairy leaves? Look at that hairy leaf! We’re pleased that it has found our area amenable and hope it will spread. (And yes, that’s another one of those purist arguments against native rescues, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.)

Better late than never! Although we live in a four-season climate, and will probably have a few days of cold left to us before it’s over, the signs of spring (bats staying out all night without phoning home, cats bringing in frogs, chickweed and bedstraws taking over everywhere) have been all around us for several weeks now. But the dogwoods and redbuds have yet to flower, and most people around here see that as the definitive marker. Last year I noted Mar 20 for the redbuds and in 2003 Mar 28 for the dogwoods. Hummingbirds should be here in the next week too!

Yesterday I heard from one of our truly cold-weather gardeners, Kathy in Zone 4, for Cold Climate Gardening, which features the Cold Climate Gardening Journal, a collaborative blog written by a number of gardeners in Zone 4 or colder. Kathy owns 14 acres in upper state New York that was once pasture and is now suffering the growing pains of succession. Here that would mean pines, japanese honeysuckle, and blackberries; there they are invaded by a host of invasives:multiflora rose, tartarian honeysuckle, and garlic mustard. As if that weren’t bad enough there’s also wild parsnip, which exudes psoralins, a delightful phytochemical that produces burns worse than poison ivy when exposed to the sun.

So let’s a raise a jpeg or two to them!


Another sign of spring - bloodroots (Sanguinaria canadensis) in full flower. Notice the lush, broad leaves that will catch the sunlight at the bottom of the canopy in the forest it lives in.

Yesterday we spied our first butterfly of the season, prowling about the tray of bluets we’d planted earlier. He (she?) didn’t seem to care much for the bluets, and wasn’t very cooperative about spreading the wings, but Glenn did note that the top surface was blue, definitely blue. The orange margin on the fore dorsal wings was prominent as was the orange spot on the ventral wings. Not easily seen here but indicated by the red arrow were two short hair-like prominences. I’m initially guessing White M Hairstreak, because of the inverted M on the ventral wing just fore of the orange spot. That would be Parrhasius m-album, in the Gossamer-wing family Lycaenidae.



The Caterpillar Hostplants Database lists solely Quercus virginiana (live oak) as the food plant. Well, we don’t have many live oaks this far north (although there are some), and none on our property that I’ve seen, but I’m pretty sure the database isn’t complete.

Oh- lookee here, a nice pic of the hairstreak AND another listing of food plants, including white oak (Q. alba) and blackjack oak (Q. marilandica), and we do have plenty of those.

And from USGS we find that the adults like “a variety of flowers including viburnum, sumac, sourwood, wild plum, poinsettia, sweet pepperbush, common milkweed, lantana, dogwood, and goldenrod.” Hmm, well, no bluets, but I could have told them that. Right now we have none of those things flowering, so the poor guy’s probably hungry and would go after anything, even bluets. Three broods (probably) here, Feb-Oct.

I live to see someone confirm or deny this!


UPDATE: “He”, it would appear.

And now, for something completely different.

Having given invertebrates their due last week, we’ll turn to the Kingdom of Fungi today. On warm wet days in the spring bright orange globes appear on some of our Eastern Redcedars (actually a juniper, Juniperus virginiana). For most of the year this growth is a hard woody gall, but in the spring it puts out these masses of gawdy orange gelatinous tendrils.

The globes are the teliohorns of the rust Gymnosporangium. Not sure what the exact species is; it may be cedar-quince, cedar-apple, or cedar-hawthorn. All rusts require at least two hosts to complete the life cycle. Rusts are a class within the phylum Basdiomycota, the same phylum that contains mushrooms and puffballs (in another class). Rusts are pretty reduced, but have complicated life cycles with at least two, and sometimes three or four stages, each with its own complicated set of names describing the fungus, the carps, and the spores they produce.

The gooey teliohorns on junipers will produce teliospores that infect the secondary host, some poor victim of the Rosaceae, the rose family. In our case, the victim is one of our numerous Crataegus spp, hawthorn. On this plant the spores infect the leaves, producing spotting, which if heavy can damage the plant. The spots contain the aeciospores. These reinfect the juniper and overwinter until the following spring, starting the cycle over again.

It seems to me that some culture must have made a delicacy of these lovely things. They look delicious, don’t they!

We knew it was going to come to this someday. We have at least five species of hawthorns on the property, ranging from knee-high to tall trees. By some counts there are 1000 species of Crataegus, undoubtedly the hellish work of a splitter. Below is the photo of one of the first to flower. As Glenn pointed out this morning, it has two styles, and is not a cymose inflorescence. Our coy references either indicate that Crataegus has five styles, or that it can have anywhere from two to six. Well, the point is that everyone, including Radford gives up on the hawthorns, lumping them into “representative” species, none of which (of course) match this one. Going through the USDA Plants there is a bewildering variety, at least half confined to the single states in which they were “discovered” (clearly the smelly spoor of splitters).

So is it important? Probably not, but it is nice to know approximately what you have, and of all the rose family, I do like the hawthorns quite a bit. If anyone knows approximately what we have or has the expertise to maneuver the maze, drop us a line. I’m not convinced yet that I want to make this my life’s work.

The series of terraces that our house site rests on is pretty dry, especially in the sun, so one of things we’ve done to increase the number of plants we can grow is to construct artificial bogs. Our first bog (below left) was constructed four or five years ago, according to instructions developed by the Atlanta Botanical Garden (which, btw, is a marvelous place to go if you’re in Atlanta). Of course we cheated a bit here and there( well of *course*; no good cook follows a recipe without changing it a bit), but the pitcher plants and sundews have done very nicely, flower prolifically, and consume scads of insects. As these plants begin to flower I’ll add them to the blog. For now, as you see in the photo, they’re just coming out of winter, but the mosses and bluets look great.

If artificial bog is to house carnivorous plants, it needs to be in the full sun. (Of course there are plenty of bog-loving plants that prefer part or full shade.) It needs to be about 18-24" deep and slope slightly so a slow flow of soil water is achieved. Once the pit is dug, the bottom (free of sharp rocks, etc.) needs to be lined with a plastic liner, or otherwise made impermeable to water so that the bog holds water. EPDM liner, such as is used for lining ornamental ponds, works fine.

For carnivorous plants, the bog must be more or less nitrogen free. Carnivorous plants get their nitrogen from the insects they trap and digest. This is an aspect of their nature of course, but that nature is because of the habitat they live in. Not only do they NOT do well in nitrogenous soils, other things DO do well and crowd them out. This means no fertilizer, ever. It means weeding out legumes or other nitrogen-fixing usurpers that increase soil nitrogen levels. It means filling the bog with a mix of non-nitrogenous soil components. We used approximately 1:1 peat moss: sand, mixing it well as we added it, and moistening it at the same time. Once the bog was full we filled it fully with water to let the peat absorb as much as it could. We lined the bog with rocks and cut a trough above the bog to prevent runoff from adding unwanted nutrients to the bog.

Although we’ve added a lot of beds around the house, we haven’t done a whole lot along the 800' dirt road that is our driveway (above right). Concurrently with the annual urge to dig, I decided to remove the trash trees near the gate, sharpen up the terraces, and line the road with a 10'-long bog (the pile of dirt to the left of the drive in the above photo).

Eventually the hole was dug and the bottom levelled off. It’s about 8-10 feet long, more or less oblong, and 4-5 feet wide (below left). The top 6-8" of soil went above the bog to fill a terrace that sits about two feet above the level of the bog. Below 8", the soil is fairly anaerobic and clayey, and that’s piled up on the road-side of the bog. I’ll stabilize and plant that with Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) to make a bank of grass rising above the road level.


The liner was put in place and the first loads of sand and peat moss have been added (above right). Not a whole lot left to do but plant now! This will not be a carnivorous plant bog, I’m pretty sure, as the deer will undoubtedly devour pitcher plants. Instead we’ll put some of the more unusual small perennials and annuals that we’ve found growing in the area that are more likely to be deer resistant.

Added: I’ve described one way to make an artificial bog, and if you want a semipermanent bog that will give long-term support to carnivorous plants then this is probably a good way of going about it. BUT, I’ve taken those 1x2x2' rubbermaid boxes from kmart, filled them with soil, sunk 'em into the ground, and planted wet-loving stuff in them. Works fine. I’ve dug a foot-deep hole, lined the bottom with a few layers of garbage bags, and filled it up with soil. Works fine for a lot of things. What you’re looking for maybe is just enough to give you a spot that stays wet between rains. May not be good enough for pitcher plants, but it’s good enough to give you a tiny swamp.

Part of our training as Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department firefighters is to put out woods fires. Therefore our fire chief Phyllis and her husband Jeff decided to start a woods fire. Controlled burning is something that they do as a matter of forest management practice, and today it could serve two purposes at once. Here in Georgia, as elsewhere, we have a lot of scrubby undergrowth and trash trees that produce dense flammable material. Other undesirable consequences (besides the trash trees, such as sweetgum) include infestations of bark beetles and other destructive insects. Under controlled conditions the relatively mild ground fire will burn a shallow portion of the leaf and pine litter, and will effectively girdle the bark of softwood trees such as sweetgums, leaving larger and harder trees unharmed.

Jeff, who is certified by the Georgia Forestry Commission to do such work had his weather data out - low humidity, moderately strong winds (strong enough to make us wait til the last moment to decide whether to go on with the burn), and enough rain in the recent past to ensure that the leaf litter deeper than a half-inch or so was still moist. Jeff had already cleared a fire break around the acre or so we intended to burn, and our first job was to rake out a bit further from (Phyllis likes to rake into) and along the original break, down to the moist soil.

So here we go (and if anyone can tell me why I get this absurdly huge space before the start of the table, I’ll be grateful):

Jeff starts the fire, a bit downwind and at the north end of the burn area. We’ll work our way to the south. This initial burn extended the firebreak area so a sudden change in wind direction wouldn’t result in a firejump over the north break. See the little firestarter and the firebreak (vaguely, ok) to the left of the fire.	After the initial experiment to be sure the fire was controllable, Jeff spotted, with that handy little flamedropper, a half-dozen areas about 50 feet further south and running up to the road (our eastern firebreak). Rinse and repeat: as soon as the main conflagration is past, the next spots are made 50 feet further south, and so forth. Conservative, but appropriate under the circumstances of a windy day.
Yours truly, doing his part to spread the fire. (We also played at putting it out.)	Here’s a spot that’s growing toward the road. The left has burned out and acts as an excellent firebreak, and the right is downwind from the center and easy to control. Much of the fun was in watching the behavior of the fire under modulating wind conditions.
One burned-out area - the sweetgum trees have hopefully been girdled, the pines and oaks left unharmed, and excess leaf litter, with its evil little bugs, removed from future fires.	The west fire-break, after the fire. Configured perfectly by Jeff. No firejumps here.
Our Phyllis, Wolfskin VFD fire chief, documenting. I think we had three cameras in total, but we also had the rakes and shovels and that’s what counts.	At the very end, there was a teensy little fire jump, but Phyllis and I had that out handily while Jeff took pictures. And just in time for Phyllis to hop into her cocktail dress and high heels and make it to that wedding shower in Maxeys! Probably smelling of woods smoke.

All in all, a lot of fun - too bad no one else showed up. In the next six months Glenn and I are going to have hours and hours of fun along Blacksnake Road cataloging the new fungi and plants that come up that wouldn’t have before.

When I got up this morning every drawer and cabinet in the kitchen was hanging open and ransacked. The cats (one cat in particular) were looking for whiskerlickins. So they’ve been very bad and will not appear today.

Instead, let’s do invertebrates. I’m fairly sure that the pagoda-like ornament hanging from the door frame is a bagworm case. Definitely a bad witch - member of the Psychidae, very damaging to many species of plants. The female doesn’t leave the case and can’t fly. Males do leave the case and eventually seek a female out. Eggs develop within her body and I suppose kill her. Surely it’s the larva who makes the case, but I can’t figure out where this one got its materials. Supposedly the bag reflects species, but I haven’t gotten very good at that yet.

I discovered the one on the right hanging up clothes (why won’t this clothespin open?) Yes, we hang up our clothes to dry, and don’t have a dishwasher either. I have no idea about this one. The cocoon (?) is very hard and resembles a chiton out of its element.

This morning over coffee Glenn described his “discovery” of Kidneyleaf Buttercup, Ranunculus abortivus, the little weed pictured below, on the left. The fruit consists of an aggregate of hard dry achenes, when mature. As all good botanists do, we began reviewing our fruits. It occurred to me that at least superficially, R. abortivus fruits are the dry equivalent to blackberries, Rumus spp., show below right. Of course blackberries are not berries at all, they’re aggregates of fleshy druplets, each with one hard seed.

All this cogitation brings us to the notion of “vegetables” that are really fruits, and berries that are not berries. Not only are blackberries not berries, neither are strawberries - the fleshy part is a fleshy hypanthium and the actual fruits are the hard “seeds”, actually achenes, that are partly buried in the fleshy part. Conversely many fruits thought of as vegetables are actually berries: the cucurbits (watermelons, cantaloupes, squash, cucumbers) are a special kind of berry called a “pepo”. Each kernel of corn (Zea mays) is a fruit called a caryopsis; a corn cob itself is an infructescence of multiple fruits. And we all know that peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes.

Another unexpected berry is tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, fulfilling the requirement as a fleshy fruit with many seeds. The dry equivalent of a berry is a capsule, a dry fruit with many seeds. The fruits of Jimsonweed, Datura stramonium, below left, are capsules when mature; they’ll split open to reveal many black deadly seeds.

What fun it is to continue this contest of fleshy equivalents of dry fruits! Follicles, the simplest kind of fruit that opens along a single suture (milkweed fruits are follicles) are most often dry. We laughed uproariously at the slightly nasty concept of a “fleshy follicle”, so early in the morning. Well it turns out there are such. Chocolate vine, Akebia quinata, above right, is an Asian escape in the US. It has fleshy follicles, fruits that open along one side to reveal hundreds of seeds embedded in a fleshy white pulp.

Life is so full of complications!

Two major events seem to have occurred overnight.

On the left we have the first leaves of Trillium cuneatum. From the bewildering Lily Family, Liliaceae, this species goes by various common names: Toadshade Trillium, Little Sweet Betsy, Little Bloody Betsy, Wake Robin, Whippoorwill Flower. We inherited several of these from a grad student finishing up her work. We seem to inherit a number of such things - cats, ginseng, pitcher plants.

On the right we have Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis. The flower buds come up first, wrapped in fresh new leaves. In the Poppy Family, Papaveraceae, bloodroot is named for its orange-red sap, which drips out of stems if you break them (but who’d want to?).


The flowers of both of these species should open soon, but I just couldn’t wait. I notice that the bloodroot has come up this year on Mar 9; last year it was Mar 3 or maybe even a little earlier, and in 2003 it was Mar 5. They would appear to be a bit late this year, assuming the differences are significant. I checked rainfall and temperatures during several months preceding March to see if there were any particular differences. High and low monthly average temperatures are remarkably similar for all three years; the only obvious rainfall difference is that amounts were lower for the winter of 2003-2004, when flowering was earliest.

For the past nine months I have been following floristic developments in a storm-water reservoir that I call the Bi-Lo wetland. Although I have not talked with the civil engineers who should know its history and plumbing, it must have started off as a naked hole carved out of the earth to prevent backup of water when the storm runoff exceeds the carrying capacity of the storm-sewerage pipes. There are signs that it is fairly old but periodically maintained. The sides contain many sawed-off trunks up to 20 cm in diameter but newly-quarried granite is sprinkled about amongst fairly new mulch.

The reservoir is fed by runoff from perhaps as much as 5 hectares of asphalt through a 1 meter-diameter horizontal pipe and is drained through a larger pipe whose main exit is several meters high but with a small exit at the level of the reservoir floor. The reservoir can contain a lot of water before overflowing into the top of the exit pipe, but I have yet to see more than a few inches of water at the bottom of the reservoir, winding its way from entrance pipe to the floor-level hole in the exit pipe. The reservoir has 30-45 degree sides which are mostly badly eroded earth. It is surrounded by a 1 meter-high chain-link fence (kindly left unlocked) and a few meter-wide strip of grass that is well mowed. There is trash everywhere. The trash is blown in, flowed in, and thrown in by no-accounts.





Ah ... but at the bottom is a wonder land of plant diversity. There are at least eight species of grass, three species of rush, three species of sedge, and at least four kinds of poor small somethings that were hoped to be, but apparently are not, the still-elusive quillworts I have been stalking at many sites.



Typha latifolia (Common Cat-tail), Ludwigia sp. (Seedbox), Diodia virginiana (Buttonweed), Commelina virginica and C. diffusa (Dayflowers), Polygonum pennsylvanicum (Lady's-thumb) and P. sagitarium (Arrow-vine, Tear-thumb), and Sagittaria latifolia (Arrowhead), are among its fall-flowering plants that are common in wetlands. Clinging to the sides of the reservoir are the usual spring-flowering and other suspects found in disturbed areas, Lamium purpureum and L. amplexicaule (Henbits), Cardamine hirsuta (Winter Cress), Stellaria media (Common Chickweed), Cerastium viscosum (C. glomeratum), (Mouse-ear Chickweed), Phytolacca rigida (Poke-weed), Alchemilla microcarpa (Alchemilla), Veronica hederifolia (V. hederaefolia) (Ivy-leaf Speedwell) and V. persica (Bird's-eye Speedwell, Persian Speedwell), Viola bicolor (V. rafinesquili) (Field-pansy), Plantago lanceolata (English Plantain), Sherardia arvensis (Field Madder), Gamochaeta purpurea and G. falcata (Purple Cudweeds), blue- and white-flowered morphs of Houstonia pusilla (Bluets) and probably a whole lot more.





I am way behind in keying the winter collections of dead material, and most of the winter annuals and the die-back perrenials are still in their maddingly-similar, basal-rosette cloaks, so the list will get longer and hopefully all to species level.




Very close to the wetlands is another, but a frank concrete, reservoir with only a trace of soil and plants. It cries out to be filled with truck-loads of sphagnum moss and sand for an artificial bog for carniverous plants. Wayne suggested I throw pitcher plant seed onto the limited soil at the bottom in hopes it germinates and establishes itself in order to have evidence that the reservoir deserves some kind of protected status! Humm ...

Wasn’t there a movie by that name? I know there was Julia and Julia.

Anyway, March is the time when veronicas flower, and here are two species. The top two are of the same species - not sure what it is, we can call it Veronica spp. The bottom weed though is Veronica filiformis, Slender Speedwell. Unfortunately neither is native, but both are attractive. Glenn got the bushy little groundcover years ago, and the deer kept it cropped until they got exiled, and then it really went to town. It will probably become much more densely flowered in the next week or so.

The difference in flower color, by the way, is real, and it’s odd to see that two flowers on the same plant are colored differently.

Veronicas are scrophs - in the snapdragon family Scrophulariaceae. Bright little flowers for late winter.

I’ve been reading Eyesore of the Month ever since I got it off The Biomes Blog months ago, and I’ve gone back to the beginning too. You’ll laugh and you’ll cry, and if you’ve any feeling for things that shouldn’t be you’ll be outraged. (Frankly I think Kunstler has some interesting things to say beyond Eyesore, but that’s just me.)

It’s really hard to say what my very favorites were, there are so many, but Sept 2004, Aug 2004, maybe especially Jul 2004, at least in the last year, struck me.

So enjoy March’s Eyesore. And move on back through months and months of previous eyesores, and maybe a few pictures will be worth a few megabytes of words.

And now for a little metablogging.

Below you’ll see the confession, and short it is, with one exception. It’s statcounter’s depiction of our site counts since I installed it. As you can see there’s a small but one used to think healthy baseline, gradually working its way up into the double digits. This is of course due to the daily, sometimes multi-daily, efforts of yours truly, always trying to serve up a sumptious and nutritious meal.

Then Glenn writes a post and the thing skyrockets. I hate him.

(In all honesty the atypical peak is due to PZ Meyers' mention of Glenn’s post. And it was a good one - always quality over quantity. I still hate him.)

So here I was, getting sunburned of all things, getting my hands dirty in the garden. I’m making rows for the first things to go in - the radishes, onions, carrots, spinach, and lettuce. It was a big groan to discover that a “nearby”, as in 50 feet away, Carolina Buckthorn, had put out monster roots in all directions, but most importantly into the area I was digging in. These aren’t tiny roots - some are as big around as my arm. This seems so greedy; what could this little shrub possibly need with roots that size?

Anyway, here I was, breaking my back following these monster roots, and what should come through on this bright sunny warm day but a honking thunderstorm! Thunder, lightning, in goes Wayne, and just in time. Here I am in Georgia, and it’s like Tallahassee.

Is it the Owl or the Pussycat?

Even in the winter there is plant activity, and long before spring randiness begins in mammals some plants are way ahead. A number of plant species, especially the spring ephemerals, make most of their living in the winter and cavort long before anyone else is awake. This makes a lot of sense if you can do it; trees are leafless and the sun comes through to the ground, which will be heavily shaded in a few months.

Below, on the left, are the leaves of Cranefly Orchid, Tipularia discolor, and yes they are orchids. You’d be surprised at how many temperate orchid species there are in North America. The leaves form directly out of the ground; the bottoms are purple and the tops are a spotty green. In a month or two they’ll disappear, but in mid to late summer they’ll put out an inflorescence of subtly beautiful tiny green and brown orchid flowers. The middle picture is a portion of the 8" infructescence, careful how you say that Eugene, with capsules left over from last season. Tiny tiny tiny seeds, with an embryo just a few cells in size, and the embryo must establish a symbiotic relationship with a fungus before germination can proceed. Always plant your Tipularia discolor in a soil fortified with rotted wood and leaves.

On the right is a flower of Sharp-lobed Hepatica, Hepatica acutiloba, flowering right now! The leaves aren’t visible, but they’re hibernal too. This is a white-flowered variant, nice, but not as nice as the blue ones to my eyes. Hepaticas are in the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae, which you can surely tell from the many petals and many stamens, a primitive evolutionary character if you ever saw one.

"Favorite" is really an inadequate word - we’re talking passion here, and this is one of those passionate points with which I must agree.

At Dispatches from the Culture Wars they’re talking about favorite pens. The conversation was sparked by Timothy Sandefur at Freespace, whose criteria don’t match mine and yet we arrive at the same conclusion: the Pilot Precise V-ball Extra Fine.

Specialized tasks (computer paper, faxes, etc.) notwithstanding THE pen for use is the Pilot Precise V-ball Extra Fine. As I type this, wishing fervently I could be using my Pilot, I have three colors at hand - blue, black, and red. I live in fear of the day that the pen hook at Wal*Mart (shudder) will someday be forever empty. It’s happened before, so don’t make assumptions.

I used to use a rapidograph - yes, I did. I did all the ink filling stuff and the cleaning and the upgrades and I cheerfully purchased a point when a clumsy moment resulted in an unrebendable disaster. I finally gave up when the University Bookstore stopped carrying them (plus alternative ink colors were so pastel as to be impossible to use).

So now I use a Pilot.

For those who use pencils (or worse, lead-filled barrels, which will someday put one’s eye out when overenthusiastic students bear down a little too hard), I say this: someday, you’ll have the self-confidence to use a real pen.

Here I was ranting about the ravening white-tailed deer and sitting unbeknownst to me in Science a few weeks ago is the following:

“With few natural predators left, deer are running rampant across much of eastern North America and Europe. In addition to damaging crops, raising the risk of Lyme disease, and smashing into cars, white-tailed deer are eating their way through forests”

The Feb 11 issue of Science presents a paper by JB McGraw and MA Furedi ((2005) Science 307, 920-922) “Deer Browsing and Population Viability of a Forest Understory Plant”.

The plant is ginseng, Panax quinquefolius, widespread but uncommon, and familiar to most people and is the most-harvested naturally growing crop of medicinal plants. The authors conclude after censusing seven populations every 3 weeks over a period of 5 years that ginseng and many understory herbs are likely to become extinct in the coming century due to deer overpopulation.

Among the things the authors learned was that ginseng populations must contain at least 800 plants to have a 95% chance of survival for 100 years. Their findings were that the median ginseng population size is 93 plants and the largest only 406 plants, among those 36 populations observed.

From Donald Waller at UW, Madison:
“We should be encouraging the recovery of large predators like wolves. It also suggests we should be increasing the effectiveness of human hunting” by emphasizing the killing of does rather than bucks.

It’s pretty astonishing. It’s as though those who set the regulations don’t know anything about sex.

I am not a purist, or perhaps I am a tainted purist. This shocking revelation will disappoint some, but I seldom see things in black and white. There is too much interesting in the world even to confine things to to shades of gray - much better to see in color when you can. This means I’m an ineffective debator; there are few ideas (although there are a few) that are so cut and dried to me that I can amass the passion to argue for them exhaustively.

When this country was colonized a lot of non-native plants and animals were introduced. Sometimes it was through the Agency of Sentimentality - people brought their favorite plants and their favorite animals when they came here to live. So we have scads of European and East Asian weeds and non-natives that have supplanted and beaten back the unfairly handicapped natives that used to live here. We have European starlings, vast flocks of which descend from a couple dozen birds brought here in the latter 1800’s by someone who couldn’t see their new American friends for want of their old European ones. Pigs were brought here, understandably, but feral escapes are incredibly destructive to local ecosystems where they exist. The list of non-native plants brought by colonists is inexhaustible. Here in the south we have huge bottomland thickets of Japanese and Chinese privet (Ligustrum japonicum and L. sinense) with little else growing. Sentimentality? Let me tell you: Our local university and stores actively sell privet plants obtained by cuttings from the (locally) famous “hedges” that flank Sanford Stadium, the Bulldogs' football field. English ivy (Hedera helix) - a favorite planting of those who want to cover the ground in a shady location, is a horrible choice, albeit a popular one. Florida is a haven for non-native invasives, among them Brazilian Pepper (or peppertree) (Schinus terebinthifolius). It was introduced in the mid 1800’s by some misguided esthete who just “liked them” and figured everyone else would 150 years down the line. And of course there are lawns: a huge majority of property owners love their lawns and spend billions in total on maintaining them through the most ecologically destructive means imaginable (energy intensively produced and ecologically damaging fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides) - their choices for lawn grass include centipede, bahia, bermuda just to mention a few. Non-native escapes can easily take over sunny areas and drive out native grasses.

Sometimes it was through the Agency of Good Intentions, and probably most famously we have kudzu (Pueraria lobata), originally from Japan where its parasites and predators control it quite nicely. Planted here to control erosion, it found a very hospitable environment and most people know the rest of the story. Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), introduced to the US at the beginning of the 19th century as an ornamental groundcover, has been subsequently propagated as deer food and is now an extremely serious pest especially in the eastern US. Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) was brought to the US a century ago as an ornamental and food plant for honeybees, and now dominates wetland habitats especially in the northeast US but occurs in all parts of the country.
Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), believed to be introduced in the late 1800’s at a New Orleans exposition, now infests waterways throughout the South and Mid-Atlantic states. In Florida, Australian Paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia) was introduced first as an ornamental and then into the Everglades in an attempted to turn “useless” swampland into “productive” land. It now infests huge tracts of forest in many different habitats.

Then there’s the Agencies of Ignorance and Greed, which are sometimes hard to distinguish from the Agency of Good Intentions. My own nemesis, Microstegium vimineum, was introduced accidently into this country, probably as seeds present in the grass used as packing material for shipments from East Asia. Now it’s overtaking important habitats in the Great Smoky Mountains reducing whole shady ecosystems to monocultural stands. I’ve been told of Garlic-Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) which has demolished similar ecosystems in the midwest. There are otherwise reputable nurseries that actually sell privet (Ligustrum spp.) and Russian olive (Eleagnus angustifolia ), both horribly invasive non-native shrubs. From the Animal Kingdom, we have the introduction to the southeast of coyotes, released for hunting purposes. Coyotes are too small to be effective predators on larger destructive herbivores but are fairly noxious in terms of dangers to pets and from rabies. Likely they compete with our native bobcats, and as a cat person I much prefer the latter. Zebra mussels are now overtaking the Great Lakes and getting into the rivers that flow from them. They likely got there as larvae in ballast water dumped by foreign vessels. Their detrimental effects are both direct and indirect, resulting through phosphate release in large algal blooms.

The list of invasive non-native species goes on and on and can be found here and here and especially here and in many more places as well. It’s all in the google if you’ll just look!

So why am I not a purist, given all these problems of introduced invasive species? Well I too am subject to the Agency of Sentimentality, at least theoretically to the Agency of Good Intentions, but not, I hope, to the Agentcies of Ignorance and Greed. I love the various species and horticultural derivatives of Dianthus, or pinks. They’re well-behaved, don’t travel, and are at least in my area Good Citizens. I’m also very fond of Mexican sunflowers, Tithonia rotundifolia, New World natives, yes, but not native to this area. They do reseed but are absurdly easy to control mechanically. In short, there’s a large variety of non-native species that are perfectly fine to plant and enjoy, and offer special treats for our insect friends.

Conversely there’s a number of native species that are quite obnoxious. If you’ve ever had to get rid of a field of Smilax, you know what it’s like to dig to China. Trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans) is a hummingbird food source, but is also a very aggressive native vine, a real thug; in contrast its native relative Crossvine (Bignonia capreolata) is a gentleman. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac - all natives - all important food plants for wildlife - all with the potential and means to overtake a habitat (and certainly noxious to humans). Muscadine grapes (Vitis rotundifolia) are natives and certainly useful as wildlife forage but the hard woody vines and tenacious roots can dominate a number of habitats. Anyone who’s had Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium maculatum), a very attractive tall native composite beloved by butterflies and wild bees, knows it needs to be hobbled. Sweetgums, with the lyric scientific name of Liquidambar styraciflua, produce thickets of nothing but. Peppervine (Ampelopsis arborea) and climbing hempvine (Mikania scandens) are both natives, but are also very aggressive and robust. Do I plant them? If I were a native plant purist I’d have to say yes; my taint says no. Know your medications; know your doses!

Any of these problems require some type of elimination or control method. As I learned from Microstegium, simply looking at it for five years and hoping it will die back on its own isn’t an effective control method. If I were a purist, I’d spent the next century pulling it up; as a pragmatic, I resort to glyphosate. I hate the idea of enriching the already largely ill-gotten coffers of Monsanto, and I’m sure I’m doing some damage to the local habitats by using Roundup, but it’s a matter of means and ends and intelligence can minimize that damage. Fortunately glyphosate is not a terribly persistant herbicide. Microstegium is very sensitive to glyphosate and I can easily kill it with a low dose that doesn’t harm many other species. I spray in the late late summer, just before it begins to flower, and well after most natives have gone dormant for the season. And I know what a seed bank is. Already I see areas clear of Microstegium after one year’s application and it will be very interesting to see what things look like in a few months after the last year’s second application.

So I’m not a purist. I can’t be. I like too many non-native plant species and see esthetic and horticultural value in them. I see too many natives that I wouldn’t want around for the detriment they serve on less aggressive species. And there are too many laudable ends to accomplish to ignore the possibility of intelligently employing what a purist would see as unacceptable means. I know what’s required to make an omelet.

According to the breakdowns of traffic compiled for free by my.statcounter.com (sorry, you can not see them for this site, but you can use my.statcounter.com to poindexter the traffic at your own site), my first blog on Niches about the Phylogeny of the Angiosperms got lots of hits. This was mainly due to Pharyngula who saw it and kindly made an honest, but much appreciated, reference to it. By lots of hits I must also be honest and say they were about only a hundred or so unique hits during the first day. This was thankfully many orders of magnitude lower that would crash our startlogic.com server but several-fold higher than the routine traffic to the blog and a few orders of magnitude higher than traffic to the SparkleberrySprings.com Store which we hope will eventually at least pay the startlogic.com and 2checkout.com bills that allow us to ....

Well, if you have ever taught photosynthesis, respiration, and food webs you should get the general picture. Electrons cycle from water to [protons plus oxygen] and then again from water, ad infinitum, because of Sol and a lot of elegant biochemistry and cell architecture, if only to produce heat in skunk cabbage or brown adipose tissue. And the loss at each trophic level is enough to drive one to being a vegetarian! Our own energy carrier-equivalents are also electrons, but of a more mundane sort, and cash must keep them moving. We hope for a Sol-equivalent Sugar Daddy to at least delay the heat death of our own local universe at SparkleberrySprings.com. We anxiously await signs of Who It Will Be and of the Avatar in Which She Will Appear. But in the meantime, your traffic is a damn fine substitute! Thanks.