Tag Archives: underfoot

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Underfoot: Turkey Tails

By Susan Sprout

Mr. Crabapple, a stump in our backyard, has grown a braid!

OK, that’s what I call it. Normal folks would probably call it shelf fungi.

Turkey Tails is their common name, reflecting the wonderful concentric color zones of tan, brown, gray and cinnamon that look like fanned turkey tails. These are one of the most frequent types of fungi found in our woods and throughout the world.

Turkey Tail Fungi

Until the 1960’s, fungi were categorized as plants. We now know, from biochemical and DNA studies, they are more closely related to animals than plants and are placed in a separate kingdom which includes yeasts, molds, mushrooms, and mildews.

Turkey Tails are saprobes, decomposers of dead hardwood logs and stumps. I see them all the time when I hike. Ah well, I actually can’t see the fungi’s main body, the mycelium, made up of microscopic thread-like hyphae, because they live deep inside what they are recycling – secreting digestive enzymes to break down the wood molecules and absorb them as building blocks in order to keep growing. What I do see are the fruit bodies formed to make and release their reproductive spores.

The white underside of the Turkey Tail is covered with very tiny holes from which the white spores are released, usually in fall or winter. The thin, flexible “shelves” can grow up to four inches in diameter and may overlap in layers as their fruit bodies grow.

I am always amazed by their soft, velvety exterior when I check them under a magnifier. Mr. Crabapple thinks they look cool! Little does he know…

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Underfoot: Swamp Dewberry

By Susan Sprout

The trailing, woody stems of this native plant like to grow sprawled out across my favorite bog. Hiking in is like walking on a thick carpet.

Their shiny green leaves of three won’t raise welts though to some folks, they may resemble poison ivy.

Swamp Dewberry

Swamp Dewberry or Bristly Dewberry (Rubus hispidus) is a member of the Rose Family – like the other berries we love to eat during the summer. Unfortunately, the ripe fruit of Dewberry doesn’t taste that great to humans. Song birds, game birds, other mammals, yes. To us, the taste is quite sour.

The small, white, five-petaled flowers have finished blooming by now, and the ones pollinated by small bees and flies have grown into small, individual druplets that are clumped together to form the aggregate fruits we call Dewberries! They start out white, then green, then red and finally purplish-black when totally ripe. You may find all of these colors at one time or another on their slender and bristly red twigs.

Look for swamp Dewberries growing where the soil is acid and damp and the sunlight is dappled. Their tendency to form dense thickets also provides nesting habitat and protective cover for birds and smaller animals. The favor is returned when seeds of the fruits are dispersed into new areas.

Check out Swamp Dewberry’s bristly stem!
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Underfoot: Spotted Spurge

By Susan Sprout

For those of you who do your walking in town, here’s a plant you may have seen growing from pavement cracks and then sprawling out like a mat over the sidewalk. It is Spotted Spurge, Chamaesyce maculata, a member of the Euphorbiaceae or Spurge Family.

This interesting little plant is a native annual that blooms from May to October. Its paired, dark green leaves are slightly toothed and hairy. They stand out against the slender, red stem which is also covered with fine hairs. On closer examination, you may find a reddish blotch on each leaf.

Spotted Spurge surging from between two sidewalk blocks.

Be careful if you pull off a piece of the plant to look at – the milky latex that seeps out of the torn stem is a caustic skin irritant. Yes, I itched from it because I placed it on the desk where I do research and write. Yes, before I did the research and found out about the itchy juice.

Male and female flowers grow cupped in structures called cyathias that are produced in the leaf forks. You really need a magnifier to see their white or pinkish petal-like appendages and the hairy three-lobed capsule that the pollinated female flower develops. Each valve of the capsule contains a single seed that is ridged and pitted.

A close up of Spotted Spurge

You may see resident flocks of Mourning Doves pecking at the plants. These seeds are hydrophilic, by the way. When wet, they can adhere to surfaces – like shoes of passers-by. Spotted Spurge is known in all of the states except Alaska. It has even been introduced to Hawaii.

On the Blog

Underfoot: Steeplebush

By Susan Sprout

Last week you saw a white steeple, the bloom of a Ural False Spiraea. This week, here are the lovely pink steeples of a TRUE spiraea – Steeplebush or Spiraea tomentosa. 

This woody shrub, a member of the Rose Family, is a native perennial ranging from Canada to North Carolina.  Look for it in sunny wet meadows, moist old fields, and pastures. The plant pictured was growing in an acid bog, carpeted with mosses and low blueberries, within a broad area circled by hemlocks and black spruces – and way off the beaten path. Immediately the bright pink blossoms spiking upward caught my eye as I shouldered my way through the dimness of the low evergreen branches and out into the open. Wow…took my breath away…the flower clusters ruled the green of everything else.

This is not a tall plant – two to four feet – with short-stemmed leaves, oval and toothed, dark green, and leathery, arranged alternately on the tough stems. They usually grow unbranched and are crowned with terminal clusters made up of tiny, five-petaled flowers that open from the top down. The fruit is found in five tiny brown pods, each with a single seed that will drop when the dry pods split open.

Tomentosa, a part of its scientific name, refers to the matted hairs found at different places on the plant – under leaves, on stems, on fruit pods, and especially on first year stems.

As you check out Steeplebush in your field guides, don’t be misled by different plants that have the same common names. This one is also known as Meadowsweet and Hardhack. I suspect the later refers to the tough stems farmers dealt with when cutting them out of their pastures – to no avail!

Steeplebush or Spiraea tomentosa
On the Blog

Underfoot: WHAT’S TRUE ABOUT URAL FALSE SPIRAEA

By Susan Sprout

It is TRUE – this False Spiraea came to us from the Ural Mountains of West Central Russia, a particular range that marks part of the boundary between Europe and Asia.

It is TRUE that this plant is False Spiraea. True Spiraea plants have toothed single leaves up to two and one half inches long on their plant stems. False Spiraea has leaves that are at least a foot long, made up of thirteen to twenty-one toothed leaflets that each grow to four inches long.

This long compound leaf is made up of 21 leaflets!

It is TRUE that the leaves of False Spiraea are very similar to the long feather-shaped or pinnately compound leaves of American Mountain Ash, (Sorbus americanum), a native tree that can grow to thirty feet tall. Consequently, its scientific name, Sorbaria sorbifolium, means it has leaves like Sorbus. Both are members of the Rose Family.

It is TRUE that False Spiraea , a perennial growing to eight feet in height, can and does spread aggressively sideways in loose soil.  This can be a positive quality because it helps control erosion on banks and slopes likely to get washed away. I found Ural False Spiraea on Dunwoody Road driving along Bear Creek. It has its work cut out for it, as this road has been washed out quite a few times! What caught my eye were the lovely four to ten inch tall, steeple-shaped clusters of tiny, white flowers.  They form on the ends of new wood in early summer and leave dry, brown steeples when the blooming is finished.

The White Steeple blossom of Ural False Spiraea
On the Blog

Underfoot: Ephemeral, Thinking about Things Seen

By Susan Sprout

I am a curious sort…purposefully looking at things and thinking about them…pondering. Sometimes I sit at my desk to write, look out the window toward the maple tree, and ponder. When will the seeds be ready to take flight?

Seedfall is coming soon to your neighborhood maples

When it rains, watching the soil absorb the wet under my muddy boots. Can this wetland remain here and be vibrant next year?

nde This wet area holds the promise of some very interesting plants

Bird feeders down and cloroxed to stave off an unknown bird epizootic. Will our feathered friends be able to return?

Morning fog both cloaks things from our view and surprisingly, reveals others at the same time. Like spider webs in the grass or looking up, the air webs hanging between the parallel phone and electric lines, hundreds of them, spun to snare flying insects, and brought into visual discrimination by clinging moisture. Will they last or be pulled down by the wet, to be respun tomorrow?

Cloudy web covering the grass

Ephemeral: here today and gone tomorrow.

Folks talk about “rewilding”- the intentional practice of restoring native plants in various rural, suburban and urban settings to reverse habitat loss, support ecosystems, and bring nature back into our daily lives.

That’s great! But in the process, let us hope that we can actually rewild our brains: to really see when we look, to be curious when we think deep thoughts, to be thankful when we enjoy, to take care of each other and those life forms sharing the planet as they take care of us. We all are, in reality, ephemeral!

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Underfoot: Yellow Wild Indigo

By Susan Sprout

Where the wild indigo grows

What an enjoyable afternoon we had at the top of Highland Mountain, gazing toward the horizon across Sullivan County and being serenaded by American Towhees with their “Drink your tea” songs! If that wasn’t great enough, looking across the clearing, I spied lots of small yellow flowers on squat shrubby-looking bushes. A new plant to explore…one whose name I did not know. It is Yellow Wild Indigo, with the scientific name of Baptisia tinctoria, from Latin verbs  baptiso (to dip or dye) and tingo (to soak in dye). 

Check out the bluish foliage

I had met its cousin before, the true “of India” Indigo, the well-known dye plant in the same Pea Family, FABACEAE. Here was a plant, native to Pennsylvania, used by Native Americans and colonists as a blue dye plant, as well as for medicine. The inch and a half long pea-like flowers were being pollinated by bees. Pods created by that interaction will look like short, fat peapods that turn brown as they mature. The leaves attached to the stem are in groups of three like clover, another relative. The bluish-green color of the young bushes sets them apart visually from the other greens of the field. The whole plant will turn black rapidly as it dries out, making it a stand-out among the fall colors, too.

See how their clover-like leaves turn  black when dried.

I was happy to discover Yellow Wild Indigo is a host plant to some of our native butterflies…they evolved together! Check out Clouded and Orange Sulphurs, the Eastern Tailed-Blue, and, most especially, the Wild Indigo Dusky Wing – its own very special butterfly!

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Underfoot: American Sycamore

By Susan Sprout

Getting a forkful at Forksville this week, afforded me the opportunity to visit several of my favorite Sycamores, AKA Planetrees. that live along Loyalsock Creek.

In Pennsylvania, some have matured to absolutely huge proportions when left alone to keep growing: one in Philadelphia County is over 149 feet tall; Delaware County has one 404 years old; one in Chester County has a circumference at breast height of over 30 feet. Amazing – see why I love Sycamore Trees – such potential!

As they grow, their less than elastic bark cracks and sloughs off to reveal lighter under-bark creating an easy to identify blotchy camouflage pattern of gray, brown, cream and tan that any hunter would be proud to wear. These native trees are common along waterways and low woods, where once established, they appear to be drought-resistant.

American Sycamores along Loyalsock Creek

Sycamores’ leaves may resemble maple leaves, but they are much bigger –  five to nine inches across, with prominent yellow veins, and furry undersides. And, they are not related to maples at all, but are members of the Planetree Family (Platanaceae) that has only eight known living species in the world. The family has been around for over one hundred million years, making some paleobotanists consider our modern Sycamores to be living fossils.

Reproduction takes place in the spring when inconspicuous male and female flowers in hanging bunches are pollinated by the wind, just about the time the leaves begin to sprout. The seeds develop in round spikey balls, green turning to brown, that hang on for about a year before falling to the ground. Pick one up and pull it apart to find the individual seeds surrounded by long hairs – they float in the air and on the water, a second dispersal mechanism. No wonder they are so successful!

American Sycamores pushing up through the rocks along Loyalsock Creek
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Underfoot: Northern Maidenhair Fern

By Susan Sprout

These elegant-looking perennial ferns, preferring acid soil and partial shade, are likely to be found on wooded slopes and ravine bottoms that are moist. They “brown-up” early in summer when they are too dry. Northern Maidenhair Fern or Adantium pedatum is the Eastern North American native of this genus growing world-wide that has nearly two hundred different species in it.  I love looking for their circular patterns of horizontal fronds and bright green leaflets divided into little fan shapes! They are lacy and delicate. The shiny black stems holding them all together are a great clue when trying to identify Maidenhair Fern, and thus, the name. And they are tough! They were used by Native Americans in their basket-making. With many other ferns, there is an observable difference between fertile fronds carrying spores and non-fertile fronds without them. Not so with Maidenhair! Their foliage looks the same until you turn one over and find little sori curled up on underside edges behind the vein tips of the leaflet. Though tiny and tucked away, wind will disperse the spores to grow into heart-shaped gametophytes responsible for sexual reproduction and creation of the next generation of ferns. Over time, they will grow into colonies, spread by their underground rhizomes. In spring, look for the pinkish-brown crosiers or shepherd’s crooks pushing up. Return trips are a must…to see them gracefully unfurl!

Northern Maidenhair Fern
Circular frond pattern
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Underfoot: Green Dragon

By: Susan Sprout

I hope you are familiar with the native plant Jack-in-the-pulpit because I would like to introduce you to Jack’s less well-known relative in the same genus – Green Dragon. Arisaema dracontium, also a member of the Arum Family with Jack, is a native perennial plant that lives in the rich ground of low woods and flood plains.

The first one I ever found was along the muddy edge of the West Branch Susquehanna River, downstream from the Ellmaker Boat Landing in Montoursville. Green Dragons like dappled sunlight when they first appear in the spring and then more shade later on. That had happened quite naturally as the sycamores and silver maples leafed out over them there.

Green Dragon leaves

Each plant has a single leaf made up of five to fifteen smooth, oval leaflets and a single naked stem topped with its inflorescence or flowers, both arising from an underground tuberous corm.  The unusual leaf usually grabs my eye first because it looks like the palm of a hand with too many fingers, swirling around the stem. Then I peek under it, and there is a dragon’s tongue!

The “tongue” of the Green Dragon

Start at the very tip of the “tongue” and travel down four to ten inches and you will find the flowers at its base like little greenish-yellow balls hugged by the spathe, a leaf-like bract that partially surrounds them and allows the dragon’s tongue to ascend out the top. Fungus gnats attend to pollinate them, turning the flower column into a red-orange club made up of at least a hundred pear-shaped berries containing one to three seeds…treats for wild turkeys. Don’t try them yourself – they contain enough calcium oxalate to burn your mouth and, if eaten, cause severe gastric distress and kidney damage.

A close up of the flowers on a Green Dragon

Look for the Green Dragon now. It will fly away… I mean go dormant…soon!