Skidmore Woods, Slim Pickings

I had just an hour or so recently to indulge in some nature therapy, so I headed out to my go-to nearby nature site, the North Woods at Skidmore College.  I wondered if any of the fruits on the Orange-fruited Horse Gentian (Triosteum aurantiacum) would be turning orange already. Here's what they should look like in early September:

But sad to report, I won't find them at ANY stage this year!  Here's the site, under a powerline, where a small patch of them always grew.  Looks like the power company was afraid the herbaceous plants that filled the open spaces under the powerlines might grow tall enough to interfere with the wires. (Pah!) So herbicide was sprayed to kill every native plant that once grew there:  Pale Sunflowers, Tall Goldenrod,  Mayapple, and others including my sought-after Orange-fruited Horse Gentian. Sigh!

Guess what got spared from the poison, though?  This patch of the non-native weed called Far-eastern Smartweed (Persicaria extremiorientalis) growing in an adjacent parking area but under the same powerline. Native to Asia, this species was first collected in North America in New York City in 1961 and has since been documented from Maine to South Carolina and west to Ohio and is probably more widespread than that.  I first found it at this location five years ago, and I have yet to find it anywhere else I explore in Saratoga County. Only here, on the Skidmore College Campus, under a powerline. So far.

My thought when I first found these gigantic smartweeds at the edge of this thoroughly-disturbed-soil vacant lot was "Whoa! Who fed some Ladies' Thumb steroids?!"  They stood on stems up to my eyeballs and with slender pink flower clusters a good eight or ten inches long, and they DID look almost exactly like the much more diminutive smartweed called Ladies' Thumb.  They even had the darkish "thumbprint" on many of the huge leaves. Except the plants were humongous.   The New York Flora Association's Plant Atlas shows this species as documented for only five counties in the state, so far, all of them much farther south than Saratoga County. Uh oh! Looks like this plant is heading north.

 

Leaving the scene of such disappointment, I entered this woods that's renowned for its many interesting native plants, many of them quite rare. One of the rarest of those plants is Eastern Green Violet (Cubelium concolor), and when you see the acres of them that carpet the forest floor here, it's hard to believe that this species could be rated as rare.  It definitely is known to thrive in deep nutrient-rich soils often associated with calcareous bedrock, and that certainly describes the soil in the Skidmore woods.

As I walked among the thousands of Green Violets, I pondered how this plant could be so prolific here, considering that I found very few plants producing seed pods.  And those pods were solitary, growing at the top of the plant, not in the leaf axils along the  stalks, where the small greenish flowers earlier bloomed.

Each seedpod appeared to contain just a few small round seeds that looked like tiny peas in a pod.

Another wildflower that thrives in this calcareous soil is American Lopseed (Phryma leptostachya).  Its small pink flowers had long since produced the yellowish pointed seedpods that pressed downward against the slender stems, demonstrating how the vernacular name for this plant originated.

I could find few other flowering plants still in bloom, but Bottlebrush Grass (Elymus hystrix) was abundant in the shady woods, its yellowish spiky seedheads quite evident.

Taking a shortcut through the woods back to my car, I never would have seen this tiny spider, a female Spined Micrathena (Micrathena gracilis), if a ray of sunlight had not penetrated the shade of the woods to illuminate her little spiky shape astride an amazingly long strand of web strung between two trees.  The remarkable shape of her abdomen has suggested another of her vernacular names, Castleback Orbweaver.