Good Friends and Rare Flowers

Sometimes I marvel at how different my life would be without computers and the internet.  Importantly, I'd never have met this smiling naturalist pictured below, Ellen Rathbone, if I hadn't found her internet blog, An Adirondack Naturalist, way back in 2008.  It was her fascinating and informative blog that inspired me to start this blog of my own in January of 2009, and through our interactions following and commenting on each other's blogs, we became great friends and not-infrequent nature adventurers together while we still lived within a do-able drive of one another.  Sadly, she eventually moved too far away for further in-person adventuring, but we still kept in touch through Facebook. And it was my recent Facebook post about some very rare plants at Moreau Lake State Park that inspired her to contact me.  She was heading my way this past Thursday, and might we go look for those rare plants together at Moreau? Oh, indeed we certainly could! And that's how Ellen came to be sitting right next to one of New York State's rarest wildflowers,  Pringle's Autumn Coralroot (Corallorhiza odontorhiza var. pringlei), a native orchid long rated as Extirpated from New York State until a friend and I discovered it here in this park over five years ago.

Lucky for the two of us, I'd had an advance group of pals who came ahead and scouted out the best patch of Pringle's Autumn Coralroots, so Ellen and I could head directly there and not waste time  searching futilely.  Here are Sue and Dana and Tom and Ruth (with Ellen and camera in the background), when we later enjoyed more botanizing together to look for additional interesting plants.

Pringle's Autumn Coralroot is not exactly a showy wildflower.  There are probably a dozen or more in this photo of the site we visited this day, but their minute size and obscure coloration render them nearly invisible on the leaf-strewn forest floor. I am grateful that my friends pre-scouted them out for us!  Around 30 individual stems were counted today in this vicinity.

Here's a flash photo of a nice group of Pringle's Autumn Coralroots, with the flash helping the individual plants stand out against the background.  The common variety of the plant called Autumn Coralroot is hardly rare, so what distinguishes this variety as the super-rare one?  The most obvious clue would be that most of the florets have a curving and broad lower petal.  Our common variety rarely has any petals at all, and if it does, they are more narrowly pointed.

Here's a closer look at one of the florets of Pringle's Autumn Coralroot, displaying the open throat that clearly reveals the pollen-bearing organs (called pollinia) within. The florets of the common variety do not open at all and are closed and self pollinating. There are some structural differences in the interior reproductive organs as well, which professional botanists have determined to be present in this population of coralroots.  So these are indeed the real deal!

We next moved on to search for a second really rare plant, a wee little flatsedge called Small-flowered Dwarf Bulrush (Cyperus subsquarrosus) that grows on this sandy shore of Moreau Lake.  Although this plant is rated as Endangered in New York State, we have found thousands of them growing on nearly every shore around the entire lake. But this particular shore was the one closest to us today.

And sure enough, we found them!  They are so small, though, they'd certainly be easy to miss.  The distinguishing features, in addition to their small size, include vaguely curving stems of a slightly grayish-green color and scaly spikelets that are chubby and round.

I feel a special affection for this Small-flowered Dwarf Bulrush, since I was present and assisting state botanist Rich Ring when we first found them here back in 2018, after this species had not been reported from this location since 1961.  

Rich Ring had actually come to Moreau that day back in 2018 to assess the population of another plant, the Small-flowered Agalinis (Agalinis paupercula), rated as Rare in the state despite teeming numbers that thrived along Moreau's shores.  This pretty wildflower is still designated as Rare in New York State, although it still grows abundantly on Moreau Lake's shores. We found a number of its lovely purple short-petioled blooms today.

More beautiful purple flowers!  Could New England Aster really be blooming so early?  If these flowers had not been so deeply and intensely purple, I might have thought they belonged to a Purple-stemmed Aster instead, especially with those hairy red stems.  But my friend Ruth looked at the underside bracts and discovered glandular droplets on them, a distinguishing trait of New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae).  The bee was not picky about which aster it was, anyway.

Here was a new one to find at Moreau Lake!  In all the decades I've walked the shores of this lake, I had never before seen Water Stargrass (Heteranthera dubia) spreading its tangles of narrow green leaves and bright flowers in the shallow water near the shores.  But here it was, blooming with bright yellow star-shaped blooms, in the muddy shallows beneath a bridge.

I couldn't remember seeing Wild Celery (Vallisneria americana) here in the lake before, either (although I do find it often in the nearby Hudson River).  But sure enough, I did see the slender leaves, squiggly stems, and tiny white floating female flowers of this native aquatic plant in the flowing water near the bridge.

Here's a closer look at one of the Wild Celery's female flowers, which those squiggly stems hold exactly at the surface of the water.  The male flowers ripen down underwater at the base of the plant, floating up to the surface when mature to float along with the current until they encounter a female flower, and tumble in to complete the fertilization process.  Once that is accomplished, those squiggly stems sharply recoil and plant the fertilized flower down into the underwater mud, there to produce a new generation.

I frequently see the female flowers of Wild Celery floating on the surface, but I have always assumed the male flowers were too tiny for normal eyesight to discern.  But today I discovered I was mistaken about that.

"Gosh, what are all these tiny white nubbins collected on this Wild Celery leaf?" Ellen mused.  She took their photo, submitted it to iNaturalist, and was told they were Eelgrass flowers.  (Eelgrass is another vernacular name for Wild Celery.) "Nah, can't be!" I rejoined, thinking of the female flowers I knew well.

But then I lifted a few out of the water and looked more closely at the tiny whitish nubbins. I then asked Ellen to find on her smartphone a photo of the male flowers of Vallisneria americana. And guess what those male flowers looked like.  Just like these!

Thanks for helping me learn a new flower, Ellen.  She was happy to have added a number of new flowers to her life list today.  And thanks to her, so was I!