Look-Alikes: Tree of Heaven

How to distinguish the fast speading invasive tree of heaven from similar looking trees?

Jewel Weed Lessons

This article, by Dick Fisher, first appeared in WildfloraRI, Winter 2022

As the natural forces of the world escalate with strong wind, drought, floods and the like, it is comforting to experience a gentler side, one which has persisted continually for millennia. It would be difficult to find a more fragile relationship than the hummingbird/ jewelweed bond. Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), a native annual, precariously dangles its flower, bouncing with the breeze, on a string two centimeters long. The hummingbird, its chief pollinator, hovers fleetingly to access nectar in an elegant midair dance.

Jewelweed prefers wet areas near streams or boggy areas, where it will grow up to five feet tall with succulent hollow stems.  It will grow in drier areas or respond to drought conditions by being proportionally shorter. Flowers are produced all summer from the axils of alternate leaves along a zigzag stem. The leaves have coarsely serrated margins and are covered with fine hairs that shed water. The orange- yellow flowers are cone-shaped with a terminal spur and hang on a two- to three-centimeter stalk. The flower develops from three petals and three sepals into a horn-shaped nectar sac. A knob of five anthers forms above it. In what has been called ‘tandem ripening’ the anthers release pollen for just 24 hours and then are shed. To prevent self-pollination the pistol then forms and receives pollen for just four hours. It’s another type of special dance, this time to promote generic diversity. In addition to hummingbirds, bees, butterflies, and hawkmoths have been noted as pollinators.

Being an annual, jewelweed has to do it all in one season: grow, develop reproductive organs, become pollinated, and mature and scatter its seeds to prepare to begin the process anew each year. Unlike perennials, which can wait out the winter with underground root systems, annual plants must be able to produce and germinate viable seed year after year.

Jewelweed has developed some instructive ways to bolster sustainability, and we can just hope they will be enough to adapt to the changing environment. Its fertilized ovum becomes a one-centimeter long dangling slender pod containing three to five seeds. When ripe, if the stalk is touched, it will suddenly split open, flinging the seeds far and wide, which accounts for one of its common names: ‘touch- me-not.’ The seeds are covered with a thin capsule, which when rubbed off, reveals the shiny blue seed; hence, the other common name, ‘jewelweed.’ The seeds germinate in April and May, producing a thick colony of new plants. The duration of seed viability has been reported to be short, so how long they will remain in the seed bank to bridge stressful years is in question.

But jewelweed has an important adaptation to unfavorable conditions such as we have seen during the dry summer of 2022. That is cleistogamy, a mechanism by which flowers under stressful conditions do not fully form but remain closed and are able to self-pollinate to produce viable seed. This saves the plants valuable energy since they produce only a small amount of pollen and no nectar. The inconspicuous blossoms form on the lower portions of the plant in the leaf axils. Jewelweed uses this trick when conditions are dry or if the plant has been cut back or grazed.

There are two species of jewelweed in the Northeast: Impatiens capensis Meerb, spotted jewelweed, which is orange with reddish-orange spots, and I. padilla Nutt., or pale jewelweed, which has yellow blossoms and is found in more shaded areas. They have an overlapping range and share pollinators, but it is thought that their pollen is incompatible and so they remain genetically distinct. There is currently an iNaturalist citizen science project underway to determine the comparative range of the two species. I. capensis seems to dominate in this area, and the descriptions here are from those populations. Medicinal properties are attributed to the liquid sap from the succulent stems, which is claimed, when applied to the skin, to reduce the itch from poison ivy, nettle, eczema and hives, and to treat fungal infestations in feet. A concoction including crushed flower buds mixed with rum is claimed to treat open wounds and burns.

There were three populations of spotted jewelweed growing in damper areas of our small property, which were doing wonderfully in 2019. During the dry summer of 2020 one of the populations withered in mid-summer and did not obviously flower. I don’t know if cleistogamous flowers were present but in the wet summer of 2021, this population did not return; the others did. During this past very dry summer of 2022, that population again did not return while the other two started out looking normal but faded in mid-summer with few if any blossoms. One population, although looking sparse, has produced some seed pods and the mid-September rains might be helping. It will be interesting to follow jewelweed populations as the drought/ flood climate pattern continues, to determine if jewelweed’s safety systems will be enough to sustain it and the multiple organisms it supports.

Will it be the canary?

 

References

Capon, Brian. 2005. Botany for Gardeners.,Timber Press, Portland, OR.

Del Tredici, Peter. 2010. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Kaczmarek, Frank. 2009. New England Wildflowers., The Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, CT.

Moerman, Daniel E. 1998. Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press, Portland, OR.

Schottman, Ruth. 1998. Trailside Notes: A naturalist’s companion to Adirondack plants. Adirondack Mountain Club, Lake George, NY.

Great Swamp Botanizing Walk – Revisit August 2022

RIWPS Great Swamp Field Trip 16 August 2022 Beth Dickson Seventeen plant enthusiasts joined Anne Wagner and Kathy Barton to explore the Great Swamp on August 20, 2022, following the same path taken earlier in the spring (see earlier blog).

In Praise of Mosses

This article, written by Bruce Fellman , first appeared in WildforaRI, Spring 2022.
Photos also by Bruce Fellman

Common Fern Moss (Thuidium delicatulum) resembles a lacy fern growing on logs.

Every spring, a peculiar ailment strikes all aficionados of the green and, however grudging, growing world. You won’t find the diagnosis in any medical textbook, but what I’d call—I, too suffer from this—botanical early-itis is definitely real. Sufferers have been known to leave family, friends, and respectable jobs on the merest possibility of finding the soul-restoring first blossom of the earliest blooming wildflower, and while I’m not immune to the siren song of the skunk cabbages, hepaticas, sedges, or bloodroots, wildlings that rival garden-variety crocuses, hellebores, snowdrops, and aconites in the floral debut department, I’ve discovered a way to keep my botanical spirits up even in the flowerless days of the bleakest midwinter.

I speak, of course, about mosses, those ubiquitous but easily overlooked organisms whose ancestors were among the first bits of greenery to colonize the land. Mosses, which lack seeds, flowers, and the plumbing systems characteristic of familiar vascular plants, have been around for at least 400 million years and predate the arrival of land animals. By any measure, bryophytes, which include mosses, liverworts, and hornworts, are biological success stories, so why are they so often passed over by plant lovers?

“Mosses are hard,” explains Brian Maynard, professor of plant sciences at the University of Rhode Island and, for the past seven years, the primary instructor of URI’s legendary field botany course. “This is a group of plants that are all around us and are really important ecologically. But though we walk by them every day, most people, including, at one time, me, pay almost no attention to them.”

Worldwide, there are at least 12,000 species, and in the Northeast, certainly in excess of several hundred different mosses. But in his field course, Brian gave them short shrift and only highlighted one species, the common haircap moss (Polytrichum commune).

A weeklong, total immersion summer tutorial in sedge identification and ecology at Maine’s famous Eagle Hill Institute began to alter the scientist’s vascular-plant-centric purview. “That experience opened my eyes to all the plants that normally don’t get taught in field botany,” he told me, one spring- like day in February, as we headed into URI’s North Woods on a mossing expedition. “I realized that the small stuff I was overlooking was really special and worth learning, too.”

The following year, Brian went back to Eagle Hill to take the moss course being taught by the legendary bryologists Jerry Jenkins and Sue Williams. “That changed my whole view of the world,” he said.

So Brian took the plunge and invested in the right stuff that every dedicated mosser needs: the field guides written by Karl McKnight and company, Ralph Pope, Jerry Jenkins, and Sue Williams; achromatic 7X, 10X, and 20X hand lenses (all of them available locally, through ASC Scientific, a geological equipment supplier in Narragansett);a stereo dissecting microscope and a compound scope, along with slides, cover slips, a pair of fine-tipped forceps—”the kind used for removing deer ticks,” said Brian—a bottle of water; and the ability to get down on your hands and knees, or, as Sue Williams is fond of saying, “assume the position.” (If age and arthritis make this difficult, Brian suggests using Pentax Papilio II close-focus binoculars.)

There are numerous other resources, such as those available for free through Jerry Jenkins’s Northern Forest Atlas site (northernforestatlas.org), which features his stunning macro photography, and Michigan Tech moss expert Janice Glime’s five- volume eBook, Bryophyte Ecology (digitalcommons.mtu.edu/bryophyte- ecology/). The truly dedicated will comb used bookstores for affordable copies of moss pioneer Howard Crum’s pricey 1981 masterpiece, Mosses of Eastern North America, and everyone should everyone have Robin Wall Kimmerer’s compelling collection of bryophyte-centered essays, Gathering Moss, close to heart and the nightstand. “It’s a fantastic read,” said Brian. “Kimmerer helps us understand why we should care.”

The book provides a thorough and thoroughly lyrical explanation of bryophyte natural history, including the clearest view of that critical concept, alien territory for those of us only familiar with seed and flower-bearing vascular plants, of the alternation of generations, in which the moss divides its identity between a vegetative gametophyte and a spore- dispensing sporophyte.

Perhaps the book’s most valuable lesson, however, is the author’s emphasis on giving nature a close read. “Just at the limits of ordinary perception lies another level in the hierarchy of beauty, of leaves as tiny and perfectly ordered as a snowflake, of unseen lives complex and beautiful,” Kimmerer writes. “All it takes is attention and knowing how to look.”

With that mosser’s mantra as our guide, Brian and I, our magnifying loues rattling, combed the forest’s typical collection of habitats—rock walls, boulders, stumps, rotten logs, tree trunks, and wetlands—for the variety of species our experience told us we’d find. What can often be dismissed as a monoculture of green becomes, to the better-trained eye, a dazzling array of Lilliputian biodiversity, a forest in miniature. Indeed, Kimmerer likens it to “a complex tapestry, a brocaded surface of intricate pattern” in which “the ‘moss’ is many different mosses, of widely divergent forms. There are fronds like miniature ferns, wefts like ostrich plumes, and shining tufts like the silky hair of a baby.”

Ulota Moss (Ulota hutchinsiae) growing on non-calcareous rocks

Fern moss (Thuidium delicatulum). Brocade moss (Hypnum imponens). Broom moss (Dicranum spp.). Rock tuft moss (Ulota hutchinsiae). Tree trunk moss (Anomodon rostratus). And, alongside a stream, a number of different kinds of peat mosses (Sphagnum spp.). “When people look at mosses as impossible to learn, I always tell them, look at where they grow,” Brian explained. “Habitat narrows down your possibilities.”

So do their growth habits, from the cushion forms known collectively as acrocarps, to the branching mosses that grow in sheets, a.k.a., the pleurocarps. And those broad categories are, of course, just the beginning. “Mosses have so much to tell us,” Brian said. Get out there, in any season, and start listening

 

 

Great Swamp Botanizing Walk on the First Day of Spring 2022

On a sunny Sunday that was also the first day of spring, I led a RIWPS group on a walk in the wetlands of the Great Swamp. It had rained the day before and dense fog lingered into the morning.

Spreading Like…What?

Every spring I look forward to seeing the whitish patches that start creeping across open grassy areas. No, it’s not the last of the snow, but a tiny, very light blue flower known by a variety of names.

Bees and Meadow Bottle Gentians

One unexpected delight this September has been discovering the meadow bottle gentian, or gentiana clausa. Its deep violet flowers don’t open, remaining clusters of plump oval buds (I’ve seen as many as 22 on a single stem). Because the flowers stay closed, only “strong bees” can pollinate them.

June orchids

On June 3, 2009, Fran Under wood and I explored a bog in northern RI. We found Arethusa (Arethusa bulbosa—State endangered) an orchid that blooms in early June.

Walking open trails

In our wilder areas, spring bloomers open their petals to the sun, a welcome reminder of the inexorable cycle of nature, at least as long as there are wild places for them.

Spring sightings

Spring is an exciting time to be in woodlands because a lot is happening on the forest floor – in plain sight! That’s when the herbaceous layer gets unimpeded, warming sunlight, and when I can’t wait to get into my woods every morning to see “what’s up” – fiddleheads uncurling, spring flowers emerging, mystery plants appearing, planted species surviving, and old-faithfuls spreading.