More flowers

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...

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!

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

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!

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

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

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