In the Woods – Brennah's Backyard

Spring Ephemerals Series #6

Maianthemum canadence

Canada mayflower is another maianthemum. Unlike the other wildflowers in these posts, this one seems to be a new arrival here. I don’t remember seeing it until the year before last, and then I wondered what it was because it was quite small and didn’t flower and didn’t seem to grow into anything (it just faded away as the summer went on, as spring ephemerals do). I suspect they may have sprouted from seeds that year which would explain why they were so small and didn’t flower, but there are several patches of them around that seem to have all come up in unison… So I’m not really sure what the story here is, but I’d like to be able to find out more about it.

This was about the extent of the plants’ growth in the first year.

These wildflowers may be a new arrival to my little patch of woods, but they aren’t uncommon in general, so although I don’t think the ones here have produced any berries yet, I have had opportunities to see and photograph the berries. The berries have a similar spotted look as they’re ripening to solomon’s plume berries, but they grow in smaller unbranched clusters.

This patch of nearly ripe berries is growing among sphagnum moss plants near the shore of Lake Superior. (The berries in the other photograph were also growing near the shore of Lake Superior, among some harder to identify moss.)

Canada Mayflower in full bloom in the woods.

Spring Ephemeral Series #5

Hairy Solomon’s seal

Solomon’s seals’ most obvious difference from the false Solomon’s seals (maianthemums) is that their flowers hang from the central stem instead of growing from the tip of the stem. I’ve found these sprinkled around the woods, but they definitely don’t grow in thick patches like some of the other wildflowers.

Solomon’s seal flowers with wild geraniums in the background.

Last spring I noticed that the leaves look quite interesting when they’re unfurling, which actually made them stand out even more from the maianthemums for me.

Spring Ephemeral Series #4

Solomon’s Plume

Maianthemum racemosum aka solomon’s plume is larger and has larger flower clusters than starry false solomon’s seal, but it doesn’t spread as vigorously, so I don’t find it in such dense patches. I find this species particularly fun to photograph, and the flowers aren’t even the main draw for me. I do have one particular photo of the flowers that is one of my favorites, though:

The out of focus leaves in the background are of a different plant of the same species, which is part of what I like about the photo. The first photo I used is also an old favorite of mine, showing the developing flower cluster with wild geraniums in the background. But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken are of the leaves, which have much the same alternating, zigzagging pattern as their relatives, but with an extra wavy edge to the leaves.

It usually blooms slightly out of sync with the other ephemerals, and only has a cluster of buds when the others are at their peak. I still like seeing it mixed in with the wild geraniums, though.

It also has a distinctive speckled pattern on the underripe berries, which it shares with a few other maianthemum species, but is otherwise unique as far as I know. And because they have particularly large flower clusters, they also have larger clusters of berries.

I rarely see the berries fully ripe, so I’m sure they are appreciated by the woodland creatures as well.

Spring Ephemeral Series #3

Here’s another one of the spring ephemerals:

White Baneberry

White baneberry is a larger individual plant than most of the spring ephemerals, but there’s only a couple of them in the woods. This species is also called doll’s eye because the poisonous berries look like doll eyes.

It was absent from the main ephemeral display last year because the spring brought a variety of inclement weather, including a warm period followed by some hard freezes and that seemed to get the better of this plant. Fortunately, after checking on it later, I saw that the plants had berries coming along on them, so they must have bloomed at some point (there are no paths to that spot, so I don’t get back there super often… and it seems even more inaccessible lately since some big branches have come down). There was one year, though, where I managed to get some cool pictures of it with wild geraniums coloring the background… which turned out to be a surprisingly awkward angle to try to get. (Shooting from a standing position was too high an angle, and from crouching was too low…)

Spring Ephemeral Series #2

Here are a couple more of the woodland spring ephemerals for you:

Maianthemum Stellatum

These are possibly the second most numerous wildflowers in our woods, (though the unobtrusive euonymus flowers are also a possibility) and they tend to spread and grow in thick patches. There seem to be quite a lot of common names for this species, but I don’t like any of them. They’re pretty much all false something, and also overly long. The one I’ve heard most frequently is starry false Solomon’s seal. Sometimes I call it starry maianthemum, though I did just make that up.

Like the other members of its genus the arrangement of the leaves on their slightly zigzag stem give them and interesting pattern to try to capture in my photography.

They also have neat looking berries as they’re ripening up. (So much so that I’ve posted about maianthemum berries specifically before!)

And the flowers are appreciated by a variety of insects. Here’s a longhorn beetle enjoying the maianthemum flowers.

Euonymus obovatus

Euonymus obovatus is a small plant that creeps across the ground, largely hidden from view by the other ephemerals. It is another that I don’t much like the common name- running strawberry bush. (I believe it’s named after another plant called strawberry bush… but still.) I don’t have a lot of good photos of this one since it tends to hide in the shadows, but it is an interesting looking little plant. it was about the last of the ephemerals I managed to identify so I don’t know a lot about this one either.

Hickory ‘Flowers’

In early spring when trees are just starting to leaf out, a few tree species have leaf buds that look quite a bit like flowers. Possibly the most dramatic example of this I’ve seen are the hickory trees (and the shagbarks in particular). Their buds can be quite large, which adds to the effect.

Ironically, the actual flowers of hickory trees don’t look nearly as showy as these buds; they have catkins and tiny, not very noticeable female flowers (which I haven’t seen since they’re high up in mature trees).

I first noticed this a few years ago now, but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I was able to start getting some decent pictures. (It helps to have some young saplings that are easier to reach…)

The young, just unfurling leaves look pretty interesting too, with a layer of fur and tiny beads of what I think might be some sort of sap or resin.

I thought the leaves on this sapling were particularly pretty with the maroon color between the leaflet midribs.

This one is a close up (crop) of the previous picture.

Crab spiders like this one usually hang out on (or in) flowers, so it was interesting to see this one on a freshly opened hickory bud.

The outside of the bud is fuzzy and feels kind of silky if you touch it.

There’s always so much out there to discover at each time of year and things seem to happen especially quickly in the spring. You have to keep an eye out or you’ll miss it!

Spring Ephemeral Series #1

Towards the end of May (roughly) is when all the spring ephemerals in the woods flower each year. It is an impressive display, but it is fairly brief. (You could say it lives up to the name ephemeral, I suppose.) I wanted to make a post about it, but with multiple years worth of photos, it was turning out fairly long, so I decided to make it a little series instead, and just spotlight one or two of the different species I’ve observed per post.

Wild Geranium

Wild geraniums are the most numerous of the spring ephemerals in our woods, which is part of their charm; it would be hard not to be impressed by the way they quite literally carpet large areas of the woods. I’ve tried many times over the years to capture a good sense of this in my photos, but although I’ve made some improvements and gotten some good photos, I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing will quite compare to seeing it in person. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to do the best I can with it.

Like quite a few native wildflowers, wild geraniums have at least one specialist pollinator: the cranesbill miner bee (cranesbill is another name for the wild geranium). Being specialist pollinators means that these bees will only use wild geranium pollen for feeding their offspring, though the adults may visit other flowers for nectar.

This is probably a cranesbill miner bee (I am at least certain that this is some type of miner bee), but miner bees can be very difficult to identify to the species.

Of course wild geraniums also provide nectar and pollen to a variety of other non-specialized pollinators too, like this agapostemon (sweat) bee.

This certainly won’t be the last you see of the wild geraniums in this series; they show up alongside the other ephemerals in many of their photos, too.

Tiny Felt Leaves

One spring I was fascinated by these tiny, just-emerged oak leaves I found on the many oak saplings along the edge of the woods. To me they looked like tiny felt crafts. They were actually tiny enough to be tricky to photograph.

Bright red, fuzzy leaves don’t seem to be a characteristic of any specific oak species; they could have to do with environmental conditions, but I wasn’t able to find much information about it. Plus, I don’t know if what I found was talking about leaves that were as tiny as the ones I found. They certainly grew out of their fuzzy red stage extremely quickly.

These leaves are only a couple days older than the others and still quite fuzzy but they only have a hint of the red at the edges of the leaves.

The undersides of a couple leaves just emerging from the bud.

I was able to spot bright red leaves like this again this past spring so I do know it wasn’t just a one-year oddity. I’m pretty sure at least some of these are burr oak, but it’s hard to tell for sure what they all were at this stage and there may have been multiple species with leaves like this. (I’m pretty sure these are all from the white oak group, though.) I’m still not quite sure yet how common this might be, but I could see it being easy to overlook, as tiny as the leaves are and if they’re on mature trees they’d be up well out of sight.

Bluebird and Dogwood Berries

Here is a series of photos I took shortly before I went to New Mexico of a bluebird doing acrobatics to reach some dogwood berries. This series is definitely an improvement over the last time I tried to photograph a bird eating dogwood berries (which was shortly after I got the telephoto lens and was still getting a feel for it). Though all these photos are cropped at least a little, I think it’s cool to be able to see some of the poses of a bird foraging for berries since they usually move a bit too fast to be able to see what they’re doing.

Forest Floor Berries

There are two different species of maianthemum that have been in the woods since I moved here (recently a third species has shown up, but that’s a story for later). Maianthemums (a genus also commonly known as false solomon’s seal) have a lot of interesting facets, but one thing I find particularly cool is their semi-ripe berries. When ripe, they’re small, red, and not too distinctive looking. But when they’re still ripening, one of the species here has spotted berries (maianthemum racemosum, also known as Solomon’s plume), and the other species has striped berries (maianthemum stellatum, also known as starry false solomon’s seal).

Maianthemum racemosum berries. This species has larger clusters of berries (and flowers, in the spring).

One time, while walking in the woods, I found this; these are the fully ripe berries of Solomon’s plume (possibly even a bit overripe, but at least a bit shriveled), and they do look quite cool dried up like this. I think most of the time the berries get eaten before they get to this stage, and it seems especially unusual to get to this stage with the full cluster intact like this.