Bloomlist for Aug. 29, 2019

    This week's bloomlist for Wildflower Island is at the end of the post, and Bonnie's pictures
    can be found HERE. Peterson names are used for consistency wherever possible, and comments
    and clarifications are welcome in the comments section.

The Sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) is so gorgeous, though as usual, it's in the lake and you have to look past the fence to see them.

Doing the bloomlist was great today because we got mentored by Charlie Roberto on various butterflies and insects on some of the plants in The Woods. The most exciting thing was the caterpillar of the Spicebush Swallowtail, resembling a small snake (below left). Yummy. It secretes enough sticky stuff to hold a folded leaf of the Spicebush (or in this case, a young Sassafras tree) over on itself for protection. In a previous stage (below right), the caterpillar looks like black bird poop, which is another kind of protection. Not so yummy.

                

Other stages of this caterpillar and the beautiful butterfly it turns into can be seen on this Gardens with Wings webpage. So if you see a leaf on a shrub that seems to be folded over, it's quite possible an insect has pasted itself into the fold for protection.  Neat.

Another picture from the lesson was an example of an "aphid farm," in this case, the Woolly Aphid.

We saw ants and bees actually caring for this stretch of aphids on the branch on the right, behavior explained in Wiki thus:

Some species of ants farm aphids, protecting them on the plants where they are feeding, and consuming the honeydew the aphids release ... a mutualistic relationship, with these dairying ants milking the aphids by stroking them with their antennae.  Although mutualistic, the feeding behavior of aphids is altered by ant attendance. Aphids attended by ants tend to increase the production of honeydew in smaller drops with a greater concentration of amino acids.

Gorgeous photos from Bonnie include the Closed Gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) and the carpets of young Straw-colored Flatsedge in the lake.

This close-up of the New York Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) on the Island captured a couple of Silver-spotted Skippers. 

Rick Bunting just told us about this butterfly in a recent photo newsletter (which you can sign up for by contacting him at the address in the sidebar).


No. 25 on the Island might be Sweet Goldenrod (Solidago odora).  The leaves are not toothed and smell like anise.




I think The Woods may have three or four kinds of Asters, but ID'ing them is a perennial problem for me, and here's why.

The White Wood Aster (Eurybia divaricatus) right has properly stalked, strongly serrated leaves and sparsely rayed flowers, as in Bonnie's picture this week on the right. There's a better picture of the leaf stems here.

Schreber's Aster (Eurybia schreberi), according to Peterson and many other sources, has a broad angular notch on the basal leaves, see below from GoBotany. But GoBotany's pictures of the White Wood Aster leaves (here) have the same kind of broad notching. Is that a mistake?

Then there's what seems to be Lowrie's Aster (Symphyotrichum lowrieanum). Peterson says the wing or flanging on the petiole is distinctive, as in Bonnie's picture below right.

A month ago we thought we were looking at Wavy-leaved Asters (Symphyotrichum undulatum), whose leaves flare out and actually clasp the stem, as in the picture below left from Native Plants of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Peterson puts the Wavy-leaved in the blue section and the Lowrie's in the white. We never saw any true blue asters this whole season.

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Bloomlist for Aug. 8, 15 and 22, 2019

    Aug. 8th's bloomlist for Wildflower Island is at the end of the post, Aug. 15th's is in the
    sidebar. Bonnie's pictures for Aug. 8th HERE, Aug. 15th HERE, Aug. 22nd HERE.
    Peterson names are used for consistency wherever possible, and comments and clarifications
    are welcome in the comments section.  Am away.  Next new post Aug. 29th.

I have to begin with this piece of dramatic art....   I mean, why would one need to see a live dance performance when you can see this beauty out on the Island.

Silk Road Dance

Before coming to the Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) above, a couple of things to mention. Just as you step onto the Island, there's a bunch of Dodder over on the left of the path near the water. A friend of mine wrote me this morning that if I ever thought this plant was boring, I should check out: Dodder: Parasite & Gene Thief Extraordinaire. It's mostly science, but here's the new kernel of surprising info:

Apparently dodder steals more than just water and nutrients from their hosts. They also steal genetic material. 

Here's Bonnie's photo of a colony of it, which I now look at with totally different eyes.

I've given up with the Goldenrod at no. 31 for the moment, but it's not Early Goldenrod. Maybe Elm-leaved, but in the shade not looking as elm-leaved as I'd like it to be.

Am also still having trouble with Joe-Pye-weed.  The plant at no. 27 really looks like the Spotted variety (Eutrochium maculata), but no. 28 (below) has a much paler cluster, a glaucous greenish stem, and doesn't have the black spots, so we put both varieties on the list. This one may just be younger, we'll have to wait and see.

Here's a great close-up of the Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) out in the lake.

Several things caught our eye in The Woods. First, the ants and aphids infesting this new White Snakeroot (Ageratina altissima) in the picture on the left. I thought the white round things were eggs, but virtually the same picture can be found in the picture on the right (at this link), which labels it "ants and aphids."

  

The splendid grass I couldn't identify out by the Bird Blind has continued to bloom beautifully, and I now think it's Sweet Wood-reed (Cinna arundinaceae). Put your hand in that patch and you'll get scratched, but not from this grass. We think it's from the Cutgrass in the same patch, which blooms later into the fall.

I will be away for a couple of weeks, so wanted to let people know that the field of Swamp Rose-mallow at Croton Landing is fully in bloom. This was taken there with a Smartphone, thus the size.....



and below is our first bloom on the island.

Demure,
Fetching,
Perfect.

Ali Express

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Bloomlist for Aug. 1, 2019

    This week's bloomlist for Wildflower Island is at the end of the post, and Bonnie's pictures
    can be found HERE. Peterson names are used for consistency wherever possible, and comments
    and clarifications are welcome in the comments section.

It's that time of the year, again, and here's the first one on the of the season (and on the Island): Early Goldenrod (Solidago juncea). It's identified not only by its general shape — plumelike — but by the tiny leaflets in the axils of the toothless upper leaves. No hairs.

A new one for me (but not for Mary, whose familiarity with the Island goes back decades) is the Seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia), which cropped up in the swamp at no.33. I'm kind of fascinated by the wide sepals and squarish pods, both noted in the Peterson description. There are two good examples of sepals no petals (which have fallen off) in the bottom left of the picture below, and you can see the square seedpod in the center of the picture, to the left of the yellow bloom.

We spent a fair amount of time with the Joe-Pyes today, but I'm only satisfied with some of our conclusions. The Spotted Joe-Pye-weed (Eutrochium maculatum), in Bonnie's picture on the left and no. 27 on the map, is easy: it has black marks on the stem (screenshot on the right from GoBotany). Supposedly, the cluster of this variety is rather flatter than the others.

Here's Bonnie's picture of the other kind we saw, which has a smooth glaucous stem with none of those dark striations. There's one of them at no.28 on the map and in amongst the Herb-Roberts near the upper parking lot. The cluster at the top of this one is more domed. What we were unwilling to do was cut the stem of one of these tall plants to see whether the inside is Hollow JPW (fistulosum) or not, which would lead us more in the direction of Sweet JPW (E. purpureum), but not necessarily ...



With the Goldenrods come the Asters, and the first one we've seen this season might be the Wavy-leaved Aster (Symphyotrichum undulatum), whose leaves have flanged petioles or "dilate into lobes clasping the stem," as Peterson says (see the examples in the right side of the picture below). Some of the leaves have a wavy edge, and some have more toothing than others. I originally thought this might be Lowrie's Aster (S. lowrieanum), but the leaves of the Lowrie's are supposed to be greasy. These are definitely not.

On the left of the Bird Blind boardwalk is a grass that I thought last week was the inflorescence of the Rice Cutgrass (Leersia oryzoides). The Cutgrass is there and continues to be very scratchy, but it's not in bloom. It is totally intermixed with a very smooth grass that is in bloom as you can see in the picture left, but which I can't identify. Just a few feet further on, Bonnie got a cool close-up of the prickly stem of the Halberd-leaved Tearthumb (below).

Lastly, a reminder that you can sign up for Rick Bunting's daily spectacular photos of flora and fauna using the link in the right sidebar. I'm including here a couple of his recent shots of insect camouflages. He swears there's a caterpillar in each one of these blooms:

AMAZING.

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Bloomlist for July 25, 2019

    This week's bloomlist for Wildflower Island is at the end of the post, and Bonnie's pictures
    can be found HERE. Peterson names are used for consistency wherever possible, and comments
    and clarifications are welcome in the comments section.
    Revised a bit below in the discussion of the Cutgrass.

Down the path through The Woods to the gatehouse a tall Common Burdock (Arctium minus), more beautiful the closer you look at it. The Illinois Wildflower webpage says it's a "low-growing rosette of basal leaves during the first year" that becomes 3–6 feet tall the second year. That's where we start with this plant. The pink part of the flower is a mass of disk florets, and unlike daisies and other composites, there aren't any ray florets. White stiles with bifurcated tips protrude from the florets, and the spiny green bulges beneath all that are actually bracts. Their tips are all hooked, which Bonnie was able to catch in the enlarged photo.





Also in The Woods today was the first Tall Bellflower(Campanula americana) we've seen in a long time, if ever. (I've never seen one actually, but I haven't been at this as long as some of the others guides.) It was left of the path just as you enter The Woods from the upper parking lot.

What's neat about this is again the style, which bends downward and away from the flower head ("S-shaped in open flowers," according to Missouri). The stigma has 3 lobes at the tip. Missouri has excellent close-up shots of this plant, including a "vegetative rosette" at the base of the plant (see right), which I unfortunately didn't know to look for today.

The taxonomy seems a little unsettled. Wiki says that USDA and some others think the correct name for this is Campanulastrum americanum, but the last paragraph of the Illinois Wildflowers description indicates two separate species.

The unidentified grass at the Bird Blind for the past couple of weeks (below) is mixed in with Rice Cutgrass (Leersia oryzoides), whose whose leaves are really scratchy and you'd never want to walk through a patch of these unprotected.

You can just about make out the scratchy edges of Cutgrass leaves in the blown-up part of Bonnie's picture above. I don't think the unidentified grass is really "in bloom" yet, as there aren't any white stigmas emerging from the florets, but it's good to keep an eye on it.

In Illinois's picture on the right, you can see a hairy node on the stem and some more of that serration on the edge of the leaf.


We just noticed that Peterson lists two kinds of Purple Loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria and L. virgatum. Ours looks like the former, because all the plants we could get close to today were downy and had sessile leaves wide at the base. Virgatum is smooth, and the leaves are narrower at the base. Yet another thing to look for when you think this is getting easier.

Many of the tiny-flowered plants have now started to bloom, like Clearweed, Dodder, and Halberd-leaved Tearthumb.

And speaking of tiny flowers, there's a few remaining blooms on the Bedstraw at no. 13, which I believe is Rough Bedstraw (Galium asprellum). Earlier this month we thought we had Fragrant Bedstraw in that spot because the plant felt smooth to the touch. The stem and edges of the leaves of the Rough Bedstraw are scratchy, as in the close-up of Bonnie's picture below. But not many flowers today.

Delightful on the Island today were some new American Bur-reeds, which we thought were done for the season. I don't remember them popping up a second time after an initial flowering period of several weeks. Maybe it has more to do with the water level in the lake than the temperature or humidity in the air.


Duckweed (genus Lemna) in veritable carpets today. Its nutritional merits described so well at this link.




And saving the best for last, we loved that the Plumleaf Azalea (Rhododendron prinophyllum) hung in there for us after all its relations decided it was time to get on with things for the year.

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