About 3 weeks ago I pruned some of the fruit trees in my backyard. I took branches from peach, cherry, and plum inside to force. The first cherry blossoms opened as soon as I got to DC! I set out a camera to try and catch a time lapse of the second set of flower buds opening. The branch had three sets of flower buds on it and they opened in sequence from outer most (distal) to the buds closest to the trunk (proximal).
Here's what I learned from my first attempt at capturing a time lapse of a flower opening:
Get your framing right! I should have left space on either side of the flower and then used a batch edit to crop all the photos. Instead the bottom flower opened and exited the frame!
Use an artificial light source and block outside light as much as possible. The street lights kept going on and off and altering the lighting on the flower. Also, as the sun came up it threw off the lighting even more.
Use the manual aperture and shutter speed settings on the camera to get the exposure constant. The flickering in the video was from minor adjustments because the light meter kept vacillating at f11 between 1/20 and1/25.
Time intervals. I set the camera to take images at 5 minute intervals and that seemed to work just fine. I used Microsoft Movie Maker to piece them together and set the image timing at 1/10 second.
Use a tripod. I didn't bring mine with me so I wound up having to jerryrig one out of an old olive oil container. It shifted slightly and had I needed to replace the batteries it would have thrown the framing off.
Leaf scars have personality. No doubt about it. With a nice little bonnet, top hat, or beehive hair do to cap off a gnomish face, each monster marches a terrifying procession along the length of their twigs. These tiny monsters grin out at the unsuspecting world. And lo, a peripatetic naturalist pauses to discover their intricate world. Sam and I spent some time asking these trees what their names were and boy were we discovered. Each face is a leaf scar, the outline of where the stalk of a leaf connects to twig. The dots and features that give the face its facey-ness collectively form the vascular bundles, which are composed of xylem and phloem (imagine cutting a celery stalk in cross section).
(Black locust) Marrowzodufia Blugly the Dwarf
(Butternut) Pompuzador the bonnet keeper of spiggetiezi
(Yellow birch) Joy Doom Happy Stacks
(Cottonwood) Mark Buntly of the Broofing Haws
(Common buckthorn) Ronald the Masked Parasitic Jubilee
(Slippery elm) Squirky Bunkles
(Staghorn sumac) Salwall Dimlar the Jay Slorper
(Sugar maple) Starky Cusperbun
(Lilac) Ralphez the woggly-eyed lime top
(Black cherry) ZanKiffle Waffletragedy, aka ZK Waffles in the forests of Burlington
(American beech) Qwayzar Dalooskie
(Bitternut hickory) Ahab Dilbous-Bannister, Purveyor of Simple Fun
(Quaking aspen) Emperor Mewslies of Nostralias
(White ash) The Honorable Wide Collared Professor Kitten Anderson
(Witch-hazel) Slippy Ghoul Grin aka Barbara Butterfields aka Babs Buttfiel
I've so enjoyed watching all the buds leaf out this year. Each species has its own way of opening up to the warm spring weather - they unfurl, burst, surreptitiously emerge, bolt, elongate, crack, pop, and slither open. What a joy to watch.
It's been a while since I've posted and I've wanted to get back in the habit for a while. My friend, Clay, was in town visiting and we took advantage of the delightful snow for a winter wander. I brought my camera along and took a few pictures of the beaver pond that I'll post in the next few days.
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.
What: A short interruption (tomorrow as well for first of the month) on the spring ephemerals to bring you an update on the silver maple bud I've been watching. The leaves on the twig have started to burst open! Also, the flowers have largely been pollinated and are starting the short journey to ripening (they look like purplish mini maple seeds). For more information, see my two previous posts on the silver maple twig.
What: This is a follow up post to one last Friday, where I've been tracking the developments of the silver maple buds outside my window.
Ecological notes: The weather has cooled off a bit and things are reluctantly marching their way indelibly towards spring. I want to give it a big push!
Taken last week
Where: My backyard Other notes: The silver maple has been dubbed one of the wonders of the modern world of Latham Ct. While working the other day I spotted an awesome abundance of birds.
What: Spring is definitely here. The energy of the land has shifted and there's a buzz all around that is singing "Life!" One unfortunate change is that the sap has started to go "buddy" - it has a bitter and unpleasant taste to it. This occurs when the buds swell. Right now, the buds on the silver maple outside my window are completely swollen (all that sap that's been flowing has to go somewhere), and they're about to burst. I'll be tracking this little twig over the coming weeks as it leafs out. You can track leaf burst dates with Project Bud Burst.
What: I just wanted to post a quick photo of a basswood bud. My friend Emily Stone told me a few years back that the buds looked like a mouse wearing a motorcycle helmet. I love that description, and it's definitely evident in the photo. The buds are edible and delicious (though a bit mucilaginous). Emily also taught me that you could eat the young leaves when they open. It's one of the first spring greens to come out and such a wonderful treat to be able to eat.
The little bumps visible on the twig are lenticels, the mouths along the branch. Basswood twigs, like most other species, are photosynthetic. If you peel back the outer bark you can see a thin layer of green tissue. The lenticels provide oxygen and other gases to move back and forth in support of respiration.
What: I've been watching the tamaracks (these are European Larch, Larix decidua) from a distance emerge into spring with this odd yellowish color. These little spur shoots have stacks of rings indicating previous year's growth.
Ecological notes: I climbed the tree to take a photo of the storm clouds dropping rain to the east over the Green Mountains. This patch of 3 larches are part of a larger plantation of trees adjacent to Centennial Field. As such they've got great lower limbs for climbing. I boosted myself up an all too healthy buckthorn and took these photos about 40' up one of the larches. The wind wasn't even that strong today but still made me uneasy - life in the sun ain't that easy (see video for a poor attempt to capture what caused my uneasiness). After about 20 minutes the two crows that I'd seen yesterday with nesting materials flew over and made a ruckus. With my arms hugging the bole like a frightened koala I twisted my head to watch them dip acrobatically down into the valley below. As the crows disappeared I spotted an old nest!! Or a new nest?!
Larch branches seem to break quite readily. In fact the whole tree has this appearance of someone who barely made it out of bed. Snapped branches litter the lower limbs, latent buds burst from every fissure on the bark, the bark turns a dead scraggly gray and flakes readily, and the new growth is a sickly grayish white. Yet it maintains it's own elegance (though certainly, at least to me, this peaks in the fall when it, unique among conifers, drops its needles. And so the crows' shabby little nest blended in perfectly with the dishelved backdrop. But again my mind wandered to the wind. On the edge the trees were like sails, and would be worse once the leaves fully emerged. Crows obviously don't get motion sickness. But imagine the nestlings - in a nest that barely has sides to it - perched up there in a good wind storm.
Where: Most of the larch in the Champlain Valley are plantation European varieties, these being no exception. There's one other European larch that I know of in Centennial Woods and it's a bit bigger than these - though I don't know exactly how old they are.
Other notes: I've found my desire to want to know challenged by my want to experience. While driving home tonight, the sunset was beautiful, and I thought of stopping at Overlook Park and snapping a photo, but didn't. I couldn't imagine trying to explain away the pink fire swallowing the horizon with the physics of light scattering.
And I started this blog in part to confront much of the misinformation about natural history (or at least plagiarism) rampant on the internet. One source quotes an esoteric piece of information from another source and then another source quotes the second, changes the text a bit, drops the citation, posts it and this gets reposted and changed to suit the new author's needs. Pretty quickly the initial attribution is dropped and nobody really knows the original source. Take the etymology of Tamarack (and alias for Larch, more properly applied to L. laricina, our native larch). Tamarack is supposedly a bastardized version of hackmatack, the Abenaki word for "wood good for snowshoes." In this case the original source is Charlotte Erichsen-Brown's 1979 book Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants, and even she doesn't cite her source (I don't have access to Gordon Day's Abenaki Dictionary so I can't verify this).
So now everyone can run around and say, Oh yeah, larch is great for making snow shoes without having actually tried. Hopefully most of what you'll read here is less recapitulation of other people's speculation and more (mis)information that at least comes from first-hand experience.
Ecological notes: I took the above photographs this afternoon around 1 pm in the woods at Shelburne Pond. Although I am not 100% positive I believe the buds to be a Sugar Maple (although I had previously thought Red Maple). The branching is opposite and I found a decent amount of maple leaves blanketing the ground. It was a gloomy day today and I found my eyes shifting to the tiny pops of color in the woods, a reminder that bloom is just around the corner. This particular tree was very young and I studied the buds carefully noticing the beautiful red and green hues. I am amazed how long I have gone in and out forests without really noticing the amazing beauty of one single bud. It really captures all of the feelings of shifting seasons from winter to spring.
Where: Forest at Shelburne Pond
Other notes: Sugar maple is a native species to hardwood forests of North America. It is beautiful during fall foliage and may be best known for . It is common among most types of soils (besides sand) and is the most shade tolerant of large deciduous trees. On young trees, the twigs like the one I have photographed above, are a reddish brown color. As the tree gets older its bark becomes darker and more rough in texture. The fruit of this tree is called a samara, which is an important food source for birds, squirrels, and other rodents. The Sugar Maple is well known for its maple sugar sap which provides us with delicious maple syrup. The earliest written accounts of maple sugaring were made in early 1600s by European explorers who observed Native Americans gathering maple sap. Its bark is often used for furniture and musical instruments like the guitar and violin.
What: Leaves on Red elderberry (Sambucusracemosa), Tartarian honeysuckle (Loniceratartarica), 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.
What: Siberian squill (aka Scilla siberica)is always the first flower to pop up in early spring (last year April 2 they first appeared). This little patch in my backyard actually came up about a two weeks ago (March 17)! The little blue flowers (in the same family as asparagus) are up before most insects, so pollination is done largely by overwintering adults of members of the bee family (and on warm days).
Ecological notes: While this plant has escaped from cultivation, it's still a nice addition to my backyard - telling me when the ground has thawed (I see it around the same time I begin to hear the earthworms crunching the leaves at night). It's also a spring ephemeral, meaning that it's whole life cycle takes place before the trees leaf out. Otherwise it's dormant and spends the rest of spring, summer, and winter as a seed or bulb.
Where: I have sandy soils that seem to accommodate this little guy quite well. They're perennial (like lilies, they have bulbs - not sure if they're edible). Because they rely on insects for pollination I would suspect they rely less on seeds than on vegetative reproduction - a cold spring would mean an absence of flying insects.
Other notes: The leaves seem waxy, but are incredibly week and will yellow pretty quickly if I walk over them. It's name probably derives from the Greek word for the plant (since the word was used in latin to convey shrimp like). The genus is Eurasian, so this plant's name is derived from other similar plants that might more closely resemble shrimp. Maybe the dangling flower was reminescent of some squid-like critter?
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