The Magic of Spring

One of my favorite spring plants is Jack-in-the-Pulpit.  It is an amazing and unique spring wildflower.  It does not have the instantaneous beauty that other wildflowers are known to possess.  Jack-in-the-Pulpit hides in the woodlands among the other emerging spring flora (plants).  These wildflowers blend in unless you know the clues that lead to the discovery of these hidden treasures of the forest.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit has the scientific name Ariseama triphyllum.  The species name is derived from the trifoliate leaves that characterize this plant.  The three part leaves are often mistaken for poison ivy during the early spring.  Something cool that I just learned:  If the plant has one leaf stalk arising from the ground it is a male and if it has two it is a female.  Mayapples have this same characteristic which makes it easy to determine the gender and sometimes the age of the plant.  Jack-in-the-Pulpit is also called Indian turnip and brown dragon just to name a few name variations.

The Jack-in-the-Pulpit flower is what makes this plant really unique.  It is either plain green, green with green stripes, or green with purple stripes, so it blends in well unless you are looking for it.  This plant brings to mind a preacher standing in a pulpit over his parishioners.  The spadix is the in the center of the flower stalk, with a spathe (sheath-like leaf) surrounding it.  

Here are some pictures that I took early this morning:

What is your favorite spring wildflower?

Autumn

The colors have been beautiful this year!  

A lot of factors go into the brilliance of the season- the amount of sunlight, temperature fluctuations, cloud cover, and moisture.  What happens in the fall is that as the daylight decreases, the chlorophyll (the green stuff in leaves) stops producing food.  When the chlorophyll dies off and fades away, the brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, and purples that have been present the whole time are uncovered.  Warm sunny days and cool nights help to enhance the colors that we see. Eventually the leaves detach from their branchy homes and gracefully flutter to the ground.  Enough of the botany aspect for now.

The best part of fall for kids is raking the leaves into piles and jumping in!  Our kids love playing in the leaves.  Pumpkin becomes a monster and loves to bury others under the crunchy goodness.  We have shag-bark hickory, red maple, sweet gum, ash, and a few fruit trees in our yard.  This time of the year my husband also LOVES to crack open the shag-bark hickory nuts to collect the decadent nut meat inside.  It is an extremely time consuming process and involves a hammer.  Usually you cannot make it through the season without at least one smashed finger.  Mix some of these nuts into chocolate chip cookie dough for a wonderful autumn treat! 

Botany for First Graders

I had the opportunity to visit Pumpkin’s class earlier this week and talk about PLANTS!!!! It was an amazing 30 minutes! Yay!!!!  

First off, I started talking about me and what I know. I told the class that I am a botanist, which means that I went to school and learned all about plants. Sure plants do not move, they do not talk, and they can kind of seem boring. But if you take the time to watch plants and play with plants, they can teach you amazing things! My brain is full of a lot of amazing fact that I have learned from reading books. I talked about the Jack O’Lantern Mushroom and how their gills glow in the dark. I told them about trees going dormant (or sleeping) in the winter and waking back up in the spring. I reminded them that just like them I am always learning something new.  

I started off with plant anatomy, but put the spin of relating it themselves to help them understand the plant parts better. We pretended to be trees. I had the kids stand up and stretch. Then I asked, “What do your feet do for you?” They help you stand up. They help you keep your balance. They keep you from falling over. “What part of the tree would be like your feet?” Roots! Roots are similar to our feet. Roots help to keep plants from falling over. Roots help the plants stay in one place. And roots have tiny straws in them that help them drink water to pull up to the tips of their branches. “What do your legs do for you?” They help you stand straight and tall. They keep you from being a blob on the floor. “What part of the tree would be like your legs?” The trunk or stem. The trunk gives the tree support and keeps it standing tall. Trunks and stems are also full of tiny straws that help to move the water up and the food down. Since by this point, I had several blobs on the floor I asked the children to sit back down in their chairs. “If we stretch our arms above our heads, what part of the tree would be our arms?” Branches. The branches help to hold the leaves up so the can get sunlight. If the branches slumped to the ground the tree would have trouble making food. “How can our mouth be similar to a tree?” We use our mouth to eat food to be healthy and strong. “What part of the tree would be like our mouth?” The leaves. The leaves make food for the tree using the sunlight, air, and water. The green color in the leaves is where the food is made. When the leaves stop making food in the fall the green color fades away and we see the yellows, reds, and oranges that are hidden during the rest of the year. Once the food is made the tiny straws in the plant take it to feed the rest of the plant. “Have you ever noticed that our hair and eyes look different from our friends?” That is what makes us unique, so everyone is different. Plants are kind of like that, flowers and seeds look different from plant to plant.  Just like our eyes and hair look different from person to person. 

 The next part of the lesson was about the plant parts that we eat. I asked “Do any of you eat plants?” Most of the kids said “No.” Ha ha ha – If they only knew!!!!! Of course now they do know! So I reached into my bag and pulled out a carrot that had the green feathery leaves on top. “This carrot is a plant.” We talked about carrots being roots. Then we listed a few other plants we eat that are roots- onions, beets, radishes, and potatoes to name a few. I pulled out a stalk of celery next. “What part of the plant is this?” After a few guess, we found out that it is the stem of a plant that we eat. Another stem that we eat is rhubarb. I pulled broccoli out of the bag. This definitely stumped them. But we finally figured out that we were eating the flower. Other flowers that we can eat are cauliflower and pumpkin blossoms. Some people even eat violet blossoms. I pulled living lettuce out of my bag next. What part of the plant could this be? Well leaves, of course. I asked the kids what other leaves we may eat and got spinach, kale, and romaine in reply. Last but not least we need a seed, so I pulled out an ear of corn. Yep! This put the kids over the edge. Most of the kids just could not believe that when they ate corn on the cob that they were eating seeds. Other examples of seeds include peas, beans, strawberries (little dots on the sides), sunflower seeds, and much more. If you dry out corn, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds then plant them in the soil you will most likely grow corn, a sunflower or a pumpkin. I enjoyed this part of the time with the kids the most. It is so funny to watch the reaction of kids when they realize that they actually eat plants. They are so use to their food that they just take it for granted and do not realize where that food comes from. 

I read the kids the story “I Am a Seed” by Jean Marzollo. The story is about a pumpkin seed and a marigold seed and how they change. The fun part of the story is that the pumpkin seed does not know what is going to be so it thinks that it will be a marigold like its friend. It is a really cute story about how seeds grow and how plants grow and make new seeds. Then we talked for a tad bit about seeds. They had just planted bean seeds the day before and the teacher had the class tell me about it. I told the class the special part about seeds. They have a baby, a bottle, and a blanket. The baby is the embryo (the baby plant). The bottle is the food that is stored inside the seed. It has just enough to help the seed get started until the leaves sprout out. And of course the blanket is the seed coat that protects the seed until it is read to emerge (sort of like a chicken egg shell). 

 I wrapped up my thirty minutes with the kids with a take home project. Pumpkin and I had prepared a craft bag for every classmate and the teacher to make a 3-D flower of their own.  Pumpkin got to hand a bag out to all of his classmates to take home, so they could tell their parents about plants and what they learned.
 

 3-D Flower Instructions  

1) Color the stem (craft stick) with a crayon. 
2) Cut out the two green leaves. 
3) Glue the flower (cupcake liner) to the top part of the stem so it faces up. 
4) Glue the leaves to the middle of the stem. 
5) Glue the seeds to the center of the flower. 
6) Glue the brown roots (yarn) to the bottom of the stem. 
7) Let dry.

Strawberry Shake Botanical Lesson

I had a strawberry shake with my supper tonight.  Boy, it sure was good!  It even had chunks of real strawberries and occasionally the straw would get blocked.  This always brings to mind a spring time botanical lesson.  

Trees are very interesting organisms.  They breath, they grow, they make food, and they multiple.  This time of the year trees are coming back to life after their long winters nap.  Have you ever thought about the mechanics behind the bud?  

Before the bud grows and flowers the sap has to start moving in the tree.  Warm days and cool nights start this process along its way.  But how does the sap move throughout the tree?  By tiny straws found in the vascular cambium.  

The vascular cambium is the special growing part of the tree that is sandwiched between the bark and the wood of the tree.  Two types of tubes are found in the vascular cabium- xylem and phloem.  Xylem carries the water and nutrients from the roots upward to the limbs of the tree and phloem carries the food from the limbs down to the roots for storage.  But, in the spring time when the sap starts following both tubes carry the sap upwards during the day and down into the ground during the night.   

The sap moving upward provides food to the buds, which causes them to grow, leaf out and sometimes flower.  

But to get back to the strawberry milkshake.  Have you ever had a strawberry stuck in the straw and no matter how hard you try that strawberry will just not move through the straw?  

That is what happens to the xylem and phloem tubes in the trees when they get older.  When the xylem tube get blocked, those tubes turn into wood.  When phloem tubes get blocked, they turn into bark.  And that is just part of the story of how a tree grows. 

Wonders of Fall

Just like spring, fall is a wonderful time to get some amazing nature shots.  Take some time and enjoy the beauty around you, until then check out these fun photos.