Making the Most of No Winter

My snowshoes are still in the attic.  My Yaktrax wait in the trunk of my car.  I'm one of those oddball folks who really loves winter, and here it is, January, and what little snow we've had is long gone, and the beautiful ice that formed on the lake now lies watery along the shore.  Sigh!  But lucky me, I have some pals who know how to make the most of whatever the weather may be, and we got together yesterday to walk in Cole's Woods in downtown Glens Falls.  Here we are -- Dana, Sue, Noel, and Tom, with me behind -- setting off on soft frost-free ground through the rising mists of the morning's fog.

We always like to greet winter's evergreen plants, like this pretty little red-berried plant called Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens). This miniature prostrate woody shrub carpets the forest floor at Cole's Woods and is gorgeous in every season, whether in bloom or in fruit or simply in glossy-green leaves.

I know of no other location than Cole's Woods to find thousands of Pipsissewa plants (Chimaphila umbellata) thriving en masse, and the glossy green leaves still look as fresh as ever, despite several freezing days.

Many species of evergreen clubmosses thrive in this woods, including this Blue Fan Clubmoss (Diphasiastrum tristachyum), distinguished from other Diphasiastrum species more by its deep-lying underground runners than by any detectable blue cast to its leaves.

The dried husks of summer-blooming flowers can also have their charms,  like these wispy little three-pointed baskets that once held the seeds of Blue Curls (Trichostema dichotomum) and look as if they were made of sheer organdy.

The Mint-family plant called Heal-all (Prunella vulgaris) bears sturdy spikes of blue-purple flowers when blooming, and even after the florets have fallen, the plant presents an impressive appearance.

Here's one of the rarest plants to thrive in Cole's Woods, a Threatened species called Green Rock Cress (Borodinia missouriensis), and we could recognize it even now by its long arching seedpods.

Ah, but if you're looking for botanical entertainment in the winter woods, there's no better place to look than the myriad fallen trunks that populate the forest floor.  Mosses! Lichens! Liverworts! Fungi! Slime Molds! These damp and debarked rotting logs support them all!

Various species of Cladonia lichens (including the red-bonneted C. cristatella otherwise known as British Soldiers) vie for space on this patch of rotting wood.

Among another equally varied patch of lichens we found this truly spiky-topped one.  We were not sure, but iNaturalist suggested it might be the one called Organ-pipe Lichen (Cladonia crispata).

This next log was decorated with a beautiful green patch of what looked like Broom Moss (Dicranum sp.) sharing its patch of decorticated wood with rows of the translucent  Orange Jelly Fungus (Dacrymyces palmatus).

These wee little dots of orange jelly could be the newborn-baby version of that same Orange Jelly Fungus.  Or something else.  Even if I don't know their true name, I thought they were awfully cute!

We found many whitish, vaguely striped shelf fungi that from the top rather resembled faded specimens of Turkey Tail, although some had gills instead of pores on their fertile surfaces. But this one was so obviously furry, what else could it be but the aptly named Hairy Polypore (Trametes hirsuta)?

And the fertile surface certainly was made up of pores and not gills. So I'm sticking with Hairy Polypore unless someone more expert than I am tells me otherwise.

I am pretty sure this bright-orange, thin-fleshed, wavy fungus is the one called Crowded Parchment (Stereum complicatum), a very common and colorful fungal denizen of the winter woods.

Here was another Stereum species of fungus, this one called Silky Parchment (Stereum striatum).  I thought it looked more like fish scales than parchment, myself.  This one prefers to grow on American Hornbeam limbs, and there certainly were many American Hornbeam trees (also called Ironwood) growing nearby.

The backside of this patch of Silky Parchment revealed how the caps of this fungus are known to fuse together.

I was pleased to find one of my favorite fungi, one that we can find all winter long growing on fallen limbs and rotting tree trunks. Its pale-vanilla rumpled caps crowd together in overlapping clusters, and the surface of the caps looks rather dry and grainy, reminding me of flour-dusted piecrust. Nothing about this rather plain-looking mushroom suggests its bright-sounding name: Luminescent Panellus (Panellus stipticus).

When I turned a cap over, the frilly orange gills radiating from an off-center stem were a telling clue to this fungus's identity, but they still didn't suggest one of the most fascinating traits of this fungus and how it might have been dubbed with a name like "luminescent." No, I would have to come back at night, and then in pitch dark I might make out its greenish glow.  For this is one of those mushrooms known to glow in the dark!

If you Google "Panellus stipticus" you will find many photos of this mushroom glowing an eerie green in the dark, like this one I found:

Here was another fungus I immediately recognize on sight, small and ruffly, with some of its caramel-striped caps edged with marshmallow white.

The undersides of these caramel-colored overlapping caps reveal the distinctively crinkled gills that suggested this fungus's vernacular name,  the Crimped-gill Fungus (Plicaturopsis crispa).  Gorgeous!

Here was a fungus I'd never seen before and probably wouldn't have noticed at all if Sue hadn't pointed it out. Very tiny, with whitish, globular, wet-looking orbs on thin black stalks.  Sue found a name for this -- Holwaya mucida -- on iNaturalist, although most of the images of it found on that site and on Google  show it in its sexually active form, as a floppy black disc.   Now that I've seen this once, I wonder if I will ever notice it again, in either of its forms.  It continues to amaze me, how much remains to be found, even in places I've explored again and again over many years.

Here was one last organism we found thriving on downed wood,  this one a slime mold called Hemitrichia clavata. I recognized it from a photo in my George Barron's mushroom guide, Mushrooms of Northeast North America, in his chapter on slime molds.  Slime molds are NOT fungi, as Barron explains, although they do produce spores as fungi do.  That fuzzy yellow stuff protruding from glossy yellow cones are the spores in this case.

This cluster of Hemitrichia clavata was truly tiny, and despite its bright color I might have missed it if better eyes than mine hadn't seen it first.  How lucky I am to have such friends to enjoy our natural world with, as informed, experienced, and eager to learn as they are delightful companions.