What do you know about plants?

Photos courtesy Arthur Kruckeberg and Dan Poelma.

It's time for December’s Berry Go Round, a carnival for bloggers who write about plants.  You don't have to be a botanist to participate!  Poets write about plants, photographers take photos of plants, most us eat plants (favorite recipe?), and plants and rocks often are inextricably linked (hint, hint ... I hope some geo-bloggers contribute).

There are several ways to submit posts:

• use the online submission form
• tweet a link with the hashtag #berrygoround
• provide a link in a Comment on this post (below)
• tweet a link to @plantsandrocks
• if you don’t blog yourself, you can email a guest post (text and/or photos) to In the Company of Plants and Rocks, by December 22

The submission deadline is December 26.  I'll post a summary with links to contributions at the end of the month.

Plants on rocks: 

Forest-grassland mosaic dictated by bedrock, Devils Tower, Wyoming.

Plants to rocks:

Petrified Miocene trees, eastern Washington.

Plants in rocks:

Digging up remains of semitropical trees at a Wyoming coal mine.  Source.

Plants in food:

Yucca petals are yummy in salads.

Plants in poetry:

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.

From Aspens by Edward Thomas,

shared by Anne Buchanan of the mermaid’s tale.

The Boys are in Bloom

Spring wildflowers prepare to release pollen ... but why bother?

Hort Log is soliciting posts for April’s Berry Go Round, a blog carnival for plant-minded folks.  The theme is Smelly and/or Ugly Plants.  With winter just now ending, we don't have many candidates aside from leafless trees and the remains of last year’s plants.  So my contribution is about lack-of-beauty -- the drab, inconspicuous, beauty-less male flowers of quaking aspen.

Not a lovely spring bouquet.

Quaking aspen -- Populus tremuloides -- is the most widespread tree species in North America.  It's known for its beautiful white bark and the slender-stemmed leaves that quake in the wind.  Every year many of us head into the mountains to enjoy gold, orange and red aspen leaves glowing in the low light of autumn.  But few people notice the flowers.

Aspen are dioecious -- male and female flowers are borne on different individuals.  Because quaking aspen propagate vegetatively (from root sprouts), an “individual” often is an entire stand, with trees connected underground by a single root system.  Stands can be quite old, on the order of 8000 years or more -- relics of the last glacial retreat (NRCS USDA).

Aspen stands often are giant clones, hence the claim to be the largest plants.

Image from USDA Forest Service.

Male flowers appear early in the season, before the leaves.  They’re borne in catkins that elongate over time.  The catkins in the photos below are from the branch in the photo at the top of the post ... but three weeks later.

Quaking aspen:  2 - male catkins; 3 - female catkins in flower, 4 - in fruit;
5, 6 - male, female flowers.  Image from USDA Forest Service.

Aspen flowers are highly reduced, i.e. many of the normal flower parts are small or missing (click on illustration above for more detail).  There are no sepals nor petals -- just a disc with stamens in the case of the males.  That's enough though.  These guys have everything they need to produce and cast their pollen to the wind.   

A male aspen flower, 1 mm in width (0.04 in).

But there's a problem ... actually several.  Because aspen usually grow in stands of a single sex, pollen has to travel far to land on female flowers.  Even if fertilization takes place and seeds are produced, the likelihood of successful establishment is small.  Aspen seeds are tiny (three million per pound) with no protective coat nor stored food.  If a seed manages to germinate, survival still is iffy because aspen seedlings are so intolerant of drought, requiring constant moisture (the site can't be too wet either).

There was a time when ecology students were taught that aspen rarely if ever reproduce from seed, that most of today’s stands were established during the late Pleistocene and have persisted by vegetative propagation via root sprouts (aka sucker shoots).  But this story -- like so many -- has turned out to be not so simple.  In fact aspen often reproduce by seed in Alaska, northern Canada and eastern North America, where there’s more likely to be habitat with sufficient moisture (USDA NRCS).  Vegetative propagation is the mode of choice in the drier West, but even here aspen will reproduce from seed in the right circumstances.  For example there was widespread establishment of aspen seedlings following the extensive Yellowstone fires of 1988 (Romme et al. 2005).

Above, female aspen flowers (USDA Forest Service).  The gals aren’t any more showy than the guys until the fruit mature and split to release silky-tailed seeds ... little Pollyannas taking flight.

In celebration of national Poem in your Pocket Day last week, Anne Buchanan of The Mermaid’s Tale shared a thoughtful poem about aspen by Edward Thomas.

March Berry Go Round is Here

First wildflowers of spring in the Laramie Basin ... see them? (clicking on the photo might help).

Starting with the big news ... I saw my first wildflowers of the season last week! (always an exciting thing).  Biscuitroot is in full bloom but of course it gets very little attention being so small and drab.  It’s “no real beauty” and has “sordid whitish flowers”.  But if you look close, you might see a colorful green anther hanging out of a tiny flower, sending pollen to some waiting stigma somewhere.

Biscuitroot, aka spring parsley, in morning sunshine; the cluster of tiny flowers is a little more than one cm across.  We have to wait for fruit to figure out which species this is. 

 Click on the photo to see filaments and anthers.

And now ... what everyone has been waiting for ... this month’s Berry Go Round, featuring contributions guaranteed to both entertain and edify.

For an abundance of bright spring color, see Geotripper’s photos of wildflowers in California’s Great Valley and Sierra Nevada foothills -- here, here and here.  In 1868, John Muir was walking east from the Bay Area to “any place that is wild” when he reached Pacheco Pass and discovered ...

“a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld.  At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long ...”

Now of course it's all agriculture, towns and cities.  These photos hint at how spectacular it must have been in Muir’s time.

John Muir as a young man; courtesy National Park Service.

Seeds Aside and I both recommend The Range of Lotus at Catalogue of Organisms.  I had to chuckle when I too fell into the trap of common names.

Seeds Aside submitted several posts as well, including one on the white asphodel, which is pyrophytic (now you’ll have to read it!), and an explanation of the Not Possible yam -- which is a true yam, not one of the impostors of the USA.  Also of interest -- Seeds Aside gathers a batch of interesting posts together each week, most recently here where you will find a link to a post about the other lotus.

Tim of Notes of Nature has done several posts inspired by Danny Chamovitz’s book, What a Plant Knows, including one about Plants and Sight.  Yesterday he provided a nice review of the book -- definitely sounds worth reading.

This month's BGR includes two posts about mountain mahogany (see the plants-and-rocks section below for the second).  In Something with Leaves, Sally at Foothills Fancies explains how nice it is to see something green in a landscape otherwise “bleak and brown” ... alas, the wildflower season is a ways off yet for some of us.

Climate change also cropped up twice.  Susannah of The Modern Forest gives a good example of how difficult it can be to predict vegetation response to climate change.  A forest of long-lived trees may be able to tough it out longer ... but might that actually be a problem for forested landscapes?

Don't miss Cujo359’s careful analysis of spring flowers (specifically those of the CCCT!), Mt. Rainier, the Moon and climate change, over at Slobber And Spittle.  Ah ... the power of science! :-j

Here’s something to ponder ... Jessica of Moss Plants and More has a post about the Jekyll and Hyde nature of plants with their alternation of generations, linking to a recent article in Science about what's behind it all in the genome.  Think about it -- some plants (ferns come to mind) take on very different forms in their sporophyte and gametophyte stages, yet the genome differs only in the number of copies of chromosomes (one vs. two).  In other words, one genome can yield two very different phenotypes (maybe like caterpillars and butterflies?).  What's going on?

My phyto-knowledge was expanded considerably by two posts by The Phytophactor.  Water ferns were only a vague memory from my taxonomy class, not sure why ... they're fascinating plants.  I had never heard of screwpines, which aren’t pines nor do they look like pines -- much more photogenic actually.

This is a fern?  Source.

I wrote about one of the more important 19th-century botanists of the American West, John C. Frémont (what??!!).  Though much better known as a topographer, explorer and dysfunctional military leader, Frémont collected plants on all five of his expeditions for the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers (USA), including 163 novelties, 40 of which were named in his honor.  But was he really a botanist?

Fremont cottonwood against the desert sky in Utah.

Here are a few more gems I found while wandering about the phytoblogosphere:

Bees like caffeine too ... and some flowers take advantage this, explained here at SciLogs.

Botanical illustrations can be so beautiful in a simple elegant black-and-white way ... like this one.  View in full resolution by clicking on the illustration.

Now on to plants and rocks ...

Lockwood of Outside the Interzone found a neat example of a puzzling distribution of plants on the landscape.  It’s all the same stuff on the surface so why do we have ponderosa pine here and here but not here?   Any ideas?  Is it history? was there a localized burn -- did a batch of cones end up in one place but the another?  It just might be differences below surface ... something about plants and rocks ...

Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment submitted a post about one of my favorite nature puzzles, the association of plant species or vegetation types with specific kinds of rock, in this case Mountain Mahogany and Rhyolite.  And you can join her on a Hike near Jarbridge (Nevada) for beautiful views of plants and rocks.

David Bressan at History of Geology posted about a really cool example of plant/rock interaction -- Tiny Plants Creating Big Rocks -- and from an interesting historical perspective.

I found an intriguing post about Bornmuellera baldaccii, a nickel hyperaccumulator.  Might bornmuellera be used to clean up toxic sites, or even serve as a source of nickel?

expression is the need of my soul (archy)

My final recommendation is about blogging in general -- Ask TON:  Why blog? at The Open Notebook.  I often ask myself this very question ...  “Why blog?  It takes a lot of time and energy that you might otherwise spend on higher paid work.  What do you get out of blogging?”  Some excellent bloggers responded with morale-building encouragement, for example from Jennifer of The Artful Amoeba:

“Blogging is an especially good format if you have a distinctive voice or like to use humor.  ... I am bursting with enthusiasm for my subjects, and on my blog, I can convey that in my own voice.”

I especially liked Steve Silberman's reason #7:

“I blog because Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were my literary heroes when I was young, and they launched a world-wide progressive cultural movement called the Beat Generation by printing their inspired poems and stories in “little magazines.” We can only imagine what they would have done with a low-cost global multimedia platform that enables the audience to find YOU.”

PS  Today is April 1 ... Happy Birthday to Sparky, my intrepid nature-geek companion.

Reminder -- Plant Carnival Here Soon!

The deadline for the March Berry Go Round is near.  You can join in the fun by submitting a post via the BGR website (by March 25) or by providing a link as a Comment below before I get the summary post up.  Hope to see you at the Carnival!

"Fun with plant ID" ... by Al F.

Exciting March News!

In the Company of Plants and Rocks is hosting the March Berry Go Round -- please consider joining us at the carnival (details at end of post).  Here's an opportunity to get exposure for your blog, or to try plant blogging if you haven’t already.  And of course ... this is a very exciting time in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.  Spring is not far off.  Have you seen any harbingers?  Let us know!

I found one this morning:

A harbinger of spring -- Easter daisy cushion with young flower heads (white stuff is snow).

Last year, the Easter daisies were in flower by April in the Laramie Basin (southeast Wyoming, USA).  They might be earlier this year.  The flower heads certainly look like they're lusting to bloom!

Easter daisy, Townsendia exscapa.  Heads are less than 1 cm across.

More News!

February's Berry Go Round is up at Foothills Fancies: Bringing you Berries!  Check it out for some excellent phyto-reading.

“Have you posted anything related to plant science lately? Then your post is probably suitable for Berry Go Round” -- see the submissions page for more guidance.  Use the Berry Go Round submission form, or if you prefer, submit a link as a Comment below.

June Berry Go Round

June’s Berry Go Round features seductive plants, misnamed plants, mysterious plants, relic plants, fossil plants, urban plants, sentient plants, ecological inspiration and more. Happy phyto-reading!

My own submissions include a review of an enjoyable and thought-provoking book -- Richard Mabey’s Weeds.  My second offering is an account of a recent stroll through a riparian zone in the rugged Coast Ranges of California, under a canopy of big leaf maples.

Wingtrip tells a story that starts with being distracted by a plant while on an ornithology field trip (good job, little lily! :)  This is a birder’s look at the plant world, with an interesting history of one of the area’s pioneers, Louis F. Henderson -- “grand old man of botany of the pacific northwest”.

Who is your Steve Jobs?   At Ian Lunt’s Ecological Research Site, he writes about ecological restoration and especially inspiration.  Probably all of us have been inspired by these kinds of people ... people who “rocked your boat, flipped your lid, pushed your button, turned you on”.  Might this inspire us to strive to inspire others? to pass it along?  Don’t skip the comments, especially if you are wondering what became of Steve Packard.

Gareth Cook of Scientific American interviews Daniel Chamovitz, author of What a Plant Knows, about similarities between plant and human biology, most notably sensory systems.  Plants see, smell, taste and feel, and they have some of the same neuroreceptors that we have!  So do they communicate? do they think?  Check the post.

Chamovitz himself contributed a post about prickly pear cactus, from his blog The Daily Plant.  This is about the prickly pear’s identity crisis and why “tzabar” may not be the right thing to call your native-born neighbor after all.

Helen McGranahan writes at Suite 101 about moonworts -- the under-appreciated little green goblins hiding in the shrubbery (as Herb Wagner called them).  She covers their natural history, mystical powers, a bit of Botrychium terminology, and symptoms diagnostic of moonwort madness.

Attack of the Moonworts!  Botrychia, tumified by the light of a full moon, sneak up on unsuspecting botanists.
Photos courtesy Cheryl Mayer and Ronn Koeppel.

More fern allies are featured at Writing for Nature -- club mosses (Huperzia and Lycopodium), specifically the Pleistocene relicts that persist in small areas of alpine tundra habitat in Vermont.  WfN gives a good bit of natural history, as well as uses of club mosses ... but really? both flash powder and condoms?!

Continuing with Pleistocene relicts ... Cheryl the rock climbing botanist reports on a botanical discovery in the Black Hills, the sheathed sedge (Carex vaginata), yet another disjunct boreal species.  The Black Hills are famous for these Ice Age holdouts ... well ... famous in certain circles anyway.

Here are a few more cool phyto-things I found recently ...

Wollemi pine; photo by Velela.

The Artful Amoeba (aka Jennifer Frazer) posted about the Wollemi Pine. Talk about discoveries ... this one was radical!

“In 1994, New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service Officer David Noble stumbled on some trees in a canyon in an inaccessible part of Wollemi National Park. He’d never seen anything like them before. Indeed, when he took samples to botanists, they confirmed it was something they’d only ever seen before in the fossil record.”

How were large trees growing just 150 km from Sydney overlooked for so long?  Don’t miss the story of Wollemi pines and other members of the Araucariaceae family, survivors of rifting and drifting of the supercontinent Gondwana.

In Flowers in the Park at Loose and Leafy, Lucy shares a nice collection of photos showing plants’ perspectives on the habitat we share.

I recommend an older post from Christopher Taylor’s Catalogue of Organisms that I just came across: When Ferns Don’t Look Like Ferns. This is an interesting discussion of alternation of generations ... something I learned about as a botany student but had mostly forgotten (and I don’t remember it being particularly interesting). Here’s a chance to stoke your enthusiasm for fern gametophytes.

Left: diagram by Jeffrey Finkelstein (click to view).

Botany Photo of the Day last week featured devil’s matchstick (Pilophorus acicularis), a crustose lichenized fungus with spectacular spore-bearing stalks -- usually over 5 mm tall, wow!  The closer we look at these symbiotic associations the more complex and fascinating we find them to be.  Pilophorus lives not only with an alga but also houses cyanobacteria that fix nitrogen for it.  No wonder it is such an “audacious pioneer”.  From this post I linked to Ways of Enlichenment, which offers keys, floras, distribution maps and more for lichens of western North America.

Finally, did you know of Alan Alda's efforts to improve and promote science education? Last night the PBS Newshour covered his competition for best explanation in response to a science question ... in the opinions of 11-year olds.  Turns out they're good judges.  You can watch the segment and other entertaining footage at science correspondent Miles O’Brien’s blog.

Promoting science in the EU.

Calling all plant geeks

In the Company of Plants and Rocks is hosting June's blog carnival at Berry Go Round, featuring all things botanical.  This is a challenge to geobloggers as well.  The deadline is approaching so get your creative juices going.  Plants, pests, pathology, seeds, weeds, wildflowers, food, fuel, fossils, science, art, music ... the possibilities are endless.

This morning was our first calm one in a week, completely still with nothing to disturb the white decor (aka litter, trash) that had blown in yesterday and now festoons the vegetation along the tracks.  Or is that trash?

No! All those pieces of white plastic actually are evening primroses, still open this morning.

Nuttall's evening primrose, Oenothera nuttalli; flowers ca 2 inches across, with buds above.

4 sepals, 4 petals, 8 stamens and a 4-parted stigma -- must be Onagraceae, the evening primrose family.

June’s Berry Go Round wants you!

It’s June, and In the Company of Plants and Rocks is hosting the monthly plant blog carnival at Berry Go Round.  Don’t run away geobloggers!  This carnival “covers all things botanical”, and there are plenty of geo-phyto convergences, for example --

fossil plants and plant fossils; left: ironwood, Lyonothamnus sp., Miocene


coal and other fossils fuels are made of plants; right: Utah’s State Rock



paleoenvironmental reconstruction; below: western Colorado in the Jurassic, featuring vegetation as well as charismatic megafauna (from Mygatt-Moore Quarry).

Or maybe you have a favorite field food recipe that features plants ... ?


Plant bloggers probably know BGR rules, but as a reminder and for those considering participating for the first time:

“Any kind of post related to plants is accepted, though we tend to reject purely horticultural posts.”

Submit by completing the online submission form.  If for some reason the online form doesn’t work, you can leave a link to your post as a Comment below.  Multiple contributions are fine.