In three more days, Fern’s Market at Serenbe will close. I have been dropping by most every day, for coffee and conversation. Somehow there are moments of puns and laughter amid the sadness. I think of Fern’s often on my Piney Woods Church Road walk. From this evening’s saunter, here are two more ferns for Fern’s.
A massive old tulip poplar, partially dead and bearing a lightning scar, is currently blooming in a cattle pasture along Piney Woods Church Road. I confess that I had never before seen the tulip poplar blossoms on the tree — only later, as scattered petals fallen onto the grass. The creamy yellow-white and brilliant orange flowers are lovely to behold.
I include, from today’s walk, a photo of a greenbrier leaf in the afternoon sunshine, growing on the road bank near where Piney Woods Church Road intersects with Rico Road. I was drawn to the way the light made the leaf glow.
The blooms of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) are long past now, but the trees still bring beauty to my walk. In this image, a lone dogwood leaf glows in the early morning sunlight.
The leaves of a sourwood sapling glow in the late-afternoon sunlight along Piney Woods Church Road.
With today’s project, I reach a third of the way through a year along Piney Woods Church Road. I continue to feel immense gratitude that there is so much that is wondrous yet to discover on my journey. Lately, I have become entranced with the play of light. Late this afternoon, I set out with my wife and our four small dogs on a walk there, my expectations tempered by a mostly cloudy sky. As we walked, though, the sunlight emerged and lit the woods and pastures ablaze with yellow-gold. In this photo, the leaves of this greenbrier are glowing brightly, as if caught up in a dance of light.
A couple of days ago, I photographed this plant with tiny yellow flowers (less than half an inch across), flourishing in a ditch along Piney Woods Church Road. I have held off posting it, pending an identification. After poring over several wildflower guides, to no avail, I put the task to my Plant Identification Facebook group. Wow, how helpful everyone was! After several suggestions from others and a bit more research on my own, I am fairly confident that this plant is Southern Ragwort (Packera anonyma), a perennial native herb. Traditionally used by Native Americans to prevent pregnancy and treat heart trouble, the plant contains toxins and therefore should be used medicinally only with extreme caution.
After overnight rain, I set out down Piney Woods Church Road, noticing how the flow of water was already changing the newly-graded road surface, forming shallow channels where the water flowed, and excavating new potholes (or exhuming old ones?). One particular tulip poplar leaf caught my attention. On its underside were perched several minute water droplets, like temporary worlds. I saw a tiny black form swimming in one of the droplets; I suspect that a microscope would reveal many more.
As spring advances, the observant naturalist notices an array of flowers coming into bloom along roadsides and forest paths. One flower blooming now that is easily missed belongs to a leafy vine that should not be overlooked: poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans). Few of our native plants have as black a reputation as this member of the cashew family, frequently encountered along forest edges, roadsides, and in other disturbed areas. After all, how many other native plants are the subject of rhymes about their dangers? “Leaflets three / let them be.”
Certainly poison ivy’s reputation is, to some extent, richly deserved. Unless you happen to belong to the twenty percent or so of the population that can handle poison ivy plants with impunity, contact with them can have memorable but unpleasant consequences. Poison ivy’s shiny leaves and hairy vines both contain an oily sap, urushiol, which can penetrate the skin and provoke an allergic reaction that produces a rash, blisters, intense itchiness, and general misery. Some people are so sensitive to this allergen that merely coming into close proximity with poison ivy may be enough to have an effect.
But with respect for those so severely afflicted, poison ivy is actually a highly beneficial plant for our native wildlife. Strangely enough, humans appear to be almost its only animal victims. White-tailed deer actually forage preferentially on poison ivy leaves. But birds are the main beneficiaries. Woodpeckers, flickers, grouse, pheasants, bobwhites, and warblers are all drawn to poison ivy’s small, spherical, tan fruits in the fall and winter. The seeds pass through these birds’ digestive tracts, helping to spread poison ivy far and wide. To aid in its own dispersal, poison ivy practices foliar fruit flagging, a technique also used by flowering dogwood. In the autumn, poison ivy leaves turn to blazing shades of red and gold. This bright coloration signals to the birds that food is available.
This early in the year, though, poison ivy sports bright-green, shiny leaves. Beneath the leaves hang panicles (dense, branching clusters) of minute, greenish-white flowers. In close-up photographs (such as the one available about halfway down on the left on this page), the minute flowers with their five petals forming a star and their white and yellow pistils and stamens look almost elegant. But to appreciate them under a hand lens requires putting the hands, arms, and face at too great a risk to be worthwhile, in this writer’s opinion.
A hardy survivor, poison ivy spreads not only by seeds, but vegetatively as well. The vines that appear to be hairy are, in fact, covered with rootlets, ready to take hold of a tree trunk or burrow into the soil. Considering its predilection for covering extensive ground, this writer confesses to eying the plant with suspicion when encountering it in the yard, despite its benefits to deer and songbirds. But inevitably, it is easiest to let a few vines be, provided they not overstep their bounds. After all, poison ivy is here to stay.
In fact, recent studies of forest plant response to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels indicate that it leads to a significant increase in poison ivy growth — on the order of 150 percent. This result is known as the “carbon dioxide fertilization effect.” Accompanying that surge, it appears that the increased carbon dioxide also enables the poison ivy to produce a more virulent strain of urushiol, leading to worse allergic reactions than are presently experienced. At least we can look forward to the day when the poison ivy begins to choke out our invasive plant species — kudzu, privet, honeysuckle, wisteria, and others. That is some small consolation, perhaps, at least for the die-hard naturalists out there.
This article was originally published on May 2, 2010.
My afternoon walk down Piney Woods Church Road was an experience in letting go. The road has been regraded — it is wider than ever before, and all the potholes and ruts are, for now, absent. Along the roadside, it seemed as if everyone with a mower was out in force this weekend. What was yesterday morning a sea of self-heal weeds along the road was, today, just a band of short grass with a couple of self-heal remaining that somehow escaped the blade. The air was close and the sky gray, but not a gray that betokened the arrival of dramatic weather yet (on Tuesday, though, quite possibly). I was in the grips of a head cold, my first illness since ten days in a hospital with pneumonia last September. And there was practically nothing to photograph.
I settled, at last, for this image, conveying well the transience of all things. A fallen petal of flowering dogwood rests on a Chinese wisteria leaf. The dogwood and wisteria are both past blooming now.
