This week in the woods, a number of plants showed their floral faces through the curtains of other leafy wetland growth. Three long twisted “flags” (a sepal up top and petals to the side) make up the yellow lady’s slipper’s “hairdo,” and the lip (the “slipper”) is a modified petal, with a pair of fused sepals behind it. As Susan Shea explains in her Outside Story essay from our archive, lady’s slippers, of which we have a handful of species in the Northeast, use color and odor to lure bumblebees for pollination but offer no nectar in return. The flower’s structure compels the bee to take a fixed, one-way path and rub pollen from other lady’s slippers on the stigma and collect pollen from the anther. A number of factors mean slow and infrequent reproduction for lady slippers: bees learn that they hold no nectar reward and visit them less frequently after their first encounter, germinated seeds won’t grow until they join with a mycorrhizal fungus (Rhizoctonia), which helps them absorb soil nutrients, and it can take several years for that connection to happen and up to another 15 years for the first bloom. Even if they manage to make it to this stage, the obviously beautiful and apparently delicious flowers remain vulnerable to orchid-hunting gardeners and hungry deer.
Nearby droops the less attention-seeking water avens. These flowers’ stamens will elongate to the point of self-fertilization as they mature, in case they have not already cross-pollinated. The plant spreads by rhizome but also by sending its burr-like seeds farther afield attached to mammals’ coats.
The water avens’ comparably subtle neighbor, swamp saxifrage, begins at ground level with leaves in a basal rosette and sends up tall hairy stems that end in a branched inflorescence. Northern blue flag, the Northeast’s most common native iris, blooms atop its 3-foot stalks between late May and July. Dark-veined yellow patches give pollinating bees directions across its purple sepals to where they can collect nectar. These perennials often share habitat with cattails, an evolutionary relative, and before flowering, the species’ sword-shaped leaves can resemble one another; foragers should note that while the light part of cattails’ tender young shoots are edible, blue flag is poisonous. Invasive yellow iris also encroaches upon the same forested wetlands and stream and pond edges blue flag occupies; Laurie D. Morrissey has more in her Outside Story “A Tale of Two Irises.”
In the woods slightly uphill from these flowers’ wetland home, Canadian bunchberry blooms in patches. Also known as bunchberry dogwood or creeping dogwood and the smallest of the dogwood family, this low-growing plant is not woody like other dogwood species, but its whorled leaves have the same shape and vein pattern. What appears to be a singular four-petaled white flower is in fact four bracts surrounding tiny individual flowers, which will become the red berry bunches later in the summer. Pollen distribution takes place when an insect lands on a flower (or curious human individual pokes it with a twig) and the stuck-together petals fly apart, releasing the stamens, and the pollen-bearing anthers on the stamens’ ends catapult pollen onto the insect visitor and/or into the wind. This photo shows one flower that has opened and the rest with their petals still sealed at their tips. The pollination tactic means that insects that might otherwise only eat the nutrient-rich pollen will still spread some to other flowers they visit. A high-speed video taken by Joan Edwards and other researchers shows a flower opening in less than a half millisecond, making it one of the fastest movements by a plant ever recorded. (In case you’re wondering: at the time of Edwards’s research appearing in Nature in 2005, the Canadian bunchberry held the record for fastest-moving plant ever recorded, but the white mulberry tree has since surpassed it, with flower movement taking 25 microseconds, or 20 times faster than the Canadian bunchberry; it can launch its pollen at velocities around half the speed of sound.)
Despite its name and the compound leaves similar to ashes’, the shrubby mountain ash belongs to the rose family and is not a true ash. Its bright red berries persist through the winter and have high value for wildlife, including numerous bird species, such as robins, grouse, and pine grosbeaks.
One of the chief enjoyers of mountain ash berries, this cedar waxwing foraged with its wheezing, marauding flock. The frugivore (fruit eater) occurs in our region more reliably in winter than its larger cousin the Bohemian waxwing and nests here in the summer. Its fruit-heavy diet, its habit of swallowing fruit whole rather than separating seeds out, and its intrepidness make it a year-round seed disperser. During these warmer months, they eat slightly more insects along with the fruit, and we might see them flitting out from waterside perches to catch emerging aquatic insects mid-air, the yellow tips at the ends of their tail fanned behind them.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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