No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem.

Winter

2011-11-15T13:40:00.003-06:00

Well, we had our first snow of the season here in Madison last week, which means that's probably all for the ferns for this year. The blog will be pretty quiet until the spring, when things start to wake up and there will be fiddleheads to photograph again! There will be big changes for me in the spring, too, as I defend my PhD and graduate from the Botany Department at UW-Madison. You'll hear all about that, and I'm also planning some trips between January and March to California, Arizona, and Colorado, which will hopefully afford some interesting plant stories even while it's still cold in Wisconsin. So please stay tuned for those upcoming posts and any others I can come up with over the cold winter months!

Dryopteris clintoniana

2011-10-10T13:10:00.002-05:00

The final species I needed to measure on this trip was Dryopteris clintoniana; after D. ludoviciana it probably has the next-most-limited range of the North American Dryopteris, but happily it grows just a few miles from my beloved Ithaca, NY, so I never mind going out to visit this one. I've followed this population for several years and it's nice to find that it continues to remain stable at the edge of its little swamp. I did notice as I was measuring this year though, that there were a number of plants with, for lack of a better word, weird fronds.

Here's a plant displaying the horizontal, venetian blind-looking pinnae which this allohexaploid inherited from its maternal progenitor, the tetraploid D. cristata:

And a couple of odd looking individuals:

Dryopteris ludoviciana

2011-10-05T13:03:00.004-05:00

Prior to this last field trip I had only seen Dryopteris ludoviciana in the field once, near Darlington, South Carolina, a couple of years ago, and a major goal of this trip was to find it and measure it. It is the Dryopteris species in North America with the most restricted range, occurring only in the extreme southeast, along the coasts. It is also one of only four diploids involved in the North American reticulate complex, and it is thought to be involved in the parentage, either directly or indirectly, of three of the five allopolyploids in North America. So it was a high priority indeed! Luckily we found a huge, beautiful population of these ferns at the Nature Conservancy's Rocky Hock Swamp Forest Preserve in Hertford, NC, with the help of Raleigh, NC fern enthusiast Jessie Perry. Getting to the plants was no easy feat, and involved a trek across a soybean field followed by hacking our way through a forest - my equipment is many-parted and cumbersome, so in the end I think we were just as glad to be done with these plants as we had been to find them in the first place! It was a great find, though, and I'll remember this population for years to come.

Hertford, South Carolina

2011-09-25T12:50:00.006-05:00

After finishing up my measurements in the greenhouse in Pickens, SC and finding Dryopteris campyloptera in the field, our next stop was eastern North Carolina, in the coastal plain. Our target here was D. ludoviciana, and I'll get to that in the next post, but first I wanted to share some photos of a beautiful cypress bog we happened across on the way back from the D. ludoviciana population.

Beautyberry (Callicarpa sp.) growing near the boardwalk entrance...

Dryopteris campyloptera

2011-09-20T12:43:00.001-05:00

The first species I visited in the field on this last trip was Dryopteris campyloptera, which is a tetraploid hybrid between D. intermedia and D. expansa, and which grows at higher elevations in the eastern US. It actually has a disjunct distribution between the Great Smoky mountains and mountains farther north, like the Adirondacks. The southern population is likely a relict that retreated up into the mountains following the last ice ages in the northern hemisphere

I've visited this population before, and it grows in a hemlock dominated forest at Bear Pen Gap turnout on the Blue Ridge Parkway. One of the benefits of working along the Blue Ridge is being treated to views like this:

Another neat thing we saw, quite unexpectedly, was this.

What's neat about this, you ask? Look closer...

Greenhouse

2011-09-08T12:38:00.001-05:00

First up in this travel diary of sorts, I have to share these photos of the fantastic greenhouse that Tom Goforth of Crowdog Native Ferns and Gardens set up to house the Dryopteris species used in this study. He built this structure, which has plants in three light levels that were achieved using shade cloth over the roof, and cared for all these plants over the course of the growing season. They had to be regularly watered, randomized and moved around within the treatments, etc. No small task, and I'll be eternally grateful to Tom for all his help with this project (and especially for killing the red wasps that had made a nest over some of the plants in the back of the greenhouse, and for moving two GIGANTIC writing spiders to quarters that wouldn't bring me into contact with them; I'm not a fan of spiders).

Late summer fern fieldwork

2011-09-05T12:28:00.001-05:00

After returning from two weeks in Australia this summer, I had about a week's respite at home in Madison before heading out into the field in the US for my last field trip for the ecophysiological portion of my PhD. This three week trek started with a week in Pickens, South Carolina measuring seven Dryopteris species that have been grown and cared for in a greenhouse by my good friend and colleague Tom Goforth of Crowdog Native Ferns and Gardens. We also visited and measured a population of D. campyloptera in the Great Smoky Mountains. Then we drove east to Raleigh and Hertford, North Carolina, where we were led to populations of D. ludoviciana and D. celsa by fern fancier Jessie Perry. I then headed north toward western New York via Norfolk, Virginia, narrowly missing hurricane Irene in the process. In Hamilton and Ithaca I measured the final two species I needed for these studies, and celebrated the end of my PhD fieldwork with friends! The next few posts here will document this whirlwind journey and the plants I encountered along the way. Most will be well known to anyone familiar with this blog, but it's always fun to visit the same species, and in some cases, the same populations, again year after year; many of them have become like old friends to me after five years on this project.

* The photo up top is a hemispheric photograph taken with a special fisheye lens mounted on a regular camera. The photo is taken at about plant height, and can be used to measure the percent of the canopy that is open and affording access to sunlight for the plants; you can also get more sophisticated and use it to figure out the total amount of light a given location under the canopy will receive over the course of the growing season, given is elevation and lat/long. I have used these photos to quantify the light environments of my species, as light is the primary environmental variable whose potential influence on evolution I'm interested in quantifying.

Australian ferns: part III

2011-08-22T12:21:00.003-05:00

In keeping with my trend of decreasing in size with these fern posts, this last one focuses on the truly tiny: gametophytes that we found growing on moist soil banks. Gametophytes are the free-living haploid stage of the fern life cycle, and in temperate climates they're usually pretty challenging to locate, since they're small, relatively ephemeral, and look just like mosses. In the tropics it's considerable easier to find them, and as soon as we started to hunt for them they started to pop out of the background. The photo above shows a large clump of gametophytes that may actually a single plant, or a bunch clumped together. That's a bit of moss sticking out of the back, not a sporophyte. The two photos below do show sporophytes starting to grow out of the gametophytes; in the first one the sporophyte is pretty small, and the large, heart-shaped plate-like structure below it is the gametophyte. In the second, the sporophytes are becoming more branched and the gametophyte is harder to make out in all the green, but it's still there!

Australian ferns: part II

2011-08-17T12:16:00.002-05:00

This second installment on Australian ferns focuses on more diminutive specimens (except for the tree ferns above), including some gorgeous filmy ferns (family Hymenophyllaceae) that we found growing in a probably perpetually-moist splash area around a culvert.

And, finally, the filmies, growing on a tree trunk. Members of this family are called filmy ferns because of their translucent leaf blades, which are often only a few cell layers thick and have very few veins. You can get a sense of their delicacy in the second photo.

Australia ferns: part I

2011-08-15T12:07:00.003-05:00

You may have noticed a distinct lack of ferns in the last few, Australia posts... that's because I've been saving the best for last! We did indeed see lots of ferns Down Under, though unfortunately I know very few of their names. All of these photos were taken in the various eucalypt forests we drove through, and there will be three of these fern-centric posts to round out my series on this summer's Australian adventures.

This is a tree-fern stump that was burned in the recent, awful fires that consumed thousands of acres around Marysville in January 2009. This fern didn't survive, but the vascular structure that remains inside the trunk is beautiful.

Polystichum sp.:

Blechnum sp., sterile leaf first, then fertile, then both together:

Lovely tree ferns adorn a brook:

Little Desert National Park

2011-08-12T12:01:00.001-05:00

Our drive through Victoria culminated with a visit to the Little Desert National Park, which is at the extreme eastern edge of the state, where it borders South Australia. This is the beginning of the outback, and the vegetation is appropriately scruffy, though with beautiful flowering things if you were careful to look for them...

Eucalypts

2011-08-08T11:55:00.001-05:00

We spent the next day driving through some beautiful, pristine eucalypt forests in central Victoria. Eucalyptus is definitely the defining Australian tree genus; there are more than 700 species found on the continent, and many forests, like the ones we drove through, are dominated by eucalypts. We also visited the tallest one in the world (well, maybe - it apparently has competition from a tree in New Zealand). There are some tree ferns around as well... in fact in some places they create a secondary canopy lower to the ground, below the eucalypts and taller trees.

Tree ferns in the understory:

Eucalyptus flowers and fruits:

Cranbourne Botanic Gardens

2011-08-04T11:48:00.002-05:00

Well, my trip to Australia has come and gone, and now all that's left is to sort through the photos and decide which ones to post! The next few weeks here will likely be devoted to cataloguing the places we went and the plants we saw.

Following the International Botanical Congress in Melbourne, my advisor led my lab on a three-day driving trip around much of Victoria, Australia. We started off at a second botanical garden (we are botanists, after all!) about an hour from Melbourne, called the Cranbourne Royal Botanic Gardens. They had a gorgeous collection of acacias and eucalypts, against a red-soil background that is characteristic of the outback parts of Victoria, which weren't far in our future...

After our visit to the gardens, we headed south and visited a mangrove swamp with an extensive boardwalk system, before heading north towards Healsville and Marysville, which are somewhat northeast of Melbourne.

Temple of the Winds

2011-07-29T11:25:00.001-05:00

One definite highlight of the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens (see previous post) was stumbling upon this fern-festooned temple in an out-of-the-way corner of the property. As the sign says, this is the Temple of the Winds, and it is adorned with native staghorn ferns. Pretty neat!

Australian Royal Botanic Garden

2011-07-29T11:16:00.002-05:00

We've had an excellent time in Melbourne so far, and one of the highlights was a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens located right in downtown Melbourne. This sprawling garden is packed with winding paths, grassy lawns, and lush forests for visitors to explore. The collection of native plants is impressive, and includes lots of tree ferns like the one shown above. It's mid-winter here right now, but many plants are still flowering, since it gets chilly here in the cold season but not particularly harsh. Photos of a very small selection of the species present in the garden are below; some don't have names as I couldn't find labels on them and I'm not all that familiar with the Australian flora!

Succulent garden

Acacia sp.; Ceiba insignis

Pathway through the garden

Clematis sp. (?); unknown

Australia!

2011-07-17T11:08:00.004-05:00

Posts have been scarce this summer as I've been busily working on writing my PhD thesis. I get a break from writing next week, though, as I'll be heading to Melbourne, Australia to attend the International Botanical Congress and explore the state of Victoria. IBC happens every six years in a different part of the world, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to visit a new (for me) part of Australia - I studied abroad in Brisbane and got to visit Sydney and the Center during my five-month stay there in 2004. I will also be talking about my dissertation research in a symposium on fern biology at the conference, which will be a great opportunity to get feedback and discuss my research with an international cadre of plant scientists. Following the conference I will be traveling with my lab around Victoria for a few days, and hopefully finding some ferns. Stay tuned for photos and posts from the trip!

Dryopteris expansa

2011-06-22T09:36:00.003-05:00

My most exciting fern find so far this year has definitely been locating Dryopteris expansa in northern Wisconsin. This is the only species which I should have been able to find a field site for, but have failed at finding for the last couple of years. I've seen D. expansa out west, in Washington and Oregon, but I need a site within driving distance to make the types of measurements I need for my research. This species is well-documented in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, but somehow I was never able to track down any of those populations, or they were gone from the sites where they previously occurred. But now, finally, with the help of some very nice folks from the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, I've got not one, but two field locations of D. expansa! I will probably only be returning to one to make measurements in the next few weeks, but it's nice to know that the other is there.

Like most Dryopteris, D. expansa is several times divided, and has a typical lacy, 'ferny' look to it. It's beautiful, needless to say. One stand-out character of this plant is the lowermost pair of pinnae, which are hugely triangular and expanded at the based (hence the species' specific epithet). The first innermost pinnule on the bottom (called basiscopic) is always the longest, as opposed to some other species of Dryopteris, where it is either always shortest, or varies considerably. The primary reason I was so anxious to find this species is that it is a diploid, and is one of two parents of a polyploid species called D. campyloptera. There are five sexual polyploid Dryopteris in the North American flora; of these, two have one parent that is unknown and probably extinct, leaving only three polyploids with both parents extant. Part of my work involves comparing the polyploids with their putative parents, and this is a very small sample size! So you can understand why finding this fern was so important to me - it was the only diploid parent of those three polyploids that was missing, so I now have the complete set for all three!

I'm measuring a number of characters related to light relations and photosynthesis for my research, and here's a shot of my photosynthesis equipment hard at work work on D. expansa:

Deparia acrostichoides

2011-06-20T09:35:00.002-05:00

I mentioned in the post on Abraham's Woods ferns that we found a new species there (well, new for that site): Deparia acrostichoides, the Silvery Glade Fern. I got some better photos of it on a return trip and thought I'd share some more about how to identify this fern. It actually sort of resembles Dryopteris goldiana, which it grows right alongside. Both are twice pinnate, but a major difference is that the pinnule lobes of Deparia are blunted and round-ended, while the Dryopteris pinnules come to a point (see photos in previous post).

Another character is the hairs: as you can see in the photo below, Deparia has a dense covering of white hairs, which make it look decidedly fuzzy, and it has no real 'scales' to speak of:

This final shot is of the underside of a frond, which is where the sori should be. Strangely, though, I couldn't find a single frond in the entire population which was fertile. All the other ferns I've seen this year are fertile by now, although the sori are still immature, but this Deparia is totally lacking in reproductive structures. I can't find any information on when it becomes reproductive; maybe this species is just a late bloomer, so to speak. A late sporer? I will be visiting this site again in the next few weeks and I'll keep an eye on it. In any case, this genus is distinguished by having linear sori, similar to Lady fern, along the midveins (costules) of the pinnules.

Dryopteris goldiana at Abraham's Woods

2011-06-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

I did a post about most of the ferns at Abe's Woods a few days ago, but I wanted to save Goldie's Woodfern, Dryopteris goldiana, for its own post. This species is close to my heart, since it's one of the (relatively) rarer members of the genus I study, and the population at Abe's Woods is really beautiful, and extensive. We saw it when we visited a couple of weeks ago, and the ferns were still unfurling, with many still in fiddlehead stage. I just went back to put out dataloggers, since I will be using this site for my research, and what a difference a few weeks makes! We've had a very strange, late spring here, and the temperature has gone from mostly in the 40s to mostly in the 90s over the last four weeks, and the ferns have responded in force.D. goldiana is one of the largest ferns we have in the woods around eastern North America (it could go toe-to-toe with Ostrich fern for that title), and it's remarkable to see how much they've grown and how quickly. Above and below are some 'before' shots...

And here are the 'after' shots. Quite a difference, huh?

These ferns are also showing off some helpful diagnostic characters. If you happen to come across an absolutely gigantic fern in the woods, and for some reason you're not totally convinced that it's Dryopteris goldiana just based on its massive-ness, here are a few things to look for. First, this species tends to have dense brown or golden-brown scales along the stipe (typical of the genus), but D. goldiana has a definite dark stripe down the middle of the scales, while many of the other Dryopteris I've come across in our area don't have this stripe. The arrangement of the sori is also pretty striking. They're very orderly, arranged in rows down either side of the costule of each pinnule, and have the typical Dryopteris form: a kidney-shaped, reniform indusium covering each sorus. Again, the only other really large fern you could confuse this with might be Ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, but that one has totally dimorphic, separate sterile and fertile leaves, so should be easy to separate from this Dryopteris.

I included this last photo just to further impress you with the size of this critter, and I actually took a similar photo with Dryopteris celsa, the log fern, which is a polyploid between D. goldiana and D. ludoviciana. You can certainly see where D. celsa gets its size from!

Leafsnap

2011-06-10T23:16:00.008-05:00

I've done some posts before about field guides, and I wanted to spread the word about a really neat new tool which is available for identifying trees. It's called LeafSnap, and it's an app for iPhones and iPads (they also have a website, which has all the same information as the app). This thing is really cool - it was developed jointly by the Smithsonian, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland, and it's one of the most comprehensive photographic field guides I've ever seen. Here's a sample of the photos it has on each tree's page, for the 182 species it knows (this is a screenshot taken from their page on Castanea dentata, the American chestnut):

Leaves, fruits, flowers, bark - it's all there. The neatest thing about it is that if your device has a camera built in, like the iPhones, iPod touches, and iPad 2 do, you can take a photo of a single leaf and the app will identify the tree for you! I spent a while walking around my neighborhood today taking photos of leaves, and it does a darn good job of telling what's what. It's not foolproof - for each leaf I uploaded, it gave me a selection of possible species, and in some cases the correct one was #4 or 5 on the list. But for a photo taken with a smartphone and possibly belonging to one of hundreds of species, that's not bad at all. It keeps track of all the trees you've identified in a "collection" on your device(s), and you can also look at a map to see where all your species are. The best part: it's FREE!! I can't even imagine how much work must have gone into creating this, and it's amazing that there's no charge for the app.

Actually, it's not so amazing - the project was funded in part by an NSF grant, otherwise known as our tax dollars. I think it's important to point this out because this is a phenomenal educational tool, that hopefully will encourage people to take more notice of the plants around them and inspire them to learn more about the natural world. It's a terrific way to merge a traditional field of science like botany with new technology to make something fun and functional. I'm thrilled to know that my tax dollars went to pay for this project and I wish more money went to support forward-thinking educational endeavors like this. I assume it's offered for free as a stipulation of receiving federal monies.

I should also mention that this app is geared for the Northeast - the default locations are Washington D.C., New York, and Northeast (last I checked New York was in the Northeast, but whatever). But I'm using it in Wisconsin and it's doing just fine!

Final flowers...

2011-06-10T09:02:00.000-05:00

I promise this will be the last flower post for quite awhile, as most of the spring flowering angiosperms have done their thing and are now strictly vegetative. I couldn't resist sharing one more batch of flower photos, though, since these are from quite a different habitat than the rich woodlands where the photos in my other recent flower posts were taken. These plants are all from Muralt Bluff Prairie, an open-access hilltop prairie just around the corner from Abraham's Woods in southern Wisconsin. This is a really neat place, exposed and windswept, with an interesting assortment of prairie plants. It had recently been burned before our visit, so a lot of things were just starting to poke out for the spring. Pictured above is Prairie Smoke, Geum triflorum, and it covers an entire slope on the western edge of the prairie:

Also on the western side, near the bottom of the hill, is this rare beauty, Besseya bullii, or Kittentail, not to be confused with the also-yellow-flowering Lousewort, Pedicularis canadensis, which is in the two photos below the Besseya.

And no set of spring floral posts in Wisconsin would be complete without a shot of Pasque Flower, Anemone patens:

Abraham's Woods Ferns

2011-06-08T08:44:00.005-05:00

And finally, a return to ferns! In addition to all the beautiful early spring flowering plants at Abraham's Woods, there are a number of ferns as well. Last time I went there we only found Dryopteris goldiana and what looked like a small Cystopteris, but this time we found an abundance of ferns in the richest, moistest corner of the woods. Some of the most striking were the Maidenhair ferns (Adiantum pedatum) pictured above and below. I've mentioned before that this species tends to have reddish stipes, which turn a dark red to almost black when the plants are mature. You can certainly see the red color in these young plants, as well as the whitish hairs and small scales they bear.

No woodland would be complete without Lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina, and Abraham's Woods is no exception. Their stipes can be bright green to brown to red, while the blade is usually always a bright green color.

Other than Dryopteris goldiana, which I'll devote a future post to, the final fern we saw was Deparia acrostichoides, the Silvery Glade Fern or Silvery Spleenwort. The second common name is a relict from when this fern was placed in the Asplenium genus. This species actually isn't on the list for Abraham's Woods, so it was an exciting find. This fern is distinguished by the bluntness of the pinnule lobes, and by having a dense white fuzz of hairs all along the stipe and rachis, which you might just be able to make out in these photos...

More flowers

2011-06-01T23:49:00.002-05:00

A few more flowers! These are from Abraham's Woods, near Albany, Wisconsin. This is a rich, lush woodland owned the UW Arboretum and reserved for research. There are some lovely ferns here that will be the focus of the next post. Abraham's Woods is right on the edge of the Driftless Area, a large part of southwestern Wisconsin that was never glaciated during the most recent Ice Ages. At the rear of the site (the southwest corner), there is a large upslope of loess, soil blown over from the unglaciated area that mounded up and which now forms a thick, dense soil. That's where the ferns are. The flowers are everywhere! Above is Sanguineria canadensis, Bloodroot, showing its leaves, a flower, and a nice little capsule fruit on the left.

Below we have Claytonia virginica (Spring Beauty), Erythronium albidum (White Trout Lily), Dentaria or Cardamine (Toothwort), Arisaema triphyllum (Jack-in-the-Pulpit), and the beautiful leaves of Hepatica, with some maidenhair ferns thrown in for good measure:

Next up is one of my absolute favorite spring flowers: the Bellwort, Uvularia grandiflora:

And another yellow-flowering spring bloomer, the Yellow Forest Violet, Viola pubescens, and finally, a beautiful spread of Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum) and False Rue Anemone (Enemion biternatum):

A floral departure...

2011-05-15T23:34:00.000-05:00

I hope you'll forgive me a diversion into flowering plants... the spring flora of Wisconsin is particularly beautiful and full of lovely flowering things. Even I can appreciate them, and some of them photograph uncommonly well. There will probably be a few posts after this one that feature angiosperms, as I visit a few rich sites with public field trips and the class I'm TAing. Then it will be back to ferns! These flowers are all from the bluff in Grant County I've written about in the last few posts. The plant above is Sanguineria canadensis, the Bloodroot. Next is Wild Ginger, Asarum canadense:

Next we have, in this order: Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica), Birdsfoot violet (Viola pedata), Pussytoes (Anntenaria neglecta), and a buttercup (Ranunculus):

Then we were lucky enough to find Hepatica still in bloom; usually all I get to see are its liver shaped leaves with the flowers long gone:

And finally, a mainstay of the spring flora here, Dicentra cucullaria, Dutchman's breeches:

More fiddleheads!

2011-05-10T23:15:00.001-05:00

Here is a last roundup of photos from the Grant County field trip - an assortment of ferns other than the Osmunda claytoniana and Athyrium filix-femina highlighted in previous posts - and some notes on identifying them when they're still fiddleheads. Above is Asplenium platyneuron, the Ebony Spleenwort, which was long past fiddlehead stage when we saw it, as was this Botrychium:

The following two photos are Dryopteris marginalis, the Marginal Woodfern. It is easy to tell this one when it's still small and unfurled because of the distinctive scales, which are a golden brown color. Most Dryopteris have scales that look something like this, and you could potentially confuse this one with other members of the genus, but probably not with anything outside Dryopteris. One helpful thing with Dryopteris is to look for persistent green fronds from last year... D. marginalis can sometimes have them, which would also help get this to species.

Ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, is a good fern to be able to identify in fiddlehead stage, since it's the only fern whose fiddleheads are considered safe to eat. This one is easy to identify because of the deep groove which runs down the front of the stipe (you can see it here), and also because of the very smooth look of the stipe, which you can see in the photo below. They can sometimes have a fairly dense covering of golden scales, but they seem to outgrow them quickly, unlike the Dryopteris, above, which hangs onto the scales for a long time as it grows.

Maidenhair fern, Adiantum pedatum, often has reddish to purple stipes, which make it easy to identify, as do the white hairs that frequently occur along the base of the stipe. The ones pictured here also have some scales in addition to the hairs, but the reddish coloration is the real giveaway that this is Maidenhair:

Lady fern fiddleheads

2011-05-07T22:52:00.000-05:00

More fiddleheads from the bluff in Grant County, WI. The last post focused on the ubiquitous Interrupted fern, while today's highlights another fern that was abundant at this site: Lady fern (Athyrium filix-femina). Athyrium can be very diverse, even among plants in a single location, as these photos demonstrate. Some of these plants had green stipes, while others were brown to purplish, and they had a variety of different scales and hairs. This species is easy to identify at this stage because of this variation, rather than in spite of it.

Spring's first fiddleheads!

2011-05-01T22:00:00.009-05:00

Today I went on my first fern field trip of the season, in Grant County, Wisconsin, with Susan and Steven Carpenter (of the UW Arboretum and Zoology Department, respectively). We had a great time! We spent several hours walking all around a huge, forested bluff and saw lots of plants. Spring has been extremely slow in arriving this year, so though the ferns were abundant, they were mostly still unfurled fiddleheads. It was interesting to see several different species side by side in this early developmental stage, and I'll post pictures of the ones we saw over several posts.

The most dominant fern at this site was clearly the Interrupted fern, Osmunda claytoniana. This species is easy to tell even this early because of the white fuzz of hairs that covers the fiddleheads and is also present in other close relatives, like the Cinnamon fern. With O. claytoniana, though, you can actually see the fertile pinnae that will make up the "interrupted" part of the frond even when the fiddleheads are quite small. This species was all over the north-facing side of the bluff, and according to Susan and Steve it becomes almost forest-like itself by summer! In the first photo below you might be able to make out some of the clumps of Interrupted fern covering the rocks... and once you've found a couple you'll probably notice more and more...

Ferns and Charles R. Knight

2011-03-20T10:26:00.008-05:00

Hello all! The long, cold Wisconsin winter appears to be drawing to a close, which means spring, flowers, and ferns can't be far off. This past week was spring break for my university, so an escape to regions southward seemed in order. We made it as far as Chicago. This was the first time in four years of living three hours away that my husband and I have made it to the Windy City, and we had a great time. One of the highlights was definitely the Field Museum, which I've had a goal of visiting for years. Sue was wonderful, but our favorite exhibit ended up being Evolving Planet, a huge stretch of space that wanders through nearly a quarter of the upper floor of the museum, and leads you through the evolution of life on earth starting hundreds of millions of years ago. One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was a large and beautiful mural above a stretch of display cases showing ancient fossil plants, mostly lycophytes and some ferns. Here's the mural:

You may or may not be able to make out, in the bottom lefthand corner, the author's signature: Chas. R. Knight. I was admiring all the lovely tree ferns and horsetails when my husband pointed this out to me, and I was thrilled! The museum I used to work at in Ithaca, NY did a big exhibit on Knight while I was there, and his prehistoric art is phenomenal. He is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for shaping our collective vision about the prehistoric world. No other artist before him had painted as prolifically, vividly, and accurately the earth's long extinct inhabitants. Jurassic Park wouldn't have been nearly as exciting and mesmerizing if Knight hadn't implanted a fascination for prehistory in our collective unconscious. I've seen several of his smaller pieces, but it turns out that in the 1920s he was commissioned by the Field Museum to paint 20-something of these huge murals for their new fossil halls, which became the Evolving Planet exhibit that we enjoyed the other day. His murals are all gorgeous, and they add a depth to the fossils on display that allows you to picture these plants and animals still alive and roaming their native habitats. You can learn more about Knight and his work for the Field Museum here. And here are some close-ups of the ferns that first caught my attention:

Fern Rap

2010-12-20T16:00:00.002-06:00

Several of my fellow TAs in the Botany Department are teaching Introductory Biology this semester, a giant, 1,000-student mega-class. One of the professors offered the students the opportunity to write a song to get extra credit... and one of the results is an absolutely phenomenal effort by a group of these students. My fellow grads let me know about it, for soon-to-be-obvious reasons, and the professor gave me the audio file and permission to post it here. I hope you'll join me in appreciation of these students' efforts and their scientifically accurate (but for a tiny detail or two) composition putting the fern life cycle to song. I (well actually they) give you the Fern Rap.

For your reading/following-along pleasure, here arethe lyrics:

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

They say I’m a monilophyte but you can call me a fern

My life’s been a long one, with many twists and turns

Sometimes it’s hard to discern what stage I’m in

Let me welcome you to my world, let the story begin

I started out as a spore, on the bottom of a leaf

Grew up in a sporophyte, my release was a relief

I had many brothers and sisters, and some of them didn’t make it

But sometimes life is hard, and the goal is just to stay fit

I was a small little guy, all alone and homeless

But I soon started to grow I guess you could say mitosis

And pretty soon fertilization became my focus

But I knew finding a mate for me was pretty much hopeless

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

So I fertilized myself just not to remain childless

I really didn’t care that all my kids would be homozygous

It really wasn’t hard there was no pandemonium

I just put sperm from my antheridia into my archegonium

So now I was a zygote, yeah from 1N to two

The best years of my life, and upwards I grew

The increase in my size was all in my genetics

And it also didn’t hurt that I was photosynthetic

I grew and I grew and it seemed like overnight

I reached my final stage and became a sporophyte

So now I’m making sporangium all on my own

And just hoping my little spores, will all find a home

To bed for the winter...

2010-11-01T19:49:00.000-05:00

Hi all! As usually happens during the winter months, I expect a lull in my blogging output from late November through mid-spring (which, in Wisconsin, is around late April). I just wanted to post a putting-to-bed message so you don't think I've shut up shop. I'll post sporadically over the winter months and will be back full-force in the spring. Wish me luck with winter's primary activity: writing proposals to try and secure funding for my next field season! Happy holidays to all.

Huntington Botanical Gardens, CA

2010-10-13T17:56:00.010-05:00

Usually the start of the fall semester signals the end of big botanical field trips for me, but this year was an exception. A few weeks ago I went to Anaheim, CA to recruit graduate students for my department at a conference. There was another botany grad with me and we had a few hours free to explore one afternoon. The best attraction we could think of was the Huntington Library & Botanical Gardens in San Marino (take that, Disneyland!), where many of our friends and colleagues have visited and/or worked. Since our time was limited, we did a whirlwind tour of the garden, spending the most time in the Japanese and Desert sections. Alas, there were no ferns in these parts, but some beautiful other plants nonetheless. The bonsai collection was particularly impressive (shown above), as were the extensive cacti in the desert, below.

Last but not least, we saw some pollination in action!

Fall find

2010-09-12T16:52:00.005-05:00

There are no ferns in this post, but there is someone green... found on a recent field trip to Spring Green, Wisconsin. This photo was taken by fellow UW-Botany grad student Brent Berger. I provided the finger-perch. Happy Fall!

Robert Treman State Park, NY

2010-08-15T16:51:00.011-05:00

The last field trip I took while in Ithaca was to Robert Treman State Park. This is a beautiful place with many miles of trails connecting the Upper entrance, descending past waterfalls and through gorges, to the lower entrance several miles away. We started at the upper entrance and hiked down past Lucifer Falls, in search of a grove of Dryopteris goldiana that was known to occur near the base of this waterfall. We found it growing happily in a lush carpet of Vinca:

Farther along, we also came across some Asplenium trichomanes growing on a little shelf in the rock wall, and near the end of the trail, back at the upper parking lot, we spotted a patch of Cryptogramma stelleri, which I hadn't seen in the wild before. Two photos of each are below. All in all, a great trip to upstate New York!

East Malloryville Preserve, Ithaca, NY

2010-08-11T16:52:00.006-05:00

After visiting Thurber Preserve I was eager to see how the other populations of Dryopteris around Ithaca were doing, so I went next to one of my very favorite nature reserves, the von Engeln or Malloryville preserve. This is a beautiful place with a very nice, easy to hike trail system. The trails start on top of glacial eskers and wind downhill into swamp and bog, which are traversed by boardwalks. There are many, many ferns here and I was happy to find several Dryopteris that I had been hoping to discover here, but hadn't seen previously, including D. goldiana:

Thurber Preserve, Dryden, NY

2010-08-10T16:52:00.010-05:00

After the Botany conference I travelled to upstate New York, where I used to live, and where there is an abundance of Dryopteris species (if only I'd known while I still lived there...). I visited several preserves and state parks, some of which I hope to use as field sites for additional physiology studies to be conducted next summer. One of my favorite places is Thurber Preserve, since it was there that I saw D. clintoniana for the first time. I wanted to go back to check on the population and make sure it would be healthy enough to withstand a few measurements next summer, and I was delighted to find that the ferns are doing great! The population was larger than I remembered, and spans the edge of the swamp from forest to thicket, mostly in the shady areas. Wherever direct sunlight hit, that seemed to be the boundary beyond which D. clintoniana would not trespass.

This species is a polyploid, and the only hexaploid known in the North American Dryopteris complex (it has 3 duplicate genomes). Its putative parents are D. goldiana and D. cristata, the latter of which is a tetraploid (two duplicated genomes... so D. clintoniana has 2 from D. cristata plus 1 from D. goldiana and you have 3). This species most closely resembles its D. cristata parent, except that it is gigantic in comparison. It gets the size boost from D. goldiana. Notice in particular the horizontal arrangement of the pinnae in the photo below... the clear hallmark of D. cristata.

Dryopteris boottii

2010-08-02T16:52:00.006-05:00

This summer the Botanical Society of America's annual conference was held in Providence, Rhode Island. As always, on the Saturday before the conference begins there are a number of field trips offered, and the American Fern Society usually co-hosts one. On this year's trip we went to several locations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and saw many of the common local ferns. One particular treat was seeing a Dryopteris hybrid I haven't seen before (which is surprising, since it's one of the more common ones). Dryopteris x boottii is a sterile hybrid between D. intermedia and D. cristata, the intermediate and crested woodferns.

There are clearly elements of both parents' morphology in this hybrid. The overall shape of the mature fronds resembles D. intermedia (first photo below), and the younger ones look like D. cristata (second photo below). The pinnae also have the unmistakable D. cristata-twist - they look like panes in a Venetian blind, each held horizontal relative to the rachis (see photo above). The plants are way too big to be just crested woodfern though, and there are occasional glands along the rachis and pinna blades that also identify the D. intermedia parent.

Fern Physiology

2010-07-10T22:41:00.011-05:00

While last summer's visit to the Hurons was purely a reconnaissance mission, this time we had a specific mission: data gathering. Specifically, I'm interested in a number of physiological traits relating to light and water use for my PhD research, and we were measuring the various species of Dryopteris that occur in the Hurons. The Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundationawarded me a research grant to hire an assistant, which was essential while working in the often-secluded habitats of these ferns, and it was great to have someone to help carry all the equipment! One of the main goals was to make photosynthetic measurements on all the species, using a fancy machine called a Licor LI6400. These first few pictures show the Licor set up and clamped onto a leaf of Dryopteris fragrans growing on a sandstone cliff. This was the most harrowing part of the whole trip, since it involved ferrying the Licor across a large lake in a rowboat, then scrambling with it up the rocky, pine-needle covered hill to get to these cliffs. Each LI6400 costs somewhere around $50,000, so perhaps you appreciate my concern.

I also need data on the light environments these plants experience naturally, so we took some short and long-term dataloggers along to capture information about incident radiation around the places. This was a bit of a challenge and required some MacGyvering with wire and duct tape for the cliff-dwelling D. fragrans, as you can see in the following photos.

One other way to measure a plant's light environment uses hemispheric photographs, which can be fed into computer programs with climate and light data for a given location. I find the photos taken above D. fragrans entertaining because most of them have some of the cliff in them. They also frequently have the plants themselves, since they're growing upside down attached to the rock overhangs.

Polystichum lonchitis

2010-07-06T16:51:00.021-05:00

In the same location where we found Dryopteris filix-mas, we also came across a few plants of Polystichum lonchitis, bringing my North America Polystichum count to five (along with P. acrostichoides, P. braunii, P. andersonii, and P. munitum). The leaves are mostly erect, with a distinct arch at the tips (more obvious in the younger, bright green leaves). This species hybridizes with several other Polystichums, and has apparently also been known to form hybrids with Dryopteris goldiana. The offspring of that odd pairing were dubbed genus x Dryostichum by Herb Wagner, with only one species: x D. singulare.

Dryopteris filix-mas

2010-07-06T16:51:00.019-05:00

A highlight of this trip to the Hurons was seeing Dryopteris filix-mas in this region for the first time. D. filix-mas is common in Washington and the Pacific Northwest, but is otherwise too far north to be found in the U.S., though it is found pretty much across the width of Canada. However, it does get down into the U.P. in a few places, as well as in the northern part of MI's Lower Peninsula. We found one of those places along county route 510, northwest of Marquette. There were several large patches of the ferns on rocky outcrops in a forested, well-drained and shady area south of the road (with the ferns on the north and east facing slopes). It's a large species, with very large fronds, and the characteristic kidney-bean shaped sori found in all Dryopteris (see below).

Huron Mountains, MI

2010-06-30T16:51:00.013-05:00

I thought I'd start a short series about this summer's research trip to the Huron Mountains in Michigan with all the neat non-fern photos I got during the three weeks we spent there. First up is this beautiful milkweed, Asclepias syriaca. There's a row of them right in front of the house where researchers stay while working there, and they were a buzzing hub throughout our visit. Other flowers of note included this pink lady's slipper, Cypripedium acaule, and colombine, Aquilegia canadensis.

There's also abundant wildlife, including a rumored wolf, although we never (thankfully?) encountered it. Lots of butterflies though, and loons that paid nightly visits to the house where we stayed. There were also sandhill cranes, and are they ever loud!

There are many beautiful, unobstructed views in the Hurons, like these from the top of Mummy Mountain, looking out over Second Pine Lake. The last photo is the view from the porch of the researchers' house at sunset.

Cystopteris bulbifera

2010-06-05T16:51:00.017-05:00

There's one area of Governor Dodge State Park where a trail leads through the woods to a large waterfall, and then follows the stream leading away from the falls through luxuriant, shady, rich forest. In the spray zone around the falls we found lots of Cystopteris bulbifera, the bulblet bladder fern. This is another neat fern I haven't blogged about before. It creates bulblets on the abaxial (underside) of its fronds, which can fall off and grow into new sporophytes, essentially clones of the parent plants. You can see one clearly in the top photo:

This is the type of environment where we found these guys. The walls of this gorge were just dripping with ferns. Lots of Dryopteris, some Osmunda, and a few boulders covered in Asplenium rhizophyllum, pictured at bottom.

Asplenium pinnatifidum

2010-06-05T16:51:00.008-05:00

Another new fern for me in Governor Dodge was Asplenium pinnatifidum (this was a great field trip!). This is another exciting one for several reasons. First, it's a polyploid, and I have a soft spot for polyploids - the group I study has lots of them, and they're just neat. Second, over a year ago I wrote about finding four species of Asplenium on another field trip, and that it was cool because they were all members of the "Asplenium triangle" of hybridizing and interrelated Asplenium species in North America. Well, A. pinnatifidum is another member of that complex. It is thought to be an allotetraploid (meaning that it's two genomes were contributed by two different parental species). The triangle figure is below, modified from the figure in the Flora of North America, volume 2. In the figure, the solid circles represent diploid taxa, the open circles are fertile polyploids, and the triangles are sterile hybrids. A. pinnatifidum falls on one of the lines connecting two diploids, which are its two putative parents, A. rhizophyllum and A. montanum:

Below are the A. pinnatifidum individuals we found at Gov. Dodge, as well as a habitat shot of the sort of rock crevices we found them in. They weren't in the best shape, and apparently some of them had actually been out-planted there in an attempt to rejuvenate an existing, natural population. Hopefully this was just a bad year or season, and they'll pick up again soon. It's neat to come across such a rarity.

Thelypteris simulata

2010-06-05T16:50:00.003-05:00

A new fern for me in Gov. Dodge State Park was Thelypteris simulata. There are over twenty species of Thelypteris in North America, but I've only ever seen T. palustris, the marsh fern, and T. novaboracensis, the New York fern. T. simulata is commonly known as Massachusetts fern. For a complete key to the Thelypteris species in North America, see the Flora of North America website.

Governor Dodge State Park

2010-06-01T16:50:00.019-05:00

Another early-summer field trip brought me for the first time to Governor Dodge State Park. I'm embarrassed to admit it's taken me this long to get out there. It's a beautiful park and only about an hour's drive from Madison. Not only were there beautiful ferns and flowers, but also gorgeous sandstone rock formations (some of them complete with Dryopteris):

As a result of all these rocks, the soils in this part of Wisconsin are often very sandy, and we found a lot of Dryopteris intermedia and D. carthusiana (pictured just below). That makes it a great place to photograph this mother-and-daughter pair together for easier comparison (second photo below; D. intermedia on the left and D. carthusiana on the right).

Another beautiful fern find was Woodsia ilvensis, and there were also some lovely flowers in bloom as well, including the Stellaria and Lupinus also pictured below. My next couple blog posts will be about specific interesting ferns that we found in Governor Dodge.

Phegopteris connectilis

2010-05-30T16:50:00.009-05:00

One fern we saw in the Dells, mostly on Blackhawk Island, was Phegopteris connectilis. I'd like to highlight it because I haven't done so previously on the blog, and it's a neat little guy. It has a relative that is fairly common in shadey, moist woodlands in the eastern U.S., Phegopteris hexagonoptera, but I've seen P. connectilis much less frequently. These are the only two species of the genus found in the U.S.; they have one other relative in eastern Asia. Both of our species are easy to spot because the lower two pinnae are strongly reflexed, meaning they point nearly backwards from the rest of the frond, as you can see in these photos of P. hexagonoptera (in the top photo, look at the frond in the middle of the photo, and its two bottom pinnae are pointing nearly straight up):

P. connectilis has the same general form, though those pinnae aren't perhaps quite so opposed to the rest of the plant. The best way to tell the two species apart is that in P. hexagonoptera, those bottom pinnae will actually be attached to the next set of pinnae by a little wing of tissue along the rachis, while in P. connectilis they will be separate. The following photos are some of the P. connectilis we saw on Blackhawk Island.

WI Dells

2010-05-28T15:32:00.014-05:00

My first field trip of the summer field season was, once again, to the Wisconsin Dells. This beautiful area boasts sandstone-bluff-lined river channels that are perfect for canoeing and kayaking, which is a great way to explore the cliff ferns and islands that dot the river channels. This year we spent some time wandering around Blackhawk Island, just upriver from the Upham Woods Outdoor Learning Center, which was kind enough to lend us canoes. The island has many sandstone cliffs, and the horizontal bedding planes produce great ledges for ferns to perch:

We also came across a few tipped-up old trees, providing fertile habitat for ferns and perhaps shelter for critters.

Among the many species of ferns that can be found on Blackhawk Island are several Dryopteris, and D. intermedia is particularly flush here. You can see its habit and sori here, as well as the sori of D. marginalis, which is also abundant in this area because of the sandy, rocky soils.

There are also angiosperms, of course, and this was a particularly cute little Sanguinaria, or bloodroot:

NameThatPlant

2010-05-07T09:00:00.002-05:00

I wanted to mention a great website for people interested in plants, particularly of the U.S. Southeast. It's called NameThatPlant.net, and it is "a clearinghouse of information about native and naturalized plants of the Carolinas and Georgia." Of course, many of the plants on the site have ranges outside of those states, so it's a resource worth knowing about. I recently contributed a bunch of photos of ferns, as well as audio files of about a hundred plant name pronunciations, so if you explore a bit you might come across me reciting the name of, say, Asplenium trichomanes ssp. trichomanes. It's a fun site, go visit.

Woodwardia fimbriata

2010-05-05T22:01:00.001-05:00

I have to apologize, again, for my lack of posting in the past few months (see early February post for similar apology). But it's spring now! And I just took a lovely trip to California to visit the fern collections at the University of California-Berkeley herbarium and do some exploring, so I've got material to stock a few posts between now and the start of my summer fieldwork, when things should really get hopping around here.

And so, without further ado, may I introduce you to Woodwardia fimbriata, the Giant Chain Fern. It lives up to the 'giant' part of its common name, I can tell you. Apparently its fronds have been known to reach 8 feet in length (!). This species is native to the west coast and up into Canada, and like other Woodwardia species it has linear, sort of squat sori in a unique pattern that instantly identifies it as a member of this genus. Members of the group are called the chain ferns because of this pattern of the sori.

These pictures of Woodwardia fimbriata were all taken in Muir Woods National Monument, north of San Francisco. It's a beautiful, serene place, full of redwoods, like the one I'm contemplating in the following picture. A redwood photo is obligatory for any discussion involving Muir Woods:

Berry-Go-Round #25

2010-03-03T11:06:00.003-06:00

February's BGR #25 is up at Foothills Fancies, and it's Valentine-themed! Great selection of plant-related posts, check it out!

Old-Timey Fern Guidebooks

2010-02-27T14:18:00.014-06:00

Many of you probably appreciate the importance of a good field guidebook, one that is well-illustrated, with the most up-to-date taxonomic information and keys to help you identify unknown entities, as well as tips for telling apart similar-looking species. For guides that we actually plan to take out in the field, in general more-recent is probably better. But I have a special fondness for old field guides for ferns. The main reason, I suspect, is the illustrations. Until the glossy 2nd edition Peterson guide came along, most fern books were exclusively hand-illustrated, and the detailed drawings are lovely. I also appreciate these books because I've seen numerous references by authors in the older fern literature to particular guides that kindled their passion for these plants. I'll just mention a few favorites that I've either bought or covet. PDFs of them are available online through various wonderful sources, like GoogleBooks or the Biodiversity Heritage Library (and clicking the book titles here will take you to one of those two sites; the images are taken out of the PDFs of each book provided at either GoogleBooks or the BHL).

I came across one old reference recently and was inspired to track down and purchase a copy of the book it referred to: W.I. Beecroft's Who's Who Among the Ferns (New York, 1910: Moffat, Yard & Co.). It's pocket-sized, meant for use in the field, and the illustrations are wonderful. Here's an example, a drawing of what is now called Dryopteris cristata:

At the other end of the size (and price, unfortunately for me) spectrum is Edward J. Lowe's 8-volume Ferns: British and Exotic, which was published between 1856 and 1870. The illustrations in this book are stunning, and it includes both black and white and color drawings, like this one of Osmunda cinnamomea. Lowe apparently wrote a series of books about British ferns and "fern allies", judging from the selection of his works that comes up in a search of GoogleBooks. It's really a treasure to have them available this way!

Last but not least, this one is at the top of my to-acquire list: How to Know the Ferns, by Frances Theodora Parsons (New York, 1915: Scribner & Sons). It was written by a women, which is uncommon and wonderful, and has a charming photo at the beginning, of her studying a polypody-covered rock. The other page shown here is from the section on Christmas Fern, Polystichum acrostichoides.

This brief listing doesn't even scratch the surface of wonderful old fern guidebooks, and PDFs of these and many more can be found online now simply by exploring OpenLibrary, GoogleBooks, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and other similar sites. I encourage you to take advantage of these fantastic resources! It's a nice way to prepare for spring.

The Long Winter

2010-02-22T20:03:00.006-06:00

It's very difficult to post about green, living plants during the depths of winter in Wisconsin. I say this by way of apologizing for the dearth of posts in the last few months. December, January, and February are particularly challenging here in the Great White North, though in March things begin to green up, and by April fiddleheads abound. One of the highlights of my winter, however, is Darwin Day at UW-Madison, which I help to coordinate, and there was actually a fern at it this year! The graduate students in my department, Botany, put together a fantastic display about plants and how they have evolved, and a species of Asplenium, the birds-nest fern, topped the podium (not to be confused with the leafy cycad which is also up there; the Asplenium is in front).

I do have some more posts in the hopper as the end of winter comes into sight. I've collected a few new (actually old) fern guide books in the last few months, about which I'd like to share, and I've been thinking about fern fossils a lot lately, so I'm hoping to dig up (no pun intended) enough fern fossil information for a post or two. Stay tuned, the long winter is almost over here at No Seeds!

Berry Go Round #22

2009-12-03T09:49:00.002-06:00

The latest issue of the botanically-themed blog carnival Berry Go Round is up at Seeds Aside! Go check it out for a great listing of plant posts on blogs around the web.

Happy Birthday, Origin!

2009-11-24T10:16:00.007-06:00

Take a moment today to wish a happy 150th birthday to the Origin of Species, published on November 24, 1859. This truly seminal work should be read by everyone, scientists and laypeople alike. Darwin was an eloquent and passionate writer, and there are many lovely passages in the book. My favorite has always been the very last paragraph:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

I think it's difficult not to find these words moving if you're anyone who gazes at stars or watches plants germinate or waits with bated breath for the latest news from the LHC. We've learned so much about the world during our species' short presence on this planet, thanks to the efforts of intrepid naturalists and researchers like Darwin, who live and breath for the pursuit of knowledge. The power of science to teach, to improve our lives, and to increase our understanding and appreciation of our fragile world is awe-inspiring. Truly, there is grandeur in this view of life.

Ferns on the radio

2009-11-12T15:56:00.003-06:00

Ferns will have their day on the radio next Thursday, November 19. If you live in Madison, tune in to WORT 89.9FM for Perpetual Notion Machine from 7-7:30pm, or you can listen live online at WORT's site, or you can download the show as a podcast afterwards. Yours truly will be the guest, talking about ferns, science-blogging, and my favorite passage in the Origin of Species (whose 150th birthday is coming up soon...).

Fern blog La Selva

2009-11-12T15:00:00.003-06:00

I just found this blog about ferns at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. La Selva is one of the stations operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies, which ran a tropical fern course I took several years ago, part of which was taught at La Selva. It's a really neat place in the lowland tropical rainforest of northern Costa Rica, with lots of ferns. This video-blog documents research that's being done on the La Selva ferns, some of it by students, and it's really great!

Here's their most recent post, on Lomariopsidaceae. Go visit the blog to learn more!

Fiddleheads immortal

2009-11-05T15:19:00.003-06:00

One of the nicest things about living in Madison, Wisconsin is that we have a lovely, free, public botanical garden here, Olbrich Botanical Gardens. And one of the nicest things about the Garden is that, in addition to having many ferns on the grounds, they have this beautiful cement statue of fiddleheads prominently displayed! I was stunned the first time I saw it, and now it's one of my favorite things to visit in town. I don't know anything about who designed or made it, because I haven't been able to locate a plaque or sign. It's now become a mission to find out the name of the artist who appreciates ferns this much.

Update, March 2010: A former student of mine discovered the identity of the sculptor: her name is Sylvia U. Beckman. Thanks Lois!

Hawaii - Nephrolepis

2009-10-08T10:47:00.009-05:00

If I had to guess, I would say that the most common fern on Hawaii in terms of sheer biomass is Nephrolepis. There are several species in this genus on the Big island, and it is everywhere! Along roadsides, on lava, almost everywhere you look. It is truly ubiquitous. It's a lovely fern, with bright green fronds and very erect stature. The popular houseplant Boston Fern is also a member of this genus, and you can probably see the resemblance:

Here are some Nephrolepis growing in a tree mold in a lava field at Kilauea:

And immature (top) and mature (bottom) sori:

Hawaii - Pityrogramma

2009-10-08T10:32:00.008-05:00

Another fern we found out on the lava in Hawaii was Pityrogramma austroamericana, a little bright green thing that has an interesting feature common in ferns that live in dry, challenging environments: farina. Farina is a powdery layer on the lower (abaxial) surface of the frond, which is usually white or yellow, and is thought to reflect light and therefore heat, cooling the frond. Many ferns in the deserts of the southwestern U.S. have farina, and it's a defining characteristic of several groups of ferns. This is one of the only farinose ferns in Hawaii.

The Preservation of Favored Traces

2009-09-30T09:31:00.005-05:00

A brief aside from ferns: a grad student friend just sent around a link to a really cool web-project based on Darwin's Origin of Species, called The Preservation of Favored Traces. It traces all of the edits Darwin made to the Origin as it went through six editions during his lifetime. This project traces them, color-coding by edition, and if you mouse over it you can read the color-coded edits. It's sort of mesmerizing, and a great distraction if you're a bit of a Darwin geek, or even if you're not...

Hawaii - Lava Tube

2009-09-06T11:13:00.000-05:00

One more post about lava; specifically, lava tubes. We visited the famous Thurston Lava Tube in Volcano National park, a giant tunnel left in the surrounding lava by a flowing lava wave that passed through, hollowing out as it went. The entrance to the tube is in a depression that makes a nice little micro-climate for many ferns, which are draped luxuriously around the entrance. Adiantum is the most common fern in these photos:

Once you get inside the lava tube (next picture), you're not done with the ferns... around every one of the light fixtures installed to illuminate the tunnel, spores have germinated and ferns are growing. A testament if ever there was one to ferns' ability to photosynthesize in low light conditions!

With the flash off, and then on:

Hawaii - Lava Ferns

2009-09-05T10:56:00.001-05:00

The most conspicuous feature of Hawaii, for someone who has never been there before, is undeniably the lava. The entire terrestrial surface of the islands is made of this stuff, a dark, craggy, ominous-looking substrate which looks suspiciously like it should still be hot to the touch from its eruptive moment of creation. In fact, for much of the lava on the south-east side of the Big Island, in the active volcanic zone, this is almost literally true. Many of these flows were formed within the last century, some of them in the last 30-40 years, and lava is still actively erupting today.

The next thing a newcomer to Hawaii might notice, after oggling the lava, is the green stuff on the lava. That would be the plants. And in most cases, the first colonists and only plants intrepid to live out on this stuff, are ferns. Ferns are excellent dispersers because of their lightweight, durable spores, so they are often the first plants to reach newly-available substrates, like lava. Here's a small sampling to give you a feel for the desolation of the lava, and hopefully, an appreciation for the indomitable nature of the ferns that live on it!

The ferns in the right photo above and at the top of this post are species of Sadleria, and the small ferns in the next photo down are Polypodium pellucidum.

Hawaii - Elaphoglossum

2009-09-01T10:42:00.012-05:00

Hawaii has eight endemic species of Elaphoglossum, which are simple, entire-leaved ferns that are often ephiphytic (growing on trees) but can be terrestrial as well. We found two species on our trip, both in a kipuka, an area of lava that is older than the lava around it, and so forms a sort of vegetated island in the middle of an otherwise desolate, young lava flow. Kipuka will often be grassy or forested, and the one we visited was the latter.

One of the species we found was Elaphoglossum paleaceum, which is easy to identify because of its nodding habit and profuse golden scales; it is pictured above and in the next two photos. The remaining photos are of the other species in the kipuka, which had an erect growth form and was not as densely scaly. Its identification was a little less straightforward... I will stick with calling Elaphoglossum sp., at least for now.

Hawaii - Cyrtomium

2009-08-15T17:38:00.000-05:00

We found two species of Cyrtomium in the Mauna Loa Bird Park near Volcano National Park. I'm very partial to this genus because it's commonly found in greenhouses and botanical garden conservatories where they want to create a very tropical-feeling environment, but it's rarely labelled. It also doesn't look much like a fern unless you turn it over and notice the sori.

This is Cyrtomium caryotideum:

And Cyrtomium falcatum:

Hawaii - Asplenium

2009-08-15T17:23:00.007-05:00

Another important genus of ferns in Hawaii is Asplenium. This group is found throughout the tropics, and there are several species in the Hawaiian islands. Asplenium species have linear sori, which can be found in other genera as well, but they can help you figure out if something could be an Asplenium:

The overall shape of the pinnae in Asplenium can also help to identify them. They are usually once pinnate to twice pinnate, or anywhere in between, as you can see in the photos below.

Hawaii - Dicranopteris

2009-08-08T14:09:00.013-05:00

This will be the first in a many-post series about various genera of ferns out here on Hawaii. First up is Dicranopteris, one of the most ubiquitous ferns you'll find at low, moist elevations. As you can see from the two photos below, it will drape itself across large swaths of vegetation, absolutely coating them.

Dicranopteris is really beautiful up close, especially when it's young. Its fiddleheads are purplish, and often sport golden or orangeish hairs or scales:

It has a unique growth pattern, unlike most other ferns. It initially sends up one unbranched frond, with fiddlehead, that unfurls and continues growing upward. Eventually, the upward movement stops and the fiddlehead/bud goes dormant. Just below it, two additional buds emerge and strike out sideways, almost at right angles from the original bud. These grow for awhile until they, too, eventually stop, and the process happens over again. This leads to the draping effect, as the fern basically continuously grows outward. (This description is based on the one in Daniel Palmer's Hawai'i's Ferns and Fern Allies book, published in 2003 by University of Hawaii-Honolulu. It's a great book - get a copy if you're visiting Hawaii or want more information on its ferns.) Another effect of this growth form is that there always seem to be little fronds unfurling somewhere on a Dicranopteris:

You can see its sori in the bottom right photo. The species shown in all of these photos is the only one on Hawaii, Dicranopteris linearis. Incidentally, this is one of the only ferns out here I can identify to species, because there's only one of them. Most of the ferns in the following posts I can only get to genus without a lot more work with the keys.

Hawaii - Tree Ferns

2009-08-02T17:30:00.010-05:00

From Snowbird and the Botany conference, I flew directly to Hawaii with my advisor. We're spending about ten days here collecting data on the Hawaiian lobeliads and, in my case, happily fern-spotting. There are about 225 species of ferns native to the Hawaiian islands, and we've seen many just in the few days we've been here. The most striking and obvious are the tree ferns, which are everywhere. The most common ones are several species of Cibotium (Cibotiaceae) and Sadleria (Blechnaceae). The fiddlehead above, my favorite of the photos I've taken so far on this trip, is a Cibotium. Here are some more views of it:

I haven't yet learned to tell apart the species. Sadleria is easier: the species pictured below is S. cyatheoides. The "cyathe...etc" in its name is found in many names that concern tree ferns, like Cyatheales, one of two large orders of leptosporangiate ferns that contains the two largest tree fern families, Dicksoniaceae and Cyatheaceae (there it is again!). Neither Sadleria nor Cibotium is in these families; Cibotium is in its own family, Cibotiaceae, which is in Cyatheales, but Sadleria is in the family Blechnaceae, which is in the other large order of leptosporangiates, Polypodiales.

Sadleria doesn't look much like the Blechnum species I'm familiar with (like Blechnum spicant), but a characteristic of many genera in the family Blechnaceae is the presence of linear sori, which you can see on the abaxial (under) sides of these pinnae.

Other cool tree-like ferns can be found in the order Marattiales, which is a group in the "lower", eusporangiate ferns.

Snowbird, Utah

2009-08-02T17:14:00.008-05:00

A brief break from fern posts: last week I was in Snowbird, Utah for the Botanical Society of America's annual Botany conference. Lots of talks, lots of mixing and mingling with friends and colleagues who only come together at this yearly event. And since the conference was in Utah, lots of mountains were available for climbing. On the last day before flying out, my labmate Phil and I took on one of the taller peaks. We hiked from the resort at an elevation of 8,125 feet, up to Hidden Peak, only 1.25 miles away but at the lofty height of 11,000 feet. It damn near killed me. But I have some beautiful photos to show for it. We only found one fern up there, a Cryptogramma species, so I'll focus instead on the beautiful wildflowers we found. Angiosperms have their day here on No Seeds!

Clockwise from top left: Aquilegia sp. (Columbine), Castilleja sp. (Indian paintbrush), Potentilla sp. (Cinquefoil), Linum sp. (Flax).

Huron Mts IV - Dryopteris fragrans

2009-07-31T23:51:00.009-05:00

Dryopteris fragrans is one of my favorite ferns, for several reasons. First, it's in the group I study, so I sort of have to like it. But it's also very different from the other Dryopteris species, it's not closely related to anything else on this continent, and it's rather difficult to find, as it grows mostly in very cold climates at higher latitudes, like Alaska and northern Canada (see past posts on D. fragrans here and here for discussions of its occurrence in Wisconsin). Because of this last reason, I've only seen it twice in the wild, in the Wisconsin Dells, and it's a thrilling experience - I've read and thought about it so much that finding it is exhilarating. Imagine my euphoria, then, to paddle out to a thin peninsula in Rush Lake, disembark from our rowboat, climb along the lakeshore below the sandstone cliffs pictured above, and find DOZENS of healthy, robust, beautiful D. fragrans swaying in the breeze from their cliff perches. They are simply beautiful!

There were also some very adorable Polypodiums growing on the rocks:

Huron Mts III - Pine Barrens

2009-07-28T23:45:00.000-05:00

Another very interesting place, though rather devoid of ferns, was a section of sandy pine barrens inside the Huron Mountain Club. There was some Pteridium aquilinum, of course... bracken fern is ubiquitous pretty much everywhere. It has very deep rhizomes, which allow it to withstand fire and drought and persist in pretty desolate places. It was smaller here than I'm used to seeing it, and quite bright green.

Huron Mts II - Dryopteris cristata

2009-07-27T23:32:00.001-05:00

One of the best things that happened during our trip to the Hurons, in my opinion, was finding a great population of Dryopteris cristata, the crested wood/shield fern. This is another member of the group I study, and I had previously only seen it in one place: a small population on private property in North Carolina. We were given directions to a large, thriving population of it near Rush Lake in the Hurons. There were dozens of plants scattered around a swampy area with a stream running through it:

D. cristata is a beautiful fern, and rather distinct looking. Its fronds are very erect, held almost vertical, and the pinnae resemble venetian blinds - rotated almost 180 degrees relative to the plane of the costa/rachis. This pinna-rotation is a unique character of this fern. One of the polyploid species it has parented, D. clintoniana, shares this character, but the pinnae aren't quite as horizontal as in D. cristata.

Huron Mts I

2009-07-25T13:39:00.011-05:00

In early June my advisor and I visited the Huron Mountain area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula for a week of ferning. We were trying to relocate populations of Dryopteris in the area that were identified in the 1960s by legendary pteridologists Herb Wagner and Dale Hagenah, both from Michigan. They located populations of seven species of Dryopteris in the Hurons, and there are at least two other species that can be found elsewhere in the U.P., which makes it one of the richest areas on the continent for the genus. We weren't successful in all of our searches, but we did find beautiful populations of two rarer species, which will hopefully become field sites for my dissertation research.

We were looking for these ferns on the lands of the privately-owned Huron Mountain Club, which is very supportive of scientific research, and funds the Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation. The HMWF graciously allowed us to use their facilities. I'll do several posts about the ferns we found in different areas of the Club's lands, including around several of the lakes.

The first day there we sought out a swampy area between Rush and Howe lakes, where we found ferns in abundance, including Dryopteris intermedia and a probable hybrid between it and Dryopteris carthusiana (which is actually itself a hybrid involving D. intermedia). Here is Rush Lake, and the swamp is pictured up at the top:

We found beautiful, lush plants of Royal Fern (Osmunda regalis), Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis), a horsetail (Equisetum sylvaticum), and Dryopteris marginalis, pictured in order below.

And this is the Dryopteris hybrid:

We also found an exceptional fern that I've never seen before, Polystichum braunii, Braun's Holly Fern:

Wisconsin Dells

2009-07-25T13:09:00.017-05:00

To most people who live in the Midwest, the Wisconsin Dells means one thing: waterparks. This is supposedly the waterpark capital of the world. Others, however, are attracted to the Dells for its stunning scenery and natural beauty. I first visited this area last fall to find Dryopteris fragrans, and I returned a few weeks ago with my labmate Phil to drop in on it again. I wanted to see the plant in a different season, and collect a fertile frond for a friend and colleague who is going to try and grow it for our research projects. The Dells is very rich, and very different from the rest of the state. As I explained in the post linked above, the river channels allow cold air to flow down from farther north, so many plants survive there that otherwise couldn't make it in mid-southern Wisconsin. The river channels, with their sun-exposed, weathered sandstone cliffs, also provide habitat for epipetric, or rock-growing plants. The rocks themselves are quite stunning too:

Here are some of the cool ferns we found growing on the rocks:

Asplenium trichomanes and Gymnocarpium dryopteris

A Woodsia species

A Pellaea species, probably Pellaea glabra

And of course, Dryopteris fragrans

Panther Creek

2009-07-10T16:37:00.010-05:00

Another place I visited while exploring the south in June was a cove along Panther Creek in northeastern Georgia. We went there last summer as well and it's an incredible place. After crossing the creek, which is knee-high at this point, and taking a short walk through the woods, we arrived at this particular, very rich cove, where the ferns are large and abundant. The dominant species along the stream bed that runs down the floor of the ravine are Diplazium pycnocarpon (Glade Fern), pictured above, and Dryopteris celsa (Log Fern), the first two photos below. Both achieve impressive stature here. Other species to be found include Deparia acrostichoides (Silvery spleenwort), Adiantum pedatum (Maidenhair Fern) (bottom picture), and a species of Cystopteris.

Dryopteris ludoviciana

2009-06-30T13:07:00.011-05:00

One of the most exciting parts of my trip to the Carolinas was finding Dryopteris ludoviciana, the Southern Shield Fern. Dryopteris is the genus I work on, and there are 13 species in North America; D. ludoviciana was the last one I hadn't yet seen in the field, so it was a total thrill to find it! We had information from some old herbarium vouchers (circa 1939) that it could be found with one of its hybrid offspring, D. celsa, in a swampy area next to a creek in northeastern South Carolina. After hacking through the woods and underbrush for an hour, we finally stumbled across both of the ferns growing happily together at the base of a cypress tree.

This is the open-water part of this lovely swamp:

Here are several of the ferns growing together:

D. ludoviciana is one of the putative parents of D. celsa, which is a hybrid; the other parent is D. goldiana. They all look vaguely similar, but the first two (which we found here) in particular share a lot of features. Side by side, however, they're clearly different. In the image below, D. celsa is on the left and D. ludoviciana is on the right. D. celsa has larger pinnae overall, and there isn't much difference between the sterile pinnae (towards the bottom of the frond) and the fertile pinnae (the two or three topmost in the picture). D. ludoviciana has smaller pinnae overall, compared to D. celsa, but there's also a definite difference between the sterile and fertile pinnae. D. ludoviciana's upper, fertile pinnae are contracted and very reduced (see photo just above, right).

South Carolina Coastal Plain

2009-06-30T12:50:00.017-05:00

For my first outing of this field season, I spent a week exploring the Carolinas and part of Georgia with native fern expert Tom Goforth of Crowdog Native Ferns & Gardens. We had a fantastic time, and spent two particularly interesting days exploring the Coastal Plain of South Carolina. One of the most beautiful places we visited was the Lynchburg Savanna Heritage Preserve.

This wet longleaf pine savanna was stunning, populated with numerous wildflowers and several species of ferns. It was interesting throughout my week in the south to find several species of ferns that were growing in several, very different environments around the area. At this savanna there were Woodwardia virginica (Virginia Chain Fern), Osmunda regalis (Royal Fern), and the ubiquitous Pteridium aqulinum (Bracken), all of which I've seen growing in dark, shady environments as well as out in the open, as they were here.

The ferns were very cool here, but even I have to admit that the real show-stoppers were the wildflowers (click to see larger pictures):

First ferns

2009-05-06T09:23:00.009-05:00

Greetings! A week ago I went on my first field trip of the season, to a natural area called Abraham's Woods in south-central Wisconsin. The forest floor was covered with spring ephemerals, like the Dicentra cucullaria visible in the image above. In addition to the flowering plants, we found fiddleheads of various fern species that were just emerging. Very exciting to find the first ferns of the season!

This is lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina.

There is a part of Abraham's Woods that is very close to the edge of the glaciation zone in southern Wisconsin, and on the leeward side of a hill/moraine is some very thick, dark, mesic soil. This is a perfect spot for Dryopteris goldiana, which makes the giant fiddleheads pictured above, with my fingers for scale.

And some ferns were even unfurling, like this Cystopteris fragilis.

Evergreen Ferns

2009-03-21T07:20:00.008-05:00

Now that the snow has melted and one can venture outside again, a feature of the late fall/early spring forest landscape you might notice is a surprising amount of green. This is due in part to evergreen ferns. These are a select set of species that drop their fronds to the ground in late fall, but keep them attached to the base of the plant, where they remain green through the winter months. There's actually a nifty mechanism by which this occurs: there is a joint right at the base of the frond that weakens at the appropriate time, so that the frond falls where it's been standing.

There are various hypotheses in the fern community about why these species do this. The consensus seems to be that having green, living fronds may allow them to jump-start photosynthesis in the spring when the snow melts and sunlight becomes available. Based on the ferns in the forest at my parents' house (where the above photos were taken), that seems like a reasonable theory. There are several species in the North American fern flora that do this, including Polystichum acrostichoides (middle photo, above; its common name, Christmas fern, reflects the fact that is a dark green color through late December) and Dryopteris intermedia (lower photo, above).

I should mention that these ferns aren't truly evergreen, in the sense that conifers are. Conifers hold their leaves through multiple growing seasons (although they do replace them eventually, usually once every 3-5 years). These ferns keep their fronds only until the next spring; when the fiddleheads start to emerge they will begin to senesce and disappear into the leaf litter.

Interrupted Fern

2009-03-07T11:25:00.008-06:00

The snow is starting to melt in Wisconsin, so I'm looking forward to the arrival of spring and a return to regular blog posting. I saw this posted on a friend's Facebook profile the other day and wanted to share it: an amusing comic about Interrupted Fern (a.k.a. Osmunda claytoniana). Of course, it really gets its name from the fertile pinnae that "interrupt" the sterile green pinnae along the rachis (see below). But the comic (drawn by Rosemary Mosco of birdandmoon) is a good interpretation, too.

Darwin and Botany

2009-02-03T08:01:00.009-06:00

2009 is a big year for evolutionary biology. In a few weeks, on February 12, we will celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, and later this year marks the 150th anniversary of publication of the Origin of Species (such a smart man, I'm sure he planned it that way!). In honor of this fascinating scientist and person, I thought I would provide the best links for reading Darwin online, and mention the intersection of botany with his thinking and works.

First off, let me comment that it's not going too far to say I love Darwin; he is a fascinating person, both as a scientist and a man. His writings are an incredible treat to read, accessible and full of tremendous insight into the natural world. The first book of his that I read was the Voyage of the Beagle, and if you haven't read it, I recommend you race out immediately and buy a copy. It is an easy, fantastic, exciting, thought-provoking read. If you aren't inclined to buy, you'll enjoy the first of these links:

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin online This treasure-trove is exactly what it claims to be: all of Darwin's writings. All of them. That means all of his major books, including the Origin, plus his numerous papers, many of which are botanical, and page-by-page images of his many notebooks and diaries.
The Darwin Correspondence Project The DCP's goal is to publish all of the letters Darwin sent and received and that are extant (i.e. weren't lost or thrown out). The Correspondence is voluminous; Darwin had close to 2000 correspondents and wrote up to 500 letters a year in the years following 1859. This site has most of the letters that have been transcribed, as well as letter sets on various subjects, and guides to reading the letters of different people. It is fascinating to read his correspondence with critics and with his supporters as he fleshed out his theories.

I cannot say enough about the delight you will get from reading Darwin. He was a joyful observer of the natural world, and his enthusiasm is clear in his writings. Also clear are his modesty and desire to be understood by his reader.

I admit that I (like most scientists) haven't read many of Darwin's less-famous papers and books, but a good many of them are on botanical subjects. Darwin suffered from illness and infirmity for most of his later life, and he took refuge in his experiments and wanderings at Down House, which he vastly preferred to the scientific fray in London. He relied on correspondence with his botanical friends for a huge amount of information in the Origin, particularly about biogeography and the immutability of species, and in his later years he increasingly turned to botanical experimentation and direct observation himself. He published books on the following botanical subjects: orchid fertilization, climbing plants, insectivorous plants, cross and self fertilization, flower forms, and plant movement, as well as dozens of papers on everything from variegated leaves to whether sea water kills seeds. All of these are available at the Complete Works of Darwin website listed above, and it is great fun to explore his writings and see the world through his eyes!

Top 100 Botany Blogs

2009-02-03T07:56:00.003-06:00

Happy February! Online college blog has assembled a list of what they consider to be the top 100 botany and plant-related blogs: Top 100 Botany Blogs. I'm very pleased and honored that No Seeds was included! We're down at #91, in the Plant Specific section. Go check out some of the others, all are wonderful and fascinating!

Dryopteris spores

2008-12-20T10:04:00.007-06:00

Hello! I apologize for the two-month hiatus, it was unintentional. Classes and research slowly hijacked my every waking moment this semester, and as the cold and snow settled in here in Wisconsin, there was less and less to talk about in terms of living plants. However, I did get to work on a really cool project for a plant anatomy course I took this fall, which I wanted to share. Along with one of my labmates and another grad student in our department, I undertook a study of the spores of Dryopteris (my research group), to satisfy the class's project requirement. We got to learn how to use the scanning electron microscope that lives in the botany building, and got some beautiful results. Above is a scattering of spores from Dryopteris marginalis, and below is a figure from the paper we wrote:

A = D. arguta, B = D. carthusiana, C = D. celsa, D = D. cristata, E = D. expansa, F = D. filix-mas, G = D. fragrans, H = D. goldiana, I = D. intermedia, and J = D. marginalis. The scale bar is 20 micrometers... really small! It was a fun project, and the results may prove useful to me down the road in my research. I'll try to post more often over the winter break, if I can find anything living to photograph! Happy Holidays!

Botany Photo of the Day

2008-10-02T09:17:00.003-05:00

The UBC Botanical Garden, which I had the great pleasure of visiting while in Vancouver this summer, posts a Botany Photo of the Day, every day. If you do the RSS thing (to which I'm addicted), here's an xml link. Go have a look at Elliottia pyroliflorus.

Berry Go Round #9

2008-10-02T09:03:00.002-05:00

The latest edition of Berry Go Round, an awesome botanical blog carnival, is up at gravity's rainbow, and I'm very pleased to say that my post on Blechnum made the cut! Go check out all the cool blogging people are doing about botany!

Dryopteris fragrans (!!)

2008-10-02T08:38:00.010-05:00

My dissertation research is on the North American species of the genus Dryopteris, the wood ferns (I may have mentioned this once or twice before), and my goal for this past summer was to collect all fourteen or so of the species found on this continent. I succeeded, except for two: D. ludoviciana, which is restricted to the far southeast (mostly Florida, coastal Alabama and Arkansas), and D. fragrans, which occurs mostly in the far northern part of the continent, up both coasts of Canada, to Greenland in the east and Alaska in the west. My travels didn't take me far enough north or south to collect these species. Then, a few weeks ago, my advisor put me in touch with an employee of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who had collected D. fragrans in central Wisconsin (!) a decade ago.

If you're at all familiar with the topography of Wisconsin, you know it's mostly flat. The state was almost entirely glaciated in the last ice age, and as the glaciers eventually retreated, they grated the sandstone bedrock down to a nice smooth plane. Except for in a few places... In the center of the state, for example, a gigantic lake was left behind, dammed by ice, which eventually broke. The entire lake drained in perhaps a matter of days, and the force of the water cut channels through the rock in an area now known as the Dells. Above is a picture of part of the Wisconsin River that runs through one such channel. The Dells are very unique in terms of plant life because they serve as conduits for cold air to flow from the northern part of the state down towards the south, and provide refugia for species that normally wouldn't be found in this part of the state because it's too warm/moist. Enter Dryopteris fragrans.

Upon learning that it might still be possible to find this fern in this unique location, I borrowed a kayak from a friend and off we went up the river to the cliffs pictured at the top. Lo and behold, we found it after only a few minutes of scanning those rocks! It's relatively small, and pretty dense, as ferns go. This is a plant meant to endure cold. Its most striking feature is that it's sticky; it gets its specific epithet, fragrans, from the fact that it is literally fragrant. It smells sort of piney, almost like Christmas, and the source of the scent is hundreds of glandular trichomes, tiny modified hairs all over the lower surface of the fronds that produce a sticky liquid substance (about whose chemical composition I haven't a clue). In these last two pictures you can see the shiny sheen of the lower leaf surface, and even some individual trichomes; they look like tiny clear crystal balls emerging from the edges of the pinnae. Really cool!

Samambaia

2008-09-12T09:19:00.002-05:00

The Portuguese word samambaia translates as fern. Apparently there is a particular fern found in the rainforests of Brazil that is traditionally known as samambaia, and a powder derived from it is used for its therapeutic properties to treat an abundance of conditions ranging from bronchitis to Alzheimer's. You can see a complete list at this site, though I have to recommend against purchasing the powder in favor of seeking modern medical advice if you have any of those ailments. It appears from the pictures I've found at that site and others that samambaia is a species of Phlebodium (which is not the same as Polypodium, despite what the linked site claims).

Whatever it's scientific identity, samambaia has prompted more than medical miracles: in 2003 cellist Yo-Yo Ma released the album Obrigado Brazil, which contains a track entitled Samambaia. The piece was inspired by, you guessed it: the Brazilian rainforest ferns he encountered while in the country.

You can hear this lovely piece of music for free, and read an NPR Morning Edition interview with Yo-Yo about the album and its inspiration at NPR's site.

Blechnum spicant

2008-09-12T08:37:00.007-05:00

Another beautiful fern from my summer travels in Vancouver, this is Blechnum spicant. It has separate sterile and fertile fronds; the sterile ones look like regular leaves, while the fertile fronds are contracted and taken up by spore-holding linear sori (lower right photo). This is a common fern in the temperate rainforests of the Northwest.

Polystichum munitum

2008-08-13T19:43:00.004-05:00

Another toothy or spinulose Polystichum, P. munitum, or Sword Fern, was without question the dominant fern species I encountered on this trip. I found this fern everywhere I went, from the forests north of Vancouver to plantings on the UBC campus to parks in Seattle. It seems to be the single most abundant fern in this part of the northwest, and it grows huge and lush. There's something about Polystichum munitum, too, that seems to turn whatever space you're walking through into a scene out of Jurassic Park. Look closely at the first picture and tell me you can't imagine a little Compsognathus peeking out from behind one of those huge basket-shaped P. munitums...

Polystichum andersonii

2008-08-13T19:36:00.004-05:00

One of several Polystichums I saw on this trip, P. andersonii made rare but lovely appearances in Vancouver and Washington. This genus is characterized by its spiny-ness (botanical term: spinulose), which you can clearly see here and in the next set of pictures of a related species...