When we first booked our vacation to Nova Scotia, I imagined a world of plants and animals relatively unfamiliar to me. I figured since we were heading so far north (it turns out, Nova Scotia is really more east than north) and all the way to another country, I would be faced with an assortment of new species. But while the rocky coastlines and higher elevation ecosystems in Cape Breton were quite different from most of our Cape Cod landscapes,…
Take a walk along a shady pond side, river bank or wetland area this time of year and you’re likely to encounter clusters of plants with odd-shaped, singly-borne, bright orange-yellow pendulous flowers – that’s jewelweed! In fact, jewelweeds often grow in such dense clusters that their canopy can suppress or shade out the establishment of perennial herbs. Although there are multiple species of jewelweed, the most common one we have on Cape Cod is spotted jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). Spotted jewelweed…
In my opinion, berry season is the best season. Scattered throughout the understory of forests and along field edges various kinds of berries, including blue berries, huckleberries, blackberries and black raspberries, are ripening. Wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius), also called wine raspberries, are another edible berry ripening at this time. Less common and less well known than our native berries, wineberries were introduced from Asia for their ornamental value and with the goal of creating hybrids with red raspberries and blackberries. Wineberries…
Beach plums (Prunus maritima) are best known for the fruits they produce in August/September, which are popular in jams and jellies, but they are most easily spotted this time of year, even from a distance, due to their showy displays of bright white flowers. The flowers bloom in May before the leaves emerge. Although these short, densely-branched beach plum shrubs appear rather scraggly-looking prior to leafing out, they will soon fill in with alternate, simple, approximately 2 inch long leaves…
A common non-native wildflower, purple deadnettle (Lamium purpureum) is also known as red deadnettle or red henbit. Due to its propensity to spring up in lawns, it is generally considered an unwanted weed, and by some accounts is considered invasive in New England. Like other members of the mint family (Lamiaceae), purple deadnettle has a square stem and opposite leaves. The small tube-like flowers arranged in whorls at the apex of the plant range from pink to purple. The upper…
Saturday afternoon I came across a patch of flowering bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) in a sandy clearing that was absolutely abuzz with bumblebees. Its short, sprawling growth form seems vine-like, but bearberries are actually low growing, evergreen shrubs. The waxy leaves are 1/2 to 1 inch long and taper at the base. Bearberries are a member of the blueberry family (Ericaceae), and like blueberries have small, hanging bell-shaped flowers. The white flowers, which are often tipped with pink, are pollinated by bees…
Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) is a widespread invasive plant in this area. By the end of the summer it will grow into large stands up to 10 feet high, but in early May it is just beginning to poke out of the ground. This early stage is the best time to forage for this plant. One of my previous post gave more detail about Japanese knotweed in general, but the main intention of this post is to provide a delicious…
Like partridge berry (Mitchella repens), pipsissewa (Chimaphila umbellata), and spotted wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata), wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) is a low-growing, glossy-leaved perennial common to our area. With numerous common names, wintergreen could easily be the poster child for why Latin names are so important. This small red-berried plant is also called teaberry, checkerberry, deerberry and boxberry, among other things. The plant is shade tolerant, but berries are more common on wintergreen plants growing in clearings. Also, although the plant is considered…
Generally speaking, in the plant world, one flower will produce one fruit. Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) is one of the two exceptions. Partridgeberry, along with only one other species of plant native to Japan, are sometimes referred to as “twinberries” because each fruit is the product of two adjacent flowers. In June, pairs of fuzzy four-petaled white or pink flowers bloom at the end of each stem. Each pair of flowers is comprised of one with a tall pistil and short…
A short-lived warm spell (mid-forties feels pretty good when it’s been below 20 degrees for weeks) allowed me to spend some quiet time sitting by the Quashnet River, watching birds, observing and drawing winter vegetation, and quietly waiting and hoping (unsuccessfully) to see the family of river otters that lives by. Besides the numerous bare woody trees and shrubs, there were two obvious and abundant plants in the river’s flood plain where I had settled down: sphagnum moss and swamp…