Valley Water Mill Park

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I finally managed to walk the trail around Valley Water Mill Lake just before Thanksgiving. It was my 3rd time at the park; the first time was with my Identifying Woody Plants class and the 2nd was on a very rainy day to learn about what kind of volunteers they needed. This 3rd time was on a dry but cloudy day in the 40s. Most of the fall color was gone but there was still plenty to see. I was a little rushed because my husband was using the hike for exercise while I wanted to slow down and take pictures!

The honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) pods were frequently on the trail….and it was easy to spot the trees with thorns!

The coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) was still beautiful along the trail. The berries require some freeze-thaw cycles to become palatable to birds.

The other color in understory was burning bush (Euonymus alatus)– a non-native invasive that is popular in landscaping. I looked at the stems to be sure that is what it was….they have corky wings. There is also wintercreeper (Euonymus fortune) in the park. Both are very difficult to eradicate.

I was on the lookout for fungus too but was rushed enough to see only the most obvious. There was a cut end of a log that has shelf fungus around the outer edge…and some that looked a lot like meringue on another.

Most of the oak leaves were brown and crackly…an occasional one still colorful.

There were a lot of leaves on the ground. Most of the time the trail has been swept clear by the wind but there were drifts of leaves everywhere.

I photographed two exposed roots. One that was close to the trail and displaying the impact of being stepped on. The other looked more like the soil has been eroded from the base of the tree – maybe during a flood; the tree was not that far from the riverbank.

Next time I go to Valley Water Mill I want to plan to spend a bit longer….explore a bit more thoroughly!

Identifying Woody Plants – Month 3

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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)

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.

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

Busiek State Forest and Wildlife Area

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A sunny fall day…the Identifying Woody Plants Class spent a couple of hours at Busiek State Forest and Wildlife Area – adding 9 more woody plants to our list and seeing others that were already on the list and we practised our ID skills for them; there are now 78 woody plants that we should recognize and be able to supply the common name, family, and scientific name!

We encountered an Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) – a tree we’d seen in previous classes - that had leaves that hadn’t fallen before the first hard frost. All of us began to realize how changed identification was going to be without leaves on the trees!

The first new one was Box Elder (Acer negundo) – the only maple with compound leaves. ID is helped by its green branches.

The second new tree was Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) – still with leaves and one I had seen recently in a Missouri Master Naturalist field trip. The picture I took was of a male but there were female trees with red fruit that we saw at Busiek.

 American Sycamores (Platanus occidentalis) were growing along the dry creek bed…another tree that we reviewed. The very large leaves were still mostly on the tree.

The third new tree was the Carolina willow (Salix caroliniana)…also growing close the dry creek bed. Its leaves are a little bigger that the Black Willow’s…and the stipules tend to stay on rather than falling off. It still had leaves…everyone realized it was a willow of some kind.

I couldn’t resist taking some pictures from the dried creek bed. The fall color is a bit muted this year because it has been so dry here. I noticed some wasp apartments on one of the bridge support columns.

Another review tree – the honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthus) – and I finally got some pictures of thorns. I also picked up a seed pod to put in the tree educational trunk I am creating for Missouri Master Naturalist.

The fourth new tree was the Chinkapin oak (Quercus meuhlenbergii). I didn’t get any good pictures of it!

The same was true of the fifth new plant – a vine: Greenbrier (Smilax). Supposedly it might be something that will be easier to see and ID in the winter because the stems stay green….and the thorns would be on the vine too – to mistaking it for a grape (Vitis).

Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) was the sixth addition for the day. The plants did not have the distinctive seed heads because they tend to get cut down frequently so that they don’t take over the area where they are growing.

Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) was our seventh new plant. The fruits looked beautiful, but no one was willing to try them quite yet. I am glad I have planted some in my yard and hope to enjoy them at perfect ripeness in the future.

The eighth new plant was a native woody grass/bamboo: giant cane (Arundinaria gigantea).

The ninth (and last) new plant for the day was an Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoides). Most of the leaves were gone…but the one we looked at was a huge tree with deeply grooved bark and buds ready to go for next spring.

It was a good walk and a transition point for the way we will begin to identify trees by characteristics other than their leaves.

Winter Tree Identification – Part 1

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Leaves are an easy first step to identifying a tree…but not in the winter. Other identifying characteristics come to the fore. I’ve collected up some photos from the past few winters and will show the ones I find easy to identify even in the winter. Do you recognize the white barked trees that grow near rivers and have round seeds that often stay on the tree during the winter?

The sycamores are common in our area and are easier to spot in the winter than in the summer when their big leaves sometimes hide the whiteness of their branches.

They are only one of the trees that have distinctive bark. Others are spicebush (it can be a bush or understory tree) and beech below. They both have relative smooth bark. The spicebush is speckled with light colored lenticels.

Both the sycamore and river birch have peeling bark.

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Sometime thorns can be an identifying characteristic – like with the honey locust.

The bald cypress is the only conifer I’m including in this post since it sheds its needles for the winter. It is easy to recognize by its shape and the presence of knees…and that it likes wet areas.

The dogwoods have distinctive buds. Sometimes they are described as onion-shaped. They look more like slightly flattened Hershey’s kisses to me!

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