Bud scales & the most adorable leaf ever

What: The forest is mostly green now that all the buds have opened or are opening. While out in Centennial Woods the other day I was collecting leaves of all different sizes from Norway maple (Acer platanoides). Like other maples, the scales on Norway maple buds open and form these elongate leaves that subtend the normal leaves (seen as the plus sign in the photo below). Buds are made out of modified leaves and these are deciduous once the normal leaves (there's probably a technical name for these) are more fully developed.

Something must have gotten messed up somewhere along the way on one of the branches I was looking at. It appeared that the bud scale decided that it was going to get back to its roots and form a leaf. In the photo above, the mini leaf was actually attached to the tip of the bud scale leaf.

Shrubs bursting

What: Leaves on Red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa), Tartarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tartarica), and Black cherry (Prunus serotina), respectively, bursting.

Ecological notes: Trees in the understory are often the first to leaf out. They risk hard frosts (like that 19 degree night we had the other day) in order to photosynthesize before the canopy trees leaf out. As a generalization, larger trees can store more energy relative to body size so they have a little more of a buffer on how long they can overwinter, plus they're in prime real estate during the summer to make for lost time photosynthesizing.

Where: All over Burlington the green is starting to return. First in the grasses and celandine poppies, then in the shrubs. By now the ostrich fern is starting to pop up as are the wild leeks.

Other notes: Already I've seen blossoms on red elderberries (at Red Rocks in South Burlington). My ornamental elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) haven't put out flowers yet and the emerging leaves do not have the same reddish tinge to them as the wild ones do. The red is caused by the same pigments that make the leaves red in the fall (non-photosynthetic vacuolar pigments called anthocyanins). It's possible that these require little energy investment chlorophyll takes lots of energy to produce) and the plant can produce the structural part of leaves initially and then chlorophyll once the fear of frost is reduced.