#on botany

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten out. Too long a while. By row:

(Yellow) Trout lily (Erythronium americanum, Liliaceae)

Little brown jug (Hexastylis arifolia, Aristolochiaceae)

Bloody butcher (Trillium cuneatum, Melanthiaceae)

Rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides, Ranunculaceae)

Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum, Berberidaceae)

These are all a week old, and the trout lilies are already (almost) all bloomless — they ain’t called ephemerals for nothing. I am absolutely thrilled for the return to bloom of our local Hexastylis offerings, and the trilliums are of course a favorite too. An excellent month for mottled leaves.

Epifagus virginiana, Orobanchaceae.

At last and as foretold, the beechdrops. Like last year’s Phelipanche, this is an obligate parasite — no chlorophyll at all, though it retains some vestigial leaves. Unlike its relative, this exclusively takes American beech Fagus grandifolia for its host (hence epi-) and stands as the only member of its genus.

These produce two types of flower: low on the stem, they’re roundish enclosed autopollinators, like some Viola spp.; higher up the grow longer, open, and rely on winter ants for cross-pollination. Stems emerge around July, but the specimens above have mostly gone to powdery seed, as in picture 2, in anticipation of dispersal by rainfall. Theoretically the stalks can get over a foot tall, but the few hundred I’ve seen trend toward half that.

By the time a plant is well enough established to show any stem at all, it’s probably spent several years developing underground. Pictures 4 and 5 show a typical middle-aged tuber wrapped partly around a shallow beech root; younger plants might consist only of some hungry root spikes and a clump of nascent differentiated stem. Early life stages seem pretty poorly understood, but that’s hardly shocking.

Several people have sent me zine-related posts lately, and I happen to have a couple zine-related items (zines, to name a few) lying around. Fancy that.

In the spirit of the preceding paragraph, here’s a little ditty I like to call Violets of Delaware and Pennsylvania: A Guide to Their Identification. By coincidence, Claude E. Phillips also called it that when he made it for the Delaware Nature Education Society on April 4 of ‘76. Fancy that.

The How

There’s a spot nearby with a really substantial, if dated, botanical library. Most of its contents are (appropriately enough) weeds from regional research collections, and it generates a lot of discards itself. Sometimes they’re left out to be made off with. Hell yeah, etc.

The Whole Thing for Once

I can show you the whole thing for once. Fancy that. It’s almost entirely a key, probably copied right out of a ‘real’ guide, but the illustrations and flavor are why I’m sharing.

Evidently it was sold as least once, so that’s a bit of handling built in even without knowing ownership history. Obviously it’s worse for wear — casually stored printer paper couldn’t fare much better — and (off the top of my head) a little dated, but this is to be expected. More interestingly, it’s very nicely composed. No page number on (1)! Masterful, really. Mwah.

The Why, Though?

Beech blight aphids (Grylloprociphilus imbricator) occasionally colonize bald cypress, but this isn’t one of those. It’s also not hornbeam or sycamore, which are the primary retainers of this riverbank. It is, in fact, an American beech. Funny thing.

In addition to the usual attendant ants, this group was feeding honeydew eater mold (Scorias spongiosa), the largest cluster of which was a good 10 cm across. The whole affair is pretty new — no appreciable spread of the aphids, and the mold is mostly without the black pigment it’ll take on in the next few weeks — but very impressive nonetheless.

Most of what you’re seeing of the aphids is costume: their bodies are primarily light blue; the red is restricted to the posterior abdomen and the white tufts are a waxy defensive exudate.

Calopogon tuberosus, Orchidaceae.

Sometimes a tuberous grass-pink is actually white. These things happen; you know how it with anthocyanins.

We often talk about orchids being resupinate — as their flowers open, they rotate through 180° and bloom upside down. Not so with Calopogon. Apart from being visually distinctive, this makes pollination a slapstick affair: a large enough pollinator can trigger the overhead labellum to snap down, guaranteeing direct contact first with the stigma, then the anthers (nice) while they escape. The second picture shows a freshly activated bloom post-bee egress. Beegress?

One straplike leaf per year is enough to underwrite up to a couple dozen flowers, which open in succession through the summer. Throughout most of its range (most of which is represented in the map below) that leaf is straight, though it’s distinctively curled in a subspecies through southern Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

Drosera filiformis, Droseraceae.