The 21st Century Matriarch

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

Continuing the posts about our hike at Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens in Washington DC…today the topic is everything I noticed other than the lotuses and dragonflies.

I looked for a shelf fungus on one the trees near the entrance that I’d seen over several years. It was gone but there was some pancake looking fungus patches on one of the high branches!

There were other flowers blooming:

2021 06 IMG_4745 (2).jpg — Pickerel Weed. In past years it attracted tiger swallowtail butterflies. I didn’t see any in the gardens this year.

Hibiscus. Not as many as in previous years. This one was growing at the edge of one of the ponds.

Water lilies. There were none of the giant lily pads that have been at Kenilworth in previous years and some of the ponds usually filled with water lilies were open water…but there were enough for a few pictures.

Button bush. Again – not as many as I remembered. I wondered what happened to them since it seems like they would be durable along the pond edges from year to year.

Trumpet vine. A robust native. My mother planted one in the 1960s in a corner of our back yard and then battled it with pruners to keep it from deconstructing the fence.

We walked on the boardwalk out to the mash and river. I was hoping to see herons but didn’t spot any.

At the very end there was a tree with lots of seeds growing in the loop of the boardwalk. It looks like a tree of heaven….a non-native and very invasive. I was surprised that it had not been cut down.