Over the last couple of months Glenn and I have been collecting some of the local cool season grasses, among other plants, and Glenn has done a fantastic job of keying them out. One of the difficulties is getting a high-resolution record of plant parts, especially for grasses which have such a large range of sizes from a meter down to micrometers. So far we haven’t favored you with a blog on grasses, but one of the things Glenn has been able to do is to use our scanner (Epson Perfection 1650, nothing special) as a substitute for photography and plant pressings. It works amazingly well.

You can for instance scan tiny seeds at a very high resolution and get excellent magnification. The pic below is of blue-eyed grass seeds, which are less than 500 micrometers in size. It was scanned by putting the seeds on the scanner glass and covering with a box (don’t have to put the lid down) then scanning within a 1 cm field at 1600 dpi. A smaller region was selected within the resulting field to make the final pic, which is only a 19kb file.


Below we have blue toadflax, more commonly known as Linaria canadensis, now preferred as Nuttallanthus canadensis. The scans were done at medium resolution, since the plant parts are much larger. Of course nothing is going to replace having a plant pressing where you can actually feel and manipulate the dried plant parts but this makes a quick and dirty record, and it’s easy to label and annotate.

There is a short story by Clifford D. Simak called “Huddling Place”. Our hero, the neurosurgeon Jerome Webster (the Webster family figures occasionally in Simak’s writing) is confronted with the need to travel a long distance (a couple hundred million miles) for reasons which are dramatic. He and his family have lived in the same old house for generations and ultimately he is incapable of leaving it, resulting in equally dramatic consequences.

I haven’t gotten quite that bad, but I can understand the point. For me a 300-mile one way trip is a long distance that I undertake only a couple times a year and I don’t really like driving long distances anyway. However the trip went fine, a full three days were spent with my sister Susan and brother-in-law Steve in perfect hedonism, I polished up my pool-playing skills and enjoyed some UV-damage doing a lot of swimming. I’d never been to a graduation before, not even my own three, so it was a delightful first to witness Our Laura’s commencement. The Tallahassee Civic Center auditorium was packed full with friends and relatives spanning many generations all focused on one thing - observing the end of many years of a process. Kids on the verge filed in solemnly, speeches were endured, names were called (along with yells and cheers from various quarters, very orderly as the principal appeared to be one who could swat anyone who broke her rules), caps were hurled, and then new adults filed out jauntily. It was fun.

Plus, there’s the brownie points, and Steve and I kept careful count. Unlike other kinds of points, brownie points can never be taken away from you!

Accompanying me homeward was a mass of moist air moving up from the gulf (that would be of Mexico) and by the time I got home waves of cool air from the north were persuading water vapor to condense into cool gentle rain, a much-needed rain that will continue through the week as the moist air system stalls over us. A kind of a reward.

What a loony thing to do this time of year, but my niece is graduating from high school, the same one I went to, in fact, so it’s to Tallahasse I drive tomorrow morning. Hope to be back Sunday. My sister and brother-in-law have a fine computer setup so I may end up blogging anyway.

What an admirable term! I found it at Dharma Bums, used by DPR to describe their water collector. Given their sophistocation of PoC, my use might be better termed Good Evidence of Concept, as it describes a pretty rinky-dink arrangement which looks like it need not be improved further, merely tweaked.

Our back deck faces south, lovely and warm and sunny in the winter, uninhabitable in the summer. The red maples I planted 14 years ago on the west side are now 30' tall and not only shade the woodland garden but offer increasing shade to the deck as the blazing Georgia sun progresses into late afternoon, but still for much of the day the deck is too hot to walk on. Great for drying clothes though - I gave up my clothes dryer four years ago and have never looked back.

Nonetheless I wanted a cheap, easily modified canopy arrangement to shade at least some of the deck, which is about 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. I didn’t want dead tarp, and for the moment I don’t want the permanent arrangment of a new roof or screen porch type thing. I don’t care if it’s not watertight - one of the functions would be to shade delicate seedlings that are hardening and growing in flats.

This spring I used spun polyethylene row covers to start my early spring plants under, and now I have 100' x 6' of this extremely light-weight material. So I drilled three wide holes in the deck railing on one side and stuck 7' rebar through them, oriented vertically and strung fence wire through clamps at the top. One the other side I put a couple of closed hooks into the wall and strung wire through those. With clothespins, yes, that’s all, I attached between the fence wires two 20' lengths of the row cover cloth spanning the width of the deck, side by side. Here’s the result.


I love the billowing aspect, besides finally being able to use the west half of the deck. It’s been windy the last couple of days and I’ve had to do a little tweaking but it’s amazing how stable the arrangement is, and how easy to repair, and how simple to take down if no longer wanted. Is it trashy? Maybe - rendering it less so is part of the tweaking, but it certainly is comfortable!

A few weeks ago I posted about dwarfdandelions, Krigia spp. I had found two of these native species, and one was undoubtedly K. virginica (Virginia dwarfdandelion; the other I thought to be K. biflora (twoflower dwarfdandelion), based on the number of flowers and leaf positions. It turns out the shape of the seeds was key to figuring this out, so lets talk about them.

Plants of the Asteraceae include all the above, plants like dandelion, sunflower, asters, and so forth. They all have a special inflorescence, a cluster of tiny flowers, called a head.

Below are pics of the infructescences (careful how you say that, Eugene) of K. virginica, left, and what I now figure is K. caespitosa (weedy dwarfdandelion), a native annual. It’s pretty clear that the one on the left has blowballs like dandelion, and the one on the right has a structure filled with naked seeds.


Here’s your pappus. A pappus is a highly modified calyx, which is a funnel of sepals. Each tiny floret on the head of a plant in the Asteraceae has one, and in some cases these are modified into bristles. Dandelions simply have long long bristles that act as a parachute; virginia dwarfdandelion has shorter, less elaborate bristles; and weedy dwarfdandelion has no bristles at all since the pappus separates from the seed instead of staying on. And by the way, each seed is actually a separate fruit called an achene (so your sunflower “seed” is also its own fruit, as is each “seed” below). A cluster of fruits is called an infructescence.

Here’s the dandelion (top) seed compared to the virginia dwarfdandelion seed:


And finally, from Walters and Keil’s “Vascular Plant Taxonomy”, a couple of figures to show what all the terms are and some of the range of pappus shapes these plants have.

For the past week we’ve sat outside in the late afternoon and early evening and watched with amazement as dozens of dragonflies whirl around the airspace above our little ponds and dart through the empty spaces punctuating our shrubs and trees and plants. It’s a pretty homogeneous group - I haven’t been able to capture one for identification purposes (nor had the heart to try yet). They’re probably 4-5" long, same wingspread, bluish in cast, and they’re not paying any attention to each other. They seem to be feeding on tiny flying insects - whatever they’re doing they do it with great alacrity, zooming on curving paths that take them through clear spaces, doing close orbits around obstructing trees and then back up into the air. As the afternoon wanes and the sun begins to disappear behind the house they move farther up until they’re performing the same stunts 30' up above the house, always in the sun.

It’s exhiliarating watching them, dozens of them. If you’ve ever read Arthur C. Clark’s “The City and the Stars”, or its shorter version “Against the Fall of Night”, then you’ll recall that a billion years down the line one of our heroes has a pet dragonfly, Krif, which is fairly intelligent for an insect. This is how these guys strike me - a small degree of sapience - apparently different from most other insects. Clarke must have made similar observations to include such a novel character.

As things get dark and dragonflies are still cavorting, the bats are coming out of their wing. They show no interest in them that I can see - whether these bats don’t eat dragonflies of this size or aren’t immediately interested after falling out of the top of the wing and taking flight I don’t know. Earlier in the evening when the phoebes and flycatchers are around, *they* don’t show any interest in the dragonflies either. I did detect a couple of bullfrogs jumping out of the pond at them though.

We’ve had quite a number of dragonflies before, and of many different species and I expect to see the whole range later, but this is different from anything we’ve observed in past years (which I have to admit may be because we’ve been less observant in past years). The ponds are clearly a great attractant - with five of them and two amounting to 800 gallons each and one close to 2000 gallons I’d probably guess these are the source and focus.

I like to fantasize that our plantings over the past five years, and especially their maturation in the past year or two, are supporting this magnificent influx. It seems that the tiny flying insects have increased in number and variety. I suspect the bog gardens with their perpetually moist soil are good breeding grounds for these; the ponds are obviously a strong draw for the dragonflies and with their permanent population of tadpoles a good food source for the voracious naiads. So yes, I know about the horrible children!

Let me say first that I am not a fickle person. I love my computer when it’s well and I’m not one to change my mind just because it’s sick. Yesterday it refused to boot, the emergency rescue disk didn’t work, it wouldn’t boot in safe mode, and it wasn’t able to boot in the last known configuration. Most people would by this point declare the relationship over, and eternal hatred for their “pos computer”. Not me. I do hope I can recover a couple of gigabytes of organismal photographs from the hard drive but we will see.

At any rate I’m now limping along on Glenn’s laptop, with which I definitely do not have a pleasant relationship, but we’re getting along ok.

So one question occurred to me yesterday: there’s invasive alien plants, and invasive alien birds, and invasive alien frogs, and terribly destructive invasive alien moths - are there any invasive alien butterflies?

So for the entire month so far, we’ve had 0.13" rain, crapped out on both of two occasions where areas 10 miles north of here got 2" each. But today there’s a severe thunderstorm watch until 5pm. Could life get any better?

One of my favorite books, purchased years ago soon after it was published in 1977 is Muriel Beadle’s “The Cat”. Muriel Beadle died in 1994 at the age of 78, but she had an amazing inquisitive mind, asking and trying to find answers for questions that delight the five-year-olds in us. And that’s what “The Cat” is about - an exploration into cat behavior and the species peculiarities that shape it. It’s a charming book, starting out with four chapters on cat physiology and leading into species origin and evolution, social and reproductive behavior, genetics, and the status of the species as human consort. Peppered throughout the book are little digressions on whichever peculiar behaviors Beadle was fascinated with at the moment.

From her forward, a potentially provocative statement: “While I was learning about feline physiology and psychology, however, I discovered that cats are more interesting as a species than as individuals. They are the product of two kinds of evolutionary pressures: those exerted by natural selection in the wild, and those imposed by the cultural milieu which they share with human beings. The same can be said of dogs, but because dogs and people naturally live in groups, there is more drama in the cat’s decision to swap solitary life in the wild for the company of men.”

Anyone who knows cats knows they love boundaries. Whether it’s a rug, a piece of notebook paper, or a keyboard, if you have a cat that’s where it’s likely to end up. Wanna read your newspaper or magazine with a cat around? So sorry. Thought you were going to take a quiet hour in bed with a book before going to sleep? That book belongs to a cat, you know. Sure cats love pillows, but they’d probably be just as happy with a concrete block.

And boxes. Cats love boxes. Put a grocery bag (paper, not plastic!) on the floor and within seconds a cat will be in it. Why do cats love boxes? Here are some thoughts on the matter. It might be a carryover from nesting behavior, and might derive from elements of a desire for enclosure and security.

Here Harry Pewter, Urchin, and Maxwell (of the silver hammer), demonstrate the proper use of a box. Maxwell would like us to know that the smaller the box, the better.




By the way, Muriel Beadle’s husband was the geneticist George Beadle, whose work in demonstrating that genes code for proteins earned him the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1958. Must have been some family!

And go to Modulator’s Friday Ark for all your Friday Organismal Blogging needs.

Woods poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum in the poppy family, Papaveraceae, flowered at the beginning of April, but is presenting an interesting little life story. Sometimes called Celandine poppy, the plant is native to several eastern states. It can also be a bit aggressive in the moist shade garden, although ours seems to be a fairly good citizen. Forty days later, these fruits (below right), capsules covered with short stiff hairs, were mature.


The fruits pop open (unpredictably) and the seeds fall to the ground. Below right is a closeup of the seeds. They have a half-belt of oil bodies called elaiosomes. These structures attract ants which carry the seeds into their nests, where the elaisomes are gnawed off for food. By the way - the word for ants carrying off seeds is myrmecochory - yes, there is actually a word for that. Eventually the intact seeds germinate.


Quite a few plants produce fat bodies of one sort or another - elaiosomes produced by trilliums, dutchman’s breeches and bleeding hearts, and one of the more interesting stories, acacias. While most plants elicit ant interest in their seeds just to get them dispersed better, one acacia species goes a bit farther than this, a mutualism that was discovered by Thomas Belt in Nicaragua in 1974, and investigated by Daniel Janzen in 1964, an investigation that earned him large numbers of vicious ant stings.

Several South American acacia species, such as the bullshorn acacia, have thick hollow thorns in which a particular species of very aggressive ant, Pseudomyrmex, makes its nest. The bullshorn acacia produces fat bodies at the tips of the leaves called beltian bodies. These structures produce fat and oil, and protein and sugars, and constitute the sole diet for the ant which cannot live away from the plant. Not only do the ants actively defend the bullshorn, but they clear away any vines or lianas attempting to overgrow the acacia, and actually remove competing vegetation for a considerable distance away from the acacia. A good account of this, as well as other examples of mutualism, can be found here.

Once again the clever plants take advantage of the naive insects.

Yes, this purports to be a family-friendlyish blog, and I know Karen and Brian each do their best to elevate discourse, but I’m going to be vulgar and present these mating golden-backed snipe flies Chysopilus spp. (I’m not *certain* of my identification, now, but I’m sure they’re mating.) They caught my attention early this morning so I followed them around, harrassing them with the camera. Isn’t that plush pile of golden hair nice? Don’t they have beautiful velvety gray eyes? Aren’t those venation patterns tracing against a translucent wing tissue background a visual feast?

I don’t have a great expertise in insects, but I could at least tell they were flies, and BugGuide took a lot of the taxonomic pain out of it (thanks Brian!). Not sure which species they are, but as snipe flies they’re in the Rhagionidae. Nice description also at BugGuide. The Ellerbe Beaver Pond tells us that the larvae live in rotting wood and detritus, and adults may be predatory but may also not eat much at all.

They certainly seem to be having at least as much fun as I did!

Two ferns have been growing very nicely. Both love a moist environment, both are native, and both produce fertile fronds that produce their spores, rather than having them on the underside of leaves. Other than that they’re not much closely related at all.

One species common in wetter areas of the East US is Royal Fern, Osmunda regalis. There’s a number of well known Osmunda species. The Osmundaceae lineage is more ancient than most of the other ferns we’d call familiar, although not as ancient as the grapeferns and addertongues I wrote about earlier. The fronds have leaflets that are much broader and “leafier” than we usually think of in ferns. The brown growths more visible in the picture below right are the fertile fronds, considerably different from the ones the next fern produces.


Ostrich ferns, Matteuccia struthiopteris (note the ‘struthio’ root - ostrich!), are in the Dryopteridaceae family, which includes many familar ferns. They are more abundant in the Midwest and the Northeast US and can form tall thickets along river edges and bottoms. Given that it’s not really attuned to the Southeast, I’m pleased to see it doing so well. The ‘ostrich’ connotation comes from the tall, wispy fertile fronds that produce the spores. I understand that this is one of the most commonly sold outdoor ferns. It can spread aggressively through rhizomes.


A couple of friends tell me that a lot of Pennsylvania forests are under fern attack - such a growth of ferns that many other species are disappearing. I’m not sure what these ferns are though.

Scroll down to the pics of the jack in the pulpits in the post below.

Don, at An Iowa Garden, made a good observation in the comments to the previous post: that to his mind those two “morphs” looked like two separate species. There’s a webpage where the author makes a similar comment. Don is right - these have in the past been classified as two different species but are apparently now considered subspecies of the same species. My use of the word “morph” was probably not correct.

I did a little searching and a little keying, which I should have done before. While I’m not so conversant with Arisaema to be able to say *why* it’s been done, it seems clear that there’s a move to “lump” species rather than retain the splits. Perhaps they hybridize freely, and despite superficial color differences there are botanically less obvious and more important characters. Glenn speculates these kinds of changes are often a result of the “latest monograph”.

So USDA Plants, which I tend to use as the best indicator of current name changes (since it retains much of the old information as well) shows A. triphyllum as previously divided into as many as 7 species. These have been lumped into one species which includes four subspecies:

A. triphyllum ssp pusillum lumps A. acuminatum and A. pusillum.

A. triphyllum ssp quinatum is the new name for A. quinatum.

A. triphyllum ssp stewardsonii lumps some of A. atrorubens and A. stewardsonii.

A. triphyllum ssp triphyllum includes the remaining A. atrorubens.

There’s a neat key by D.C. Huttleston that distinguishes among these four subspecies, mostly on the basis of leaf, spathe, and spadix morphology, and to a lesser extent to coloration.

It looks like the green one in the post below is A. triphyllum ssp pusillum, which means it was probably previously called A. pusillum; and the purple-striped one in the post below is A. triphyllum ssp triphyllum, probably previously called A. atrorubens.

[One last note: in binomial nomenclature, and those who are familiar with Latin will appreciate this, the species name should agree in gender (if not sex) with the genus name. Thus Sarracenia purpurea or S. flava, both feminine. Gossypium hirsutum, both neuter. Most of the time this works, but it turns out a lot of trees and shrubs are considered feminine even if their genus names look masculine: thus Quercus alba - ‘Quercus’ looks masculine but since trees are considered to be feminine the species name ‘alba’ is feminine.

The reason this comes up is because of jack in the pulpit: The genus name ‘Arisaema’ appears to be feminine, but the species name ‘triphyllum’ is neuter. I dunno.]

Since Our Speechless mentioned this a few weeks ago I’ve been antsy for the little dudes to do their thing. Well, they have.

On one of our plant rescue expeditions two years ago we brought back some Arisaema triphyllum, Jack-in-the-Pulpits (Jacks-in-the-Pulpit? How many Jacks can fit in a pulpit? One? All too many?). They’re in the Arum family Araceae, represented mostly by tropical species but a few as well in North America: skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus, which gives you some food for thought) and wild calla (Calla palustris). A lot of houseplants are arums, and they’re characterized by a strange hooded flower. The stalk inside bearing the male and female organs is called the spadex, and the hood is a modified leaf called the spathe. Although they may resemble pitcher plants in some ways, pitcher plants make a totally separate flower; their trumpets are modified leaves, period. There’s no evidence that jack-in-the-pulpit or other arums use their trumpets to trap and digest insects.

What’s interesting about what’s come up is that there are two distinctive color morphs - the bright green one on the left, and the striking purple-striped one on the right. The stems of the green plant are green, and the stems of the purple-striped are purple. Neat!

Interesting, many of the ferns and other plants we brought from that trip are volunteering jack-in-the-pulpits, possibly from pre-existing rhizomes and maybe from the seed bank that came in with the soil. Since we planted these in a number of habitats, we’ll be able to see how well jacks do in wet to dry and shady to part sunny locations.

Several years ago we put up a birdbox designed for screech owls. Since then I’ve seen titmice, chickadees, and flying squirrels use it; the hole has been enlarged by overwintering gray squirrels, but nary the screech owl. Today I heard raucous joyous screeches, and found that a pair of great crested flycatchers (I’m pretty sure - could only otherwise be yellow-bellied flycatchers) had discovered the box. Now, we’ve had them come through in past years, but all they did was grab up a few caterpillars and move on. So this is exciting. All morning they’ve been carrying junk into the nest, clearly a-building. Didn’t want to bother them too much, although they were very tolerant of me. So the pics suck a bit, but enjoy.

Seventeen days ago I described my good deed for the day, giving a helping hand in cross-pollinating our colony of pawpaws (Asimina parviflora) with flowers on an isolated pawpaw found 1200 feet away. Yesterday there were 3 developing fruits on the 9 pollinations I did on the colony, and 1 developing fruit on the 3 pollinations I did onto the isolated plant. All other flowers have fallen completely off the plants by now. The developing fruits are about 1 cm long now. Success!

Now all I have to do is figure out a way to protect these from the ravening animals.

If you’ve ever started tomato or pepper seeds indoors then you’ve probably filled pots with soil, stuck the seeds in, kept the pots watered, and in a few days the seeds germinated and the little green leaves popped up. Cheap thrills, but it is thrilling and it is cheap and easy. Unfortunately most wild plants don’t work this easily.

Seeds of vegetable crops are typically easy to germinate because they’ve been artificially selected to be so. Any dormancy that the wild ancestors might have had has been removed - no special treatments are necessary to induce the seeds to germinate quickly and synchronously. This is of course important for farmers and gardeners, who certainly don’t want to have to deal with a seed that just sits there for weeks or months or that has to be coerced in some complicated manner.

Continuing to grow seedlings into plants is also relatively easy for vegetable crops. Most vegetable crop plants are annuals, and their above-ground shoot growth is rapid and vigorous.

Compare with wild perennial plants. Since they’re wild their seeds have to have dormancy - a condition that prohibits germination until the winter has passed or a certain period of time has passed. This is the phenomenon that we have to deal with in propagating native plants by seed.

The growth of perennials from seedlings is quite different from that of annuals and domesticated plants. Perennials have to establish a root system capable of storing enough energy to get it through the next winter. Consequently their shoots may just sit there doing nothing for weeks, belying the intensity of growth underground away from sight, while their annual cousins who don’t have to develop that root system are going gangbusters above ground.

I’ve written quite a bit about this, as well as about a few early versions of germination methods (see the sidebar under “tutorials”). So except for saying that I’ve been working to develop a fairly easy, consistently successful, and space-saving method of germinating seeds of a great many species, I’m going to skip the details of all the intervening non-successes.

Here’s the method that is giving remarkably good results. I am now germinating perennial (and annual) seeds in baggies. The initial steps are simple and have been described in the March tutorial. (#) indicates some notes at the bottom of the page.

Dump a few dozen seeds along with a tablespoon or two of moist fine soil (1) into a snack-size (6.5" x 3.25") baggie with a sealable top (the cheapest you can find). If you know the seeds to have no dormancy, just lay the baggie under the lights in a warm room until germination occurs. If you know them to have dormancy, just follow the directions.

For example, many seeds require 1-3 months of cold treatment (stratification), whereby dormancy is broken (2). I can fit dozens of these seed-soil/baggies into a small place in the fridge, much easier that trying to fit dozens of 4" pots. Other seeds (hollies, for instance) required 6 months warm treatment followed by another 6 months of cold; this is just as easily adaptable. If you don’t know what the treatment should be, just put the baggie under light for a few weeks in the warm, and if nothing happens then put the baggie in the cold for a couple of months.

I started stratifying seeds this way back in February, and have been removing and planting them since. One possible approach after removing a baggie with its ungerminated but ready seeds is to immediately remove small amounts of seed-soil mix and mix them with the top layer of soil in a pot or plug tray flat; in general I don’t recommend this except for the tiniest most delicate of seedlings and only if constant care is taken to keep the soil moist and the air above the pot or flat humid.

The way I prefer now is to just let the seeds germinate directly in the sealed bag. They look something like this:


These seedlings are ready to plant into soil (3). First you should know what a seedling looks like, and which parts are which.


The above seedling is a dicot, with two seed leaves or cotyledons. Monocots, such as grasses, will look somewhat different but the same rules apply. Look at the left side, the shoot part. The cotyledons are storage organs for the developing seedling, but they also do photosynthesis. They are not true leaves however, and will eventually wither and die. It’s important not to squash or damage the join between the stem (in a seedling the stem is called the hypocotyl) and the cotyledons because this contains the apical meristem from which the true leaves and the rest of the above-ground parts will emerge (4). Now follow the hypocotyl down to the transition zone. Below this is the root system; when you plant this seedling, the soil should come up to this zone and probably not much further - the hypocotyl should remain above-ground.

Here’s a couple of examples of planted seedlings:


I’ve planted these seedlings into 50-plug trays filled with a fine, pre-fertilized soil (5). The seedlings on the left were large and relatively tough. Their roots had grown together but I gently pulled them apart by hand and inserted them into a hole dug into a plug, then gently pushed the soil back into the hole, covering the root to the transition zone. For the next few days I’ll spritz these guys several times a day, and I’ll keep them under lights indoors until they harden. I will NOT put them out into the direct sun for quite some time.

The seedlings on the right are more difficult - there were many of them and they were very tiny. I used a pair of fine forceps to handle them, preferably by grabbing a lump of soil into which a half-dozen or so grew together, and then transferred the entire lump along with its seedlings to a crack in the soil top in the plug. I prefer not to touch the seedlings themselves, but it can be done if delicately. I gently press the soil around the little colony. Again, for the next few days I’ll spritz several times a day - I may even cover these tinier seedlings with light plastic if they seem to be stressed.

In both cases, try not to let the shoot system, stems or cotyledons, come in contact with the soil. Watch for fungus! If seedlings wither and die, even when moist, it’s called “damping off”, it’s caused by a fungus, and the humidity should be reduced.

Flats of seedlings should not be allowed to dry out for several weeks. Watering cans deliver water too forcefully to water from above. I put the entire flat into a tray and water from below until the soil in the flat is soaked, and then put back under light. Eventually though you will need to fertilize the seedlings as they develop - continued watering will wash out the fertilizer already in the soil and it will need to be replenished.

One alternative to this method that I’m playing around with is to leave the seedlings in the baggie for awhile and let them develop. After germination, it’s important to open the baggie to the air, but gradually 6. I unseal the baggie, and then hang it up under the lights with a clothespin. For the first couple of days I’ll let the clothespin pinch BOTH sides of the baggie opening, then I’ll hang it up by only one side, fulling exposing the seedlings to the air. At this point it’s important to keep the soil and seedlings moist (but not muddy!); I spritz into the bag a few times, once a day, and that seems to suffice. Eventually I predict the seedlings should be much larger and more easily planted, perhaps into 4" pots.

Now get out there and grab some mature seeds off a favorite plant and try it!

NOTES

1. Soil for germination should be fine; it should not be prefertilized. For some species, seeds will be inhibited by the ammonium that is usually a part of the fertilizer. The soil should be sterile (although note that some seeds, for orchids for instance, must have fungi present for germination and seedling development). The soil should be moist, but not muddy. It’s probably possible to use another medium, such as vermiculite. Peatmoss is probably too coarse and its acid qualities may inhibit some seeds.

2. Stratification must be done moist. It doesn’t work to put dry seeds into the fridge. Legume seeds often have hard coats that should be scarified, nicked or roughed up with sandpaper. Many very tiny seeds will require light to germinate, but needn’t be in light during the stratification period.

3. Soil for seedlings should be fine. It may be prefertilized or not, but if not keep in mind that fertilization will soon be necessary.

4. The seedling in the photo has already developed its true leaves, but for many other species this will not happen for some time. All you’ll see will be the cotyledons.

5. I prefer to use plug trays. These are standard trays with 50 small cells into which soil is placed. For most seedlings at this stage 4" pots are just too large. Once a good root system has developed in the plug trays, I’ll transplant into 4" pots.

6. Once seedlings have formed in the baggies, many species will begin releasing the gaseous plant hormone ethylene (remember ripening bananas by putting them in a bag with a cut apple?). If this hormone accumulates too much it may cause weird development of the growing seedling. Best to give it some air!

I’ve gotten three laughs the last couple of days.

Our toads are out now. Bufo americanus is officially cruising and available. Sunday night we saw our first one hopping toward the ponds, and a little later his medium-pitched throaty trill. Last night there were dozens trilling away. Many of them stay under the porch platform and then along about dusk out they come trooping eagerly toward the ponds in a determined little parade hopping over each other.

I’ve been concerned about the barred owls (Strix varia). I’m sure they’ve begun calling in the past in mid to late winter, but there’s been no sign of that this year. Anyway, they’re calling now. I’ve been able to find sound files of the first half of their call, the “Who! Cooks! For You!...Who! Cooks! For Youuuuuuuu!” part. See comments below for my culturally unfortunate misrepresentation (See for example . It’s a canadian owl, but still understandable.) The first part of the call is mandatory; the second part is optional; you don’t always hear it. I haven’t found any .wav files of the second part, which always makes me laugh. It’s an insanely giggling, cackling followup, which always puts me in mind of some kind of socially maladapted partygoer. We can be sure that the demented owner of this voice just got royally goosed.

Finally there’s our signature bird, and my favorite, the Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe). They moved in soon after we did, 14 years ago, and always nest atop the downspout crook under the gutters. They stay all year around, and are the most diligent, hard-working birds I know. No preening for them, no, not like those pretentious cardinals. They’re always perching on the tips of things, watching intently for insects which they catch on the wing (well, they’re flycatchers, after all!) I’m warmed by their high-pitch, hoarse call (USGS has a good list of birdcalls.) I’ve been trying to get pics of them, but have been unsuccessful at getting good focus so far. However I was amused to see this unfortunate little betrayal of their presence, right under the nest.

Anyone else amused lately?

There’s nothing quite like standing in a maelstrom of bats as they’re returning home from an evening out. These are little brown bats Myotis lucifugus (I’m almost certain of this). At last count, early last fall, we had 600 living in an ornamental wing that juts out from the front of the house. The wing is about 30 feet tall, 10 feet wide, and 6 inches thick. It faces the east sun on one side and is more or less shaded by the house on the west side. There’s only one entrance at the top point and only one bat at a time can get through, making for lots of fussing. So it’s easy to count them coming out at night and easy to photograph coming in in the morning.

I used my Nikon 990 for these pics. There’s no talent to it, just point, shoot, and hope. I set it at 1/1000 sec, sufficient to freeze the bats in motion, and used flash. My flash is not powerful enough to fully illuminate and the brightening required during massage sometimes reduces contrast and makes the subjects appear fuzzy, although there’s the occasional near-perfect one. The camera can’t focus automatically in the dark so I have to set the focus manually for the number of feet away I think I am from the subject. Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. I end up sending about 2/3 to the recycle bin. Blessed be digital cameras. Someone with a better camera could undoubtedly do better!

Nah, that’s not entirely true. USDA Plants Database lists 14 species found now in the US; four of these are native. The worst non-natives are E. fortunei, winter creeper, a groundcover with many horticultural derivatives and commonly planted as such in the eastern US where it has proved to be a problem, and E. alata, burning bush, which has invaded much of the northeast.

I place these in the same category as redtips, periwinkle, English ivy, and bradford pears, unnecessary plantings occupying spaces that a more thoughtful gardener could use to propagate perfectly fine natives, or even non-native non-invasives. I will allow that as far as Euonymus is concerned there aren’t native substitutes in that genus for the alien groundcover E. fortunei but there are many potential native groundcovers if one must cover the ground.

Three of those native Euonymus are found east of the Mississippi and one, E. occidentalis, western burning bush, is native to the Pacific states and endangered. Here we have E. americanus, strawberry bush. It’s a weak shrub that produces homely insignificant flowers, appearing right now. Deer apparently like the vegetation - only when protected does it grow higher than a few inches, to at least 3 or 4 feet.

(Actually as I look at that flower, it certainly doesn’t look insignificant though it is scarcely 5 mm across. Look at those lovely patches of anthers on the outside, and that demure little green stigma in the center. Elegant is what it is.)


Why on earth would someone want a weak shrub that produces homely flowers? Why, for the fruits that appear in the early fall, if not for the satisfaction of showing off a homely group of native plants that will shine a little later in some small but vivid manner! Having protected quite a cluster of these guys for the last couple of years, they grew and prospered and the mass of colorful fruits last fall was spectacular. Just look at those beauties. Even if you don’t have the urge to dissect the flowers, you can’t be uncompelled by the fruits!

I planted this native vine, Aristolochia macrophylla (aka A. durior), pipevine or dutchman’s pipe, two years ago. It’s now a vigorous vine growing up a small hackberry (Celtis occidentalis). And it’s in flower!

Last year it made two or three flowers and none set seed, but this year there’s dozens, and are they strange? Why yes they are. The entire “pipe” is formed by the highly modified fused sepals; there are no petals. (Petals? Where we’re going we don’t need petals!) The morphological development of this flower is undoubtedly a story in itself which we shall with regret pass over today.

When the time comes, the tips of the sepals pop open, and “Welcome!!” This reveals the first of many lies: nectaries, appearing as the red bumps around the lips of the mouth and exuding a powerful odor that promises rich rotting meat. Tiny flies pollinate this beast. The reddish spots must drive them crazy because they funnel down into the flower searching for food.


Let’s cut one in half longitudinally and see what’s going on! Ugh, about 30 flies came rushing out. What’s happened is they’ve followed the tube all the way to the chamber at the end, where the ovules and anthers are, the business end. This chamber is covered with stiff hairs so once in the flies can’t get out. After a couple of days the anthers will mature and the hairs will wither away. At that point the flies can leave, covered with pollen. Their little brains just compel them to the next fresh flower whose lies they immediately believe and get trapped just like before. This time though, the pollen they’re carrying pollinates the female part of the flower. Is that cool or what?


Insects' revenge: This plant is a favorite caterpillar food for the larvae of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly, Battus philenor.

The family Aristolochaceae also contains wild gingers, and I posted an amusing association a few months ago.

For a thoroughly enjoyable experience in reading the purplest botanical prose you could image, visit More than Mints. Scroll down for the entry on A. macrophylla. (It’s true that Neltje Blanchan does invoke one of my pet peeves, capitalizing the specific epithet. Forgiven, given the over-the-top use of the English language.)

Let us tap the wisdom of the internets today. We’ve got two plants that are just putting out flowers. My suspicion is that the second set below is of false solomon’s seal, or a related species. I don’t think that the many many flower in the inflorescences are really open yet so this may be premature. But I just can’t wait, so...

This first one came in from a plant rescue. It was actually a southern lady fern that got rescued, but then this guy popped this year. It’s quite a lush plant with many somewhat thick leaves, especially toward the top. It has a rather fleshy stem. The inflorescence is more or less upright.


The next one is one that is popping up all over the floodplain, or perhaps a species related. We got it on a plant rescue last year. The inflorescence droops. This is the one that I think may be related to false solomon’s seal.

No pics today. I realize that the front page of this blog tends toward being pic-heavy, and employ several restrictions to keep the loading problem to a minimum. (For instance, only 10 posts on the front page at any time, so you should always remember there are monthly archives on the right sidebar, as well as that handy search thingy!) Of course many of you are conveniently hooked up to one form or another of a fast connection, but I am not - in the styx here we still don’t have DSL or cable of any sort, so I’m fairly sensitive to that aspect. Of course I’m used to 56Kb phoneline connection, and just to start things off, that’s a helluva lot better than the 9600 baud rate when I first started dialing up in the early 90’s!

Several times in the last few months I’ve been prompted to reminisce about the old days. This is something old people do, and yes, dear young ones, you will too someday. At the age of 49, I’m not quite rocking back and forth at the old folks' home, but I did grow up in an age without computers and with only three TV channels. Television is an aspect of our culture that I abandoned as soon as I left home and then never reacquired - since 1973 I’ve never lived in a household with a television.

(Lest you think I feel virtuous about this (ok, I do), I should point out that I’ve very complacently allowed computers and the internets to take over what others allow as television’s demands on their time. I do consider that to be a preferable substitute, favoring active over passive learning.)

These kinds of reminisces began long ago. When I started doing some teaching in the early 90's; I realized that the students I was teaching had never experienced the amazing occurrences of people walking on the moon. Now I understand my students are referred to as “Generation Y”, that is, born after 1980. This apparently follows Generation X, which follows the Baby Boomers to which I barely cling, having been born in 1955 to parents who were born relatively late in their generation, whatever it’s called.

I bought my first calculator as a junior at Leon High School in Tallahassee sometime around 1971. It was a Hewlett Packard, and it cost me several hundred dollars. (Yes, *me*, I was a good kid, I had a part-time job.) A few months ago I went and bought a new calculator that did a lot lot more than that HP could do, and I paid $30 for it. My first real encounter with computers was as a sophomore at Florida State University around 1974. I took a Fortran course, and we got to actually sit down at a keyboard and type line after line, each of which punched a new card that added to the stack! We’d run around with our stacks of cards representing programs, and feel very smug at our high tech capabilities. For a bonus this course, in the latter third actually allowed us to sit down at a terminal and type a WHOLE program onto the “CRT screen”, which somehow saved it and allowed you to “run” it, right from the keyboard.

At about the same time I took an analytical chemistry computer course, instructed by two professors who had actually built their own computer. They had programmed a “character set” into the computer, and the letters you typed appeared in the green circle of an oscilloscope screen. We had loads of fun persuading the computer to spout back “obscenities” and “epithets”.

As a grad student in chemistry at the University of Georgia here in Athens in 1977, I became more fully acquainted with computers. We worked with a PDP-11, which was housed in a room kept very cold. It kept breaking down, so my major professor had the department buy her a “mini-computer”, unfortunately also from DEC, which also kept breaking down. Here it was that I had my first contact with the “modem”. This was fun. You could actually connect with the university computer by telephone. You dialed the telephone, yes, by hand, and then you set the handset down into a padded receptacle so your “CRT screen” could talk to the computer. Presto!

A little later, about 1980, our lab built our own “microcomputer”, using an 8080A chip for the CPU. There wasn’t a “CRT screen”, heavens no, those were still way too expensive. You “booted” the computer and loaded it with a long strip of tape that was read by a “tape reader”. Basically you fed the beginning of the tape under the optical reader and then you pulled it through, again by hand. You had to pull it through at the right speed, otherwise the computer would “crash”. It took a bit of skill, but once the program was in there you could communicate with a “teletype”, which also printed out the results, clackety clackety clackety.

Along came the 80’s, “Ronald Reagan”, the “me” years, and I suppose those yet-to-be potty-trained “Y generation” that I guide through genetics, PV=nRT, and balancing redox reactions today, and computers were getting personal. You could get a Trash-80 from Radioshack, but as my old old friend Susan discovered, it wouldn’t do squat. You couldn’t hook up to anything outside that cubic foot space occupied by this expensive little machine, but you could show it off, and you could keep your cats off the keyboard (*they* knew way before us what keyboards were for), and you could wonder why you’d spent the bucks. What, to run the electricity in your house?

My first personal computer was a Heathkit. I built it myself, at home, in 1982. It had 24K of “RAM”. It had a “floppy disk drive”, a new and modern thing which took those 5.25" flexible “disks” that held an amazing 100 Kb of information. Later I expanded it to *two* “floppy disk drives”. There was no “hard drive”, gracious no, those things ran in the thousands of dollars to buy. This computer was a real improvement over the paper tape computer. You could actually boot it by typing, in “machine language”, the numbers that represented the half-dozen commands to get it to read its “ROM” memory, which contained the booting program. Click click click click click click, and the “terminal” would fill up with white on black (only) letters and words telling you it had been successful. This computer allowed you to program it in BASIC, which I actually still use now and then (but not on the Heath computer). How fast was it? Honey, we didn’t talk about fast in those days. Now for the amazing part - on this computer I wrote a SIMPLEX analysis program that, in conjunction with experimental data got me my PhD, and Glenn wrote a model simulation program that got him a hefty NSF grant. You make do with what you have. I still had to type my dissertation on an IBM Selectric, but it did have a special eraser ribbon that typed a white coating over any mistakes you made. “Word processors” were just getting going.

At this point I think most people know the rest of the story. There aren’t a whole lot of anachronisms that are fun to reminisce about after the mid-80’s (YET: just you wait, you young'ns). Along about 1991 there was the “internet” which we now refer to as the “internets” courtesy of our incurious president, and I started messing with *that*, and we all started getting and sending “electronic mail”. A bit later there were “homepages”, which people started displaying the “URLs” for on “Usenet”, which you could get to if your site had a “Usenet News Reader”. You could read all sorts of interesting things on “Usenet”, at least until our “university” shut down all the “newsgroups” that had the string “sex” in them. Computer monitors were getting some color to them, hard drives were readily available with a gigabyte or so of space, and there were these neat new portable 3.5" disks that actually held a megabyte of information.

Now I have a big wide screen with lots of colors, a computer with 386 megabytes RAM, a digital camera that I throw away half the pics on, this great little jumpdrive that plugs into the back of the computer so you can download whatever’s on it. I could even wear it around my neck, if I wanted to. Yes, Sonny, times have changed.

Trilliums are wonderful, and I very much like the ones I’ve acquired, but the one that grows very commonly in the hardwood forest in the hollow is my favorite, Trillium catesbaei, rose trillium, wake-robin, bashful wakerobin, Catesby’s Trillium, all kinds! Down in the woods it never flowers that I’ve seen. I transplanted some to a woodland garden on the north side of the house in a moist runoff under the river birches and it flowered the second year. Thought it was gone this year, but no, last week it popped up complete with drooping bud, and today it opened. The flower really does droop below the level of the petals, so the right pic is taken looking straight up at it.

Just in time for mother’s day. It’s a real shame my mother doesn’t have one.

It doesn’t lead to jokes about Mayflowers and Pilgrims, but it seems to be true here in northeast Georgia. I’ve been collecting rainfall data for the last five years and present it below for Feb through May for the years 2002 through 2005. Seems pretty clear that we usually get a lot more rain in Feb and Mar than in April. While a lot of plants will be flowering in May, our preciousessss, dogwoods, azaleas, spring ephemerals, redbuds, and so forth, have already flowered. My guess is the old adage was made up somewhere north of here. Happy May Day!

UPDATE: New data just in show that around here, it’s not so much the Merry Month of May as the Antic Month of April.