Identifying Woody Plants – Month 3

The Identifying Woody Plants field class I am taking at Missouri State University is winding down. The field trips are done, and we’ve had a class looking at twigs and fruit in the lab. The fruit is not too hard…but twigs are a challenge. I did some photographs of fruit.

Hickory nuts/husks, pods (trumpet creeper, catalpa, honey locust)

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Colorful bittersweet (I hope the native), acorns, chestnut burs, magnolia (the grouping looked very artsy to me), rose hips, tree of heaven winged seeds, pods of Rose of Sharon.

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The ginkgo outside the building our classroom is in finally turned yellow. There were others on campus that had already turned yellow and dropped their leaves. This one was delayed.

In another class, we looked at pressed specimens from prior classes (some of them more than 10 years old) with the assignment to be able to ID them in the next class! I realized how much I look at many aspects of the tree and only having the small part that can fit on a page is sometimes very challenging.  The Nyssa sylvatica specimen has no fruit – just leaves and twig.

There is one more class after Thanksgiving that includes the mounting of our own pressed specimens. Then I will be done since I am auditing the class and can forego the final!

Previous posts about Identifying Woody Plants field class

Ten Little Celebrations – September 2024

It seemed liked the heat of summer lingered into September this year…but we are already savoring a few cooler days and looking forward to fall foliage. There was plenty to celebrate this month:

Places to visit

Butterflies at Botanical Garden of the Ozarks (in Fayetteville). Celebrated finally seeing some of the larger butterflies although it was in Arkansas rather than at home.

A few hours at the Lovett Pinetum. The place is not a park…requires some coordination to visit. I visited as part of my Identifying Woody Plants class (Missouri State University) and celebrated the evergreens…but also the native plants that are growing in the unmanaged areas. There is also a lovely spring feed pond and then stream.

Japanese festival at the Springfield Botanical Gardens. Celebrating big drums and the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden full of people enjoying the fall day. We got ice matcha tea just before the booth was scheduled to close!

La Petite Prairie field trip. Celebrating the experience of walking through a prairie with grass almost as tall as me for the first time….and not getting bitten by anything (maybe because of my permethrin treated gaiters and hat…long sleeves and jeans).

Family ties

Finding puzzles for Dad. Finally…found a used books/puzzles sale that had some 300 piece puzzles. Celebrated and took them down to Dallas for my dad a few days later.

Around our yard

A cooler day. September had some hot days…but there are cooler ones where the high stays in the 70s to celebrate too.

Getting the yard mowed and the brush burning in the chiminea. I celebrated that I got so much yard work done on one of the cooler days…mowed the whole yard and burned a pile of brush that had accumulated during the summer.

Collecting pin oak acorns to sprout. Celebrating finding a video about sprouting acrons in water and starting the process with some carefully selected acorns from my neighbor’s tree that fell in my yard.

Planting pawpaw seeds. So many seeds from 2 pawpaws I got from an earlier master naturalist class! This time I stratified them before planting. I am celebrating that I got them in the ground…and hopefully will celebrate some of them coming up next spring/summer.

American Spikenard seeds turning red. Celebrating that the American Spikenard I planted a year ago has survived and is producing red seeds this September.

CSA Bounty – September 2020

Fabulous fall veggies. Our shares have been full of them all month.

This week we got

• The last of the tomatoes (green) which I have ripening near the kitchen window,

• The first butternut squash and sweet potatoes (both on the large side),

• Maybe the last of the shishito peppers (I picked a few snacking peppers in the cutting garden),

• And the fall staples of potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, garlic, hot peppers, and kale.

I love the orange veggies (squash and sweet potatoes) and will probably use them for custards or hearty soups…although I like sweet potatoes grated and used in salads and stir fries (as I would carrots). I might have to cook them and then freeze portion sizes since their size is overwhelming to eat in one week!

I cut stevia in the cutting garden and have it drying on the counter. I’ll use it to sweeten pots of hot tea – maybe I’ll have enough to use for the remainder of 2020.

There were still a few flowers – more on those in another post.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Sweeping acorns and oak leaves. The driveway was covered again. I noticed a squirrel sniffing the acorns and maybe taking a few….there are way too many acorns to rely on the squirrels to do the clean up! I swept the driveway and then the gutter in the street which filled the wheelbarrow. The load made a nice addition to my compost pile (lots of browns to overwhelm the few ‘green’ kitchen scraps I have.

I am discovering joy in everyday activities….that might be considered chores. The clear driveway plus the knowledge that I’ve kept the acorns and twigs from clogging the storm drain are two positives for the day!

September sunrise. I always do the grocery shopping early and this time I was on my way to the store before sunrise. I stopped at the CSA turn out to take a picture. It was a great way to start the day.

Mini-clover. The clover is filling in the bare spots in the yard and is still short enough that the mower doesn’t touch it. So far – it had worked better than our attempts to overseed with grass seed. We’ll see what happens over the winter. I hope we’ll still have enough warm days that it will grow a bit more and be firmly established before the first frost.

Capturing Moments

There are always things to notice…and we are often carrying around something (phone or small camera) that can capture the moment. Here are some recent nature captures:

At the car dealership while I waited for my car after its service…I photographed the flowers in urns with my phone; the water droplets on the big leaves were left from the rain earlier in the morning.

My attention was captured most by the flowers that had dropped and always to land upside down with there stems pointed skyward. They must have been knocked off by the rain.

Next - I was walking down the driveway when I spied something round in the driveway. I went back to the house for my small camera. Once I looked more closely, I realized it was an crushed acorn that had stayed together rather than scattering into pieces. It still had the cap (on the bottom)!

The blue jays come to our deck frequently, but I hadn’t ever seen them on the feeder. There is a reason….the roost are too close together for the birds (see how the bird is ducking and can’t perch on the roost normally) and their weight is enough to partially close the openings where the seed is available. This bird did get a few seeds but flew away and didn’t return!

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Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Cocoon. One of my oldest pieces of clothing is a ‘cocoon’ I made back 1985. I use it during the change in season when it’s too cool to go without a wrap but then warms up and I want something that lets in more air…then off and folded up neatly. It is made of gray cotton fleece. Its current dimensions are 19.5” x 62” – probably stretched out over the years. The construction is two French seams (narrow dimension) with an arm hole left on the fold end. It’s a semi-structured blanket!

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And then a folded under hem of around the edges. I used red thread to break the monotony of the gray fleece.

It folds neatly making it easy to carry and pack. It’s something I wear frequently enough to keep even though it is about 35 years old since I remember making it in the fall!

First day of autumn. It was 40 degrees this morning…very autumn like. The oak and sycamore are dropping leaves, but the tulip poplars and maples are still very green. We have a lot of acorns on the driveway that I need to sweep up and take back to the forest.

Mid-Atlantic Climate Change Education Conference – Day 1

The Mid-Atlantic Climate Change Education Conference (MACCEC) was a conference that went virtual because of the pandemic.  I anticipated that it would be an intense 4 hours in from of my computer. I set up to use both of my screens – one for the WebEx and one for note taking/agenda/etc. Initially, I thought I might use a headset for the audio but quickly decided that 4 hours was too long for that. I also thought that I might get up and move around more during the sessions, but I was too busy interacting with polls and chat…and taking notes. I only got up and moved during the breaks!

Now that it is the ‘morning after,” I’ve had some hours to digest what happened on the first day. It was overwhelming at times while it was happening – and in a different way than an in-person conference is overwhelming. The flow of chat during the presentation is often invigorating but also distracting. It requires multi-tasking. Sometimes I tuned it out to focus on the presenter entirely.

Like most conferences, the speakers were often rushed so that we could stay in the time windows on the agenda. The charts were posted which made up for the rush somewhat…but not completely.

There were breakout sessions that ended up having some similarities with in-person conferences since one time I got lost for about a minute…couldn’t find my session!

The big take aways from the first day were:

• information is out there for climate change educators…choosing what works best for their situation

• education on climate change is interlinked with JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion)

• always get to solutions…don’t stop with defining the problems

The ice-breaker activity was to determine the native inhabitant of land where participants were located using the https://native-land.ca/ website. I learned that where I live is Piscataway land. Where my daughter lives in Springfield MO is Kickapoo, Osage, and Sioux land. The land where my parents and sisters live in Texas (Carrollton, Flower Mound, and Sherman) was Kickapoo and Wichita land. Got us all thinking about how the land, water and air have changed since then…what we can and should restore.

Unique activities for yesterday:

Deer found the day lilies. The deer ate many of the day lily buds in the past few days. I am cutting a few every day as they manage to mature enough to bloom indoors.

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I found one already blooming under the milkweed this morning – a different variety than I had cut before. The stalk was shorter which probably helped it escape deer notice. Other buds are hiding in the same way…and I hope they will remain for few more days until they are ready to be cut.

Oak shedding acorns. Our oak tree dropped quite a few immature acorns on our driveway in the past few days. There are so many…. not many left on the tree to mature over the summer.

Flowerbeds in the Morning – Part 1

I was out early on a morning that started out in the 70s – to do a little work in the front flowerbeds. I got sidetracked by some of the vegetation and did some photography before I got any work done.

There are a few clover plants. I leave them although I am often tempted to eat them. Supposedly they are edible from root to blossom! I’m letting them go to seed and hope that they’ll grow amongst the day lilies again next year.

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The wild strawberries have grown better than usual this year. They cover the area near the down spout from the gutter. They’ve even crowded out the mint that used to grow in that space….and the horse nettles are not growing there this year either.

I did notice some black berry vines against the wall of the garage. They are wild and only produce tiny berries….and the thorns are bad. I pulled/cut them.

I left the Virginia creeper climbing up to the brick for now. When it gets to the window level, I’ll cut it. It looks artsy at this point….in the mottled light.

The milkweed is up but is late blooming this year because of the odd May temperatures. I haven’t seen any monarch butterflies yet this year or any evidence that the milkweed plants are being eaten by anything…not even aphids (yet). There are some with curled leaves which I’ll probably cut down in an effort to keep the rest of my milkweed patch healthy in the event that the Monarchs come and need the plant for egg laying/caterpillars.

But the best discovery of the morning was that the day lilies are blooming…and the deer have not even nibbled in the area (in previous years we’d be on our second wave of day lily leaves and the bud stalks would be chomped)! I cut two stalks with open flowers and large buds to take inside.

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Tomorrow’s post will feature the small critters I discovered….and managed to photograph.

Unique activities for yesterday:

Mowing the yard – finding a baby oak.  The grass is growing fast with the combination of warmer temperatures and periodic rain. We waited a day or so since the last rain. The dew was dry by about 9:30 when we started. There is one place that stays wet in our backyard – where the extra water from our neighbor’s sump pump runs down the slope from their yard into ours. The grass is very lush there and – so far – seems to be thriving with the extra moisture and not too damaged by being mowed when it is wet. I noticed an oak seedling and pulled it out so I could photography it rather than mow over it. Part of the root did not come out of the ground, but the acorn did! If I were doing pre-school field trips, this would be an excellent specimen to share with the children.

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Overall – my husband and I were mowing/working for about an hour. He did more of the mowing this time and I trimmed low hanging branches from the plum, maple, and tulip poplar. There is still one low branch on our cherry tree that I almost always manage to hit (with my head) and it is too large to cut without endangering the balance of the tree.

Kenilworth Gardens – Other Stuff

Of course – lotuses, water lilies, buttonbushes and dragonflies were not the only things to see at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens last weekend. Even in the island of garden in the parking lot there were things to see. The most interesting (to me), were some tiny acorns on a lower branch of an oak

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And a blue jay that seemed very acclimated to people.

I didn’t spend much time on the boardwalk out to the river but was there long enough to capture a sleepy duck.

There were some colorful canna leaves in the morning sun and

A gall on one of the trees with shelf fungus make it look something like a face (with a few too many eyes and eye brows!).

The showy flowers of the rose mallow seemed to be everywhere. I love the flowers with their deep red centers but maybe the tightly wrapped petal in bud form are ever more interesting. Enjoy the mallow slide show below!