Kids in the Woods

I'll be 70 next month.  I guess that makes me officially an old lady.  But whenever I'm wandering the woods with my friends in the Thursday Naturalists (some of whom are a good deal older than me), I feel like a kid again.  And I think my friends do, too, since they sure have a lot of fun, bringing a marvelous sense of childlike wonder to what they find in nature.

They sure know a lot of great places to botanize, too, and this Thursday they took me with them to a place that a New York Chief Botanist once called the richest wildflower site in the entire state -- Joralemon Park, in a limestone-rich area about 15 miles south of Albany.

This was the third time I've visited Joralemon Park, and I do believe that this site is becoming ever more endangered because of the masses of Garlic Mustard that have infested the woods, creating severe competition for many of the native plants -- some of them quite rare -- that once thrived in this limestone-rich woods.

Happily, many native plants are holding their own for the time being, such as this vividly colored Wild Columbine.

The woody plants also seemed to be barely threatened by the alien invasion, and I was delighted to find American Bladdernut fully in bloom.

This is a shrub that I rarely find in Saratoga County, especially now, since the groundskeepers at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs cut all their bladdernut shrubs to the ground to install security lighting.   I felt almost sick when I found them destroyed, since I know of no other place in the county to find them.  I'm sure the people who did it had no idea of the rarity of those shrubs.



After exploring the western side of the Joralemon preserve, we next headed across the road to our lunchtime destination, a series of limestone ledges that overlook a beaver pond.  Here we sat to enjoy a picnic while watching Tree Swallows swoop and dive over the water.

A labyrinth of caves underlies the ledges we sat on, and while examining the opening of one of these caves, our friend Win discovered a large pile of bear scat, indicating that a bear had likely holed up for the winter inside that cave.

This part of the preserve appeared to be free of the Garlic Mustard infestation, for Miterwort and violets covered the forest floor instead.

A highly unusual low-growing shrub called Creeping Shadblow hung over the ledges, and we were delighted to find it still in bloom.

We were also delighted to find Fragrant Sumac now in bloom, although the leaves (which are indeed fragrant) had yet to emerge.

Carpeting the rocks where we sat to picnic were sprawling patches of a rare "fern ally" called Selaginella rupestris.   Although this mossy-looking plant is also called by the common name of Rock Spike Moss, it is more closely related to ferns than mosses.

Clinging to the sides of the ledges was another highly unusual plant called Purple Cliff Brake (Pellaea atropurpurea).  Although this photo doesn't show them well, this small fern of sunny calcareous rocks has dark purple hairy stalks.

Purple Cliff Brake bears its sporangia along the inrolled margins of its pinnules, and I did manage to capture a photo of that.

I was also happy to capture in a photo the little red glands that stud the petioles of Black Cherry leaves, a distinctive feature of most cherry species.  I would have thought they were some kind of gall, but my friend Ruth Schottman, a walking encyclopedia of botanical knowledge and a longtime member of the Thursday Naturalists, informed me that these little red bumps were a normal part of healthy trees, perhaps serving as decoys to prevent ants or other destructive insects from attacking the fruit.

That's one of the great things about joining this friendly and extremely knowledgeable group of friends on their nature walks.  There's almost always somebody who can answer any question I may have.  Even if I didn't know enough to ask it.

Another Adventure with Ed

Ed Miller's a native-plant enthusiast of great renown throughout the Albany/Adirondack region, a man of exhaustive botanical knowledge to whom many professional botanists turn when they want to know what grows where. A few posts back I recounted our trip to the Landis Arboretum, where Ed has almost single-handedly created a collection of New York native woody plants. Today, Ed took me to another of his remarkable spots: Joralemon Park in Coeymans, NY, a small town south of Albany. Adjoining this community park is a nature preserve that a former state chief botanist once called the best area he knew of for its botanical riches. Thanks to Ed's generosity (he personally put up the funds for the Nature Conservancy to purchase the land), this wooded area with a limestone substrate is now protected from further development.

The place reminded me a lot of the Skidmore woods, which has a similar limestoney soil and many of the same plants, including such rarities as Green Violet, Goldenseal, and Ginseng. One plant I've never found at Skidmore, though, is Virginia Waterleaf, which was growing abundantly in the Joralemon preserve. As was true for most of the woodland flowers, the waterleaf was long past its blooming time and was now bearing fruit.

One of the very few deep-woods blossoming plants was Lopseed, a flower I have never been able to photograph clearly, because it's so tiny and grows where the shade is so dark. A little sun filtered in to light up this one, but even so, it's not as clear as I'd like. The plant gets its name from its blossoms' habit of turning down to cling to the stalk when they form their seeds.

We found a large patch of Wild Leeks, a plant I found earlier this year up north in Warren County. Its deliciously edible leaves, also called Ramps, have long withered away so that all that remains by now are the flower stalks, going to seed.

This cluster of Harebells was crowning a limestone cliff overhanging an open marsh, the water below completely covered with several shades of green duckweeds. The spindly-stemmed Harebell normally grows as isolated individuals. I have never before seen it gather together into such a large clump.

Those limestone cliffs yielded many more remarkable botanical treasures. We found Creeping Shadblow and Fragrant Sumac (two shrubs I have never seen before in the wild) and many species of mosses and ferns. I was very glad to have Ed as my guide as we scoured the rocks, for he could point out to me many plants of interest, such as this tiny asplenium fern called Wall-rue. I'm certain I would never have seen it if Ed had not pointed it out. The whole clump was maybe two to three inches across.

That Wall-rue was a sure sign that the underlying rock was calcium rich, since it requires that nutrient for its very existence. The same could be said for a number of other ferns we found, such as Bulblet Fern, Fragile Fern, Walking Fern, Maidenhair Spleenwort, and the Ebony Spleenwort pictured here, so slender and gracefully curving.

I assumed this furry, spiky stuff was a moss, but Ed most kindly corrected my misunderstanding, explaining that this Rock Spikemoss (Selaginella rupestris) was more closely related to ferns than it was to mosses.

I won't go into the complicated botanical explanation -- it has something to do with it having a true vascular system, which mosses don't have and ferns do. Ed also had me look into its greenery with my magnifier to detect minute specks of bright yellow spores, another feature of the spikemoss's structure that sets it apart from regular mosses.

When I go on adventures like this one, with wonderfully knowledgeable folks like Ed, I become so aware of how much I still have to learn about the botanical riches that surround us. But I am also struck by how kind most plant-people are to students like me, how eager they are to share what they know with folks who express an interest. Thanks so much, Ed. I had a wonderful time.