Outside My Window

Happy Halloween!   Here’s a selection of witchy things to celebrate the day.

Witches hat mushroom (Hygrophorus conicus) (photo by Dave Powell, USDA Forest Service, from Bugwood.org), common in the forest at this time of year.

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Witch-hazel trees are blooming now in Schenley Park (photo by Dianne Machesney).

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Witches Butter fungus (Tremella mesenterica) (photo by Gerald Holmes, Valent USA Corporation, Bugwood.org).  Its gelatinous fruiting body feels greasy or slimy when damp.  Eeeewwwww!

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Witches brooms in a hackberry tree (photo by Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org).  Witches brooms are ugly but don’t kill the tree.  They’re so common in hackberries that I use them as a clue to identify the tree in winter.

(see photo credits above)

While perusing the Sibley Guide to Trees (which I quote below) I ran across an amazing name for ginkgos:  Stinkbomb Tree.

The name is new to me but I know how they got it.  In autumn the ginkgo’s fleshy, ripe fruit falls from the female trees and is easily crushed underfoot.  If you step on it you’re sorry.  It’s slippery and smells like vomit.

Ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba) are living fossils from the Triassic, the only plant in their division to survive into the modern age.  Though classified as trees, ginkgos have a lot in common with ferns.  Their fan-shaped leaves have a fern-like vein system.  Each tree is either male or female and the seeds are “fertilized by motile sperm as in cycads, ferns, mosses and algae.”

There are probably no wild ginkgos left on earth but they survived and re-naturalized in Asia because humans cultivated them for their religious and medicinal significance, especially in China.

Ginkgos cope well with pollution and confined root systems so they’re often planted in cities.   How hardy are they?  Six ginkgo trees were the only living things to survive within a 1-2 km radius of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic blast.

Of course that wasn’t known when they chosen to beautify Pittsburgh during our Smoky City days.  Both male and female trees were planted in our city parks in the late 1800s.  Nowadays female ginkgos are often banned because of their “stinkbombs” but we have some on Schenley Drive near Phipps Conservatory and on Highland Drive near Highland Park.

Very soon our ginkgos will turn a beautiful bright yellow and their leaves will fall all at once.  If you time it right, you can stand below a yellow ginkgo on a windless day and the leaves will drop around you like snow.   But watch where you step…

(photo by Aomorikuma via Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free license. Click on the photo to see the original.)

The weather was beautiful last Saturday when I took these pictures in Schenley Park.  Even my little cell phone camera was able to capture the colors.  Here are buckeye leaves turning yellow at eye level.

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Blue sky peeks through the trees.

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Golden leaves and green.  The green leaves are porcelainberry.

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The trails were flooded with light.

(photos by Kate St. John)

With berries this beautiful no wonder the plant was imported.

Porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) is native to China, Korea, Japan and far eastern Russia.  Brought to the U.S. as an ornamental in the 1870′s it grows so well that it’s now invasive in Pennsylvania.

Porcelainberry resembles grapevine except that its stem pith is white, its bark doesn’t peel, and its berries are stunningly beautiful in turquoise, blue and pink.  Birds eat the berries and give the seeds a free ride.

Do nothing and you’ll soon have porcelainberry in your garden.

Want to see it up close?  Visit Schenley Park.

The berries are worth it.

(photo by Jonathan Nadle)

On my way to somewhere else on the Internet I found…

Rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) is a shrubby perennial in the Aster family native to the arid North American West.  It’s a hardy plant that thrives in poor conditions, sending down deep roots even in coarse and alkaline soil. I’m sure I’ve seen it in Nevada but it wasn’t blooming at the time.

For most of the year rubber rabbitbrush — also called chamisa or gray rabbitbrush — looks a lot like sagebrush but in the late summer and fall it produces clusters of pungent-smelling yellow flowers that light up the landscape.  Pungent is probably a kind word for the smell.  Some compare it to the smell of a wet armpit.  Bees like it, though.

Its names fascinate me.

• “Rubber” comes from the rubber content of its sap which was studied as an alternate source of rubber during World War II.  The idea didn’t catch on.
• “Rabbitbrush” could mean  that rabbits eat it — and some probably do — but for the most part its forage for deer and antelope.  What do rabbits do with it?  Perhaps they hide under it.
• The word “nausea” sticks to this plant even after a name change from Chrysothamnus nauseosus to Ericameria nauseosa.  Apparently nauseosa is another way to describe its smell.

But what really caught my eye was the fact that in one valley in New Mexico these plants are radioactive.

As mentioned above, rubber rabbitbrush will grow in poor soil and send down deep roots.  In Bajo Valley near Los Alamos there’s an old nuclear waste dump.   Years after the area closed, rubber rabbitbrush grows above it and those particular shrubs are radioactive.

According to Wikipedia, “Their roots reach into a closed nuclear waste treatment area, mistaking strontium [strontium-90] for calcium due to its similar chemical properties.  The radioactive shrubs are “indistinguishable from other shrubs without a Geiger counter.”

This is happens to humans too.  Our bodies mistake strontium for calcium and put it in our bones.  It’s good news when treating osteoporosis with non-radioactive strontium but bad news if your water contains radioactive strontium from industrial, mining or Marcellus shale drilling waste.

When in doubt, test your water.

But don’t worry about radioactive bushes.  You’d have to go to Bajo Valley, New Mexico to find them.

(photo by Walt Siegmund, GNU Free License via Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original.)

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p.s. On Monday October 31 at 7:30pm, WQED will broadcast Managing Marcellus, an unusual look at Marcellus issues through the lens of a locally-produced play, its performers, and their real-life counterparts.

Here’s another flower that blooms in the fall.

Bottle Gentian or Closed Gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) is found in moist meadows in the southern half of Pennsylvania.  I usually find it near the lake at Moraine State Park. This one is from Marcy Cunkelman’s garden last month.

The flower is fascinating because it’s closed so tightly that small insects can’t get inside.  Only bumblebees can force their way in to sip the nectar.

Occasionally an insect will bypass the closed tips by drilling straight into the base of the flower.  Alas.  This mars its intense blue petals.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

We often think of orchids as rare tropical plants that grow on trees.  Did you know we have quite a selection of them in Pennsylvania? 

The Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania‘s Wildflowers of Pennsylvania illustrates 37 species in our state.  But don’t look for them in the trees.  Our orchids are terrestrial.

One of them is Nodding Ladies’ Tresses (Spiranthes cernua) and it’s blooming right now.  According to Wildflowers of Pennsylvania, “Nodding Ladies’ Tresses is usually found as colonies in marshy fields, wet meadows and ditches throughout Pennsylvania.”  

Dianne and Bob Machesney found this one at Moraine State Park last Sunday.  ”We found 57, in groups of one, two or three, along a half mile trail in a strip mined area, reclaimed with pines.”

The photo above is a close-up of the flower spike; the whole plant is shown below.

Look for Pennsylvania’s orchids and you’ll find gems close to home.

(photos by Dianne Machesney)

Lady cardinals like their guys to be colorful.  They prefer mates with the brightest red plumage because the color means he’s well fed, healthy, and has a good territory.

The cardinal’s color comes from carotenoids in the food he eats so it has been a good breeding cue for females.  But a two-year study in Ohio by OSU’s Amanda Rodewald and colleagues shows this cue is a trap in stands of Amur honeysuckle. 

Amur or bush honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) is a shrub native to Asia that was planted in North America for its beauty and to control erosion.  Unfortunately it takes over rural landscapes, forming dense stands that shade out native species.  It’s invasive in Pennsylvania.

Amur honeysuckle berries provide good food and carotenoids for cardinals but the shrub is a gilded trap.  The OSU study found that nests built in it are more likely to be raided and those who choose to nest in it have few surviving offspring.

They found this to be true in rural landscapes but not in urban settings where bird feeders provide supplemental food and predators have a wide selection of things to eat other than cardinal babies.

Ultimately the low success of bright red males in Amur honeysuckle landscapes may cause rural cardinals to become duller red because only the dull guys have successful nests.

Just another reason to hate Amur honeysuckle.

(photo by Steve Gosser)

October is a good time of year to see wood glow in the dark. 

The phenomenon is called foxfire and is most often caused by the honey mushroom (Armillaria mellea), native to eastern North America.

Armillaria mellea feeds primarily on hardwood and is most often noticed when it produces fruit — the mushrooms.  Mushrooms are similar in function to apples.  There’s a big plant structure that produces apples, but in the case of honey mushrooms you can’t see the “plant” until it glows.

The glowing comes from its rhizomorphs that look like long, black bootlaces and grow under the bark of dead trees, downed logs, old roots and stumps.  They also grow on living trees which they eventually kill. 

The faster they grow, the more they glow because their feeding process produces light.  Their bioluminescence is a chemical reaction that’s the opposite of photosynthesis.  The tree they’re consuming used CO₂ + light to produce organic (carbon-based) material + oxygen.  The fungi use luciferin molecules to combine organic material + oxygen to produce CO₂ + light.  Pretty ingenious, eh?

Finding foxfire is problematic, especially for city folks like me.  The light produced is a faint green or blue glow that’s easily swamped by man-made light.

The habitat and weather must cooperate too.  The infected wood has to be damp — not too wet, never dry — and the best temperature is 77^oF though anything above freezing is acceptable.  Summer heat (86^oF+) shuts down bioluminescence which makes autumn, with its early sunsets and cooler temperatures, an optimal time to see it.

I’ve never seen foxfire but that’s no surprise.  I’d have to drive to a very dark place (how far?) and wander in the woods at night looking for a faint glow, hoping I don’t encounter a mammal I don’t want to meet.  Spooky!

Have you seen foxfire?  Where?

(photo of foxfire in Allegany State Park, New York by highlatitude on Flikr, Creative Commons license.  Click on the photo to see the original)

Last month Dianne Machesney found beautiful flowers blooming at Cape May, New Jersey.  This one is Maryland Meadow Beauty (Rhexia mariana), a wetland plant that likes sandy soil.

Rhexia mariana grows as far north as Michigan and Massachusetts but neither of us have seen it in southwestern Pennsylvania.

I’m sure that’s because our area has the wrong habitat … few wetlands and almost no sand.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)