The two pink wild azaleas--R. canescens and R. periclimenoides—we have in the Piedmont can be difficult to separate without a close look.
When flowering like today (and both flower before leafing out), the most reliable character are the hairs on the floral tube behind the flaring petals. If the hairs are tipped with a sticky spherical gland, it is R. canescens. If it is just hairy and not especially sticky, it is R. periclymenoides. This being said, K.A. Kron says of R. periclymenoides: “plants with stipitate-glandular hairs on the corolla occur sporadically throughout the range of this species”.
Some references claim that R. canescens is pale pink and R. periclymenoides is deep pink. My experience is that flower color is totally unreliable. Both species in the Atlanta area can be nearly pure white or deep pink and any color in between. Don’t go there!
Habitat can be a general guide throughout their ranges, but in Atlanta I find it horribly misleading. R. canescens is a plant of “swamps, pocosins, and savannas” and R. periclymenoides is found in “moist to dry slopes and streambanks” according to Weakley. The former are nonexistent and the latter pretty much defines the Atlanta Piedmont. Both are here and if one desires to name the wild pink azalea to species, it absolutely requires a close look. R. periclymenoides is usually the taller of the two in our area, with references like FNA indicating 5 meters.
This azalea gets its specific epithet because the flowers resemble the European honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum) as periclymenoides means “looks like periclymenum”. “Pinxter” comes from the Dutch Pinxter blomachee as it flowers about Pentecost Sunday, 50 days after Easter. Of course, Easter is a moveable festival based upon the lunar calendar and can fall from March 22 to April 25. This name had to come from the northern end it the plant’s range as its fruits are ripe and opening by that time here in the South where it flowers fairly near the early dates for Easter.
Today along the entire Red Trail’s course along the river we are never out of sight of wild azalea in every stage of bud to flower, deep pink to pure white. A particularly impressive specimen is in the flats of Jack’s Branch on the White Trail is about twenty feet tall and in full pale pink flower. This is taller than any reference I find.
I learned this lovely dandelion as Cynthia in Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. I’ve no idea who Cynthia is, but the genus name is an honorific for German David Krieg (16??–1713), plant collector in Maryland and Delaware. It often has more than two flowers.
The genus name comes from the Greek prefix ὑπο- hypo-, under, and οξυς oxys, sharp, referring to the pointed bases of the ovaries. This seems a pretty obscure character for Linnæus to choose to use as the name for such a lovely group of plants.
It’s family lineage is complex as many references retain it in the Liliaceae sensu lato “in the wide sense” (such as the Flora of North America), long recognized as in need of serious splitting. I learned it in the Amarylidaceae, a family whose circumscription has radically changed. Now it’s in it’s own family, the Hypoxidaceae which genetic research shows is far more closely related to the Orchidaceae than other liliaceous families. Linnæus placed it in the genus with star-of-Bethlehem, Ornithogalum which he considered in the Liliaceae but is now in the Asparagaceae.
Most ferns bear their sporangia on the underside of their fronds, but some bear them on separate—and very different looking—fronds. With cinnamon fern, the fertile fronds have exactly the same architecture as the sterile, its just that all the photosynthetic tissue has been eliminated leaving nothing but reproductive tissue.
Always a favorite fern, today’s are especially nice as both the fertile and sterile fronds are just expanding yet there are ripe sporangia already releasing spores into the air and the plant is only days out of the ground. Is this the result of the very mild winter and current warm spring? My usual experience with this fern has the sporangia ripe well after the sterile leaves have fully expanded.
Today’s plants are in the rather open sandy terrace of Sweetwater Creek, not the usual moist and organic (but usually acidic) cove soil expected. This is due to the floods of September 2009 depositing a thick layer of sand over the organic soil and washing away many cover trees. This may also bear on the very rapid development of the fertile fronds along with the current weather.
“When the rbcL trees, the fossil and morphological evidences are all taken into account, it can be concluded that the extant Osmunda cinnamomea has no closely related living species in Osmundaceae, and it has evolutionarily very static morphology with no significant modification for more than 200 million years. Thus we can call extant Osmunda cinnamomea a ‘living fossil’.” (Yatabe, Kishima, & Murakami 1999)
...we analyzed over 8,500 characters of DNA sequence data from seven plastid loci (atpA, rbcL, rbcL–accD, rbcL–atpB, rps4–trnS, trnG–trnR, and trnL–trnF). Our results confirm those from earlier anatomical and single-gene (rbcL) studies that suggested Osmunda s.l. is paraphyletic. ... We support the recognition of a monotypic fourth genus, Osmundastrum, to reflect these results. (Metzger et al 2008)
The close-up of the fertile frond on the right aptly illustrates the common name and specific epithet. Unfortunately, there is no smell or taste of cinnamon here.
Over the years I’ve head these galls are edible and that pioneer folk pickled them. I’ve never tried one, but when I pull them off the plant, they are brittle and break much like a fresh apple and look edible. Since all parts of azalea are poisonous, I’ve refrained from eating them. I’ve not found a definitive source for their edibility.
I’m used to seeing galls on the petioles (leaf stems) of hickory, but not on the leaves themselves. Today’s gall strongly resembles the willow leaf bean gall I’ve been examining each summer in Alaska. I cut this one open and just as I’m about to photograph the fleshy growth with a maggot inside, it blows away in the wind. The creature causing this gall is probably a aphid-like insect called a phylloxera from its genus. The maggot is exactly the same very pale green color as the gall tissue and only 1 mm long by 0.2 mm wide, very tiny.
When examining the flower and fruit of this plant, it is easy to see how it came to be understood as primitive and placed in the order Laurales, close sister to the Magnoliales and Piperales among the most primitive of angiosperms.
The flowers are made of of entirely separate tepals where the sepals and petals are very similar arranged in a continuous spiral on the outside of the hypanthium (a fleshy cup-like growth of the receptacle or flower base) with many stamens and staminodes (sterile) inserted on the inside. Below the stamens inside the hypanthium are many carpels. As the fruit ripens, the hypanthium forms a closed pouch around the carpels which disintegrate inside. The pouch becomes almost leather-like and opens along slits to release the abundant achenes inside.
While a prolific seed producer, the primary means of reproduction seems to be the aggressive stolons that run atop the soil just below the duff layer.
Today’s flowers are lightly scented and I find a very great range of spicy fragrance for this shrub from virtually none to almost pungent. This is the origin of the names “bubby-bush” and “boobie-bush” where pioneer women would take advantage of the pleasant perfume by placing flowers inside their bustier.
Like its distant relative, the large-flowered trillium (T. grandiflorum), its petals fade to pink making the flower actually more beautiful as it ages. This flower is very young as the leaves and stem are a long way from being fully expanded and formed, yet it is a lovely pink. The long stamens of this trillium are a joy to examine as their egg yolk yellow color is beautiful and they are twisted like an airplane propeller.
This trillium is named in honor of Mark Catesby (1682–1749), explorer and author of Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first published flora of North America.
The genus name comes from the Ancient Greek κράτος kratos, strength, from the extreme hardness of the wood. Hawthorn comes to us from the Old English hagaþorn, or earlier hæguþorn, meaning white thorn. It may also derive from obsolete haw, hedge or encompassing fence.
The name iris comes to us from the Greek ἶρις iris, a rainbow, probably from the many colors of the flowers, especially the deep blues and lavenders of many. Crested and cristata come from the ridges on the unusual tubular structure above the colorful petals. This, with the bright yellow and white patch, serves as a “landing field and hangar” for pollinating insects. The undecorated sepals look like plain blue petals between the elaborate real petals.
The name “cooter” comes to us with some obscurity. It first showed up in English in 1827 in the phrase “drunk as a cooter” then applied to a turtle in 1835. It may derive from the “obsolete verb coot ‘to copulate’ (1660s), of unknown origin. The turtle is said to copulate for two weeks at a stretch”. The Miriam-Webster online dictionary has that it may have been brought to America from Africa from the Bambara and Malinke word for turtle, kuta.
Tropicos lists 21 subordinate taxa and Weakley includes four. This is the “standard” plant that can grow to substantial and robust stature, probably because it is a tetraploid, 2n=56 (having four sets of chromosomes).
The hike ends with a sumptuous repast at our covered dish luncheon!