Month: April 2019

People seem to notice the willow catkins when they are small and fuzzy, but this stage is essentially just a bud of a flower that has not yet opened. They are not quite what one thinks of when thinking of flowers; they don’t have petals, and they don’t look like they are trying to attract insects. But they are the part of the plant that produces its pollen and its seeds. Unlike many flowers, though, the pollen is produced on separate catkins on separate plants from the seed producing catkins.

The small fuzzy buds are generally more appreciated for their appearance, and they are pretty, but I actually find their later stages to be even more fun to photograph. There is a surprising amount of variety in the opened willow catkins (even of the same species of willow), and I took more than fifty photos of the opened catkins this spring; most of them seem distinctly different from each other. The catkins are very attractive to pollinators since there’s not a lot flowering yet, and the insects give even more variety to the pictures of the opened catkins.

It occurred to me, while taking pictures of insects on the seed producing (female) catkins, that if willows were wind pollinated, as most plants with catkins are, then the pollinators should have no interest in the female catkins. Since many pollinators eat pollen, as well as nectar, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see them on the male catkins only, but they were just as excited about the female catkins. It seemed that willows must actually be insect pollinated, and a little bit of research confirmed my guess.

When we first moved here, there were two tiny flowers that would bloom when the weather was beginning to warm, but before it really looked like spring. They were draba verna, and bittercress. It occurs to me now, that one of these is a common name, and the other is a scientific name, which strikes me as slightly inconsistent. It is how I usually refer to the plants, though. The common name of draba verna (whitlow grass) seems harder to remember and certainly seems less descriptive of a tiny, early flowering member of the mustard family. Bittercress is also a member of the mustard family, and seems very much like a miniature version of a garden cress that I grew in the hoophouse the winter before last. Both were extremely cold hardy, both tasted about the same to me, and they looked very similar except for size; the garden cress was much larger. The flowers look a little different too. The garden cress also doesn’t shoot its seeds at you if you brush up against a ripe seedpod. Before I identified the bittercress, I called it the ‘seedshooting mustard’.