Happy February, everyone!
I’ve been saving up this fabulous fungus for a good Mushroom Monday, and today I present:
A Puffball, before and after puffing. My parents and I found it in the woods when I was visiting them back in December, and of course I could not resist helping it spread its spoors around as I’ve enjoyed doing since I was a young kid.
POW!
A couple weekends ago a friend and I had a day off for MLK Jr. Day and decided to spend it hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was an overcast day in LA, so we took the precaution of wearing our windbreakers, but never expected it would actually be raining farther west.
Our hike to Sandstone Peak, the highest in the range, was gloriously misty, more like the Pacific Northwest than our familiar desert. Seeing the landscape doused in moisture, such a rarity in the long drought, was magical. The reportedly excellent views were obscured, but details like the tiny droplets on branches came to the forefront.
Even on sunny days, the landscape is different up in these mountain areas. The vegetation, mostly low shrubs, is known as chapparal.
Narrow leaf yuccas abound, and the landscape also features broad-leaf evergreen trees. California’s grand pin oaks and live oaks are part of this category of trees, which I had never experienced before moving out west. The most common tree on Sandstone Peak hike was a particularly lovely species with peeling red bark and small light-colored leaves.
At first I assumed it was a kind of eucalypt due to its other most prominent feature- the smell! As soon as we stepped out of the car I noticed a very particular scent in the air, that good / bad cat pee-like odor that wafts off eucalyptus trees. The dampness in the air that day seemed to accentuate it.
It took me a full week of searching, both online and in actual books, to identify this new tree I had never seen before. In spite of its peeling bark and pungent smell, the red tree is not in fact a eucalypt at all, but a California native known as Red Shank, Latin name Adenostoma sparsifolium.
I learned recently that only 6% of all the tree species currently living in Southern California actually originated here, so it’s exciting that this beautiful specimen doesn’t come from Australia but right here.
On the shortest day of the year, my parents and I ventured out to the vernal spring in the woods behind their house to celebrate the Solstice. There we found a diminutive world of ferns, mosses, and lichens.
Botanically, mosses belong to a group called Bryophytes, or non-vascular plants. They don’t have the complex roots and sap transportation systems of larger (vascular) plants, so are considered primitive members of the plant kingdom, between algae and more complex land-dwelling forms. Bryophytes do not flower and so do not reproduce via seeds. Instead, they grow the “fruiting bodies” you see on this little hillock above, which are filled with spores.
I’ve been fortunate enough to know wetland pools and streams like this my whole life, and have always loved how the mossy upheavals resemble tiny islets covered in forests of trees.
The delicate crunchy lichen grows in a fractal matrix above a clump of green moss.
I read recently that lichen is becoming more and more scarce, especially in urban and suburban areas, due to air pollution. Lichen is an amazing creature, a composite of algae and fungus that resembles both but at the same time neither. It is plant-like but not a plant; fungus-like but not a fungus. The existence of this symbiotic colony is a delicate balance, so any change in environment can imperil it. Its presence in these woods confirms what we already know– That this is a pure space to be preserved and appreciated by those who know and love it.
As I welcomed a fresh new winter season with my family this year, these beautiful little specimens felt like a verdant gift and reminder of all that home has to offer in the coming year.
Happy Solstice, Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas!
Mushroom Monday, New York State Style
Taking a cue (OK, maybe directly copying) my role model of online botanizing, Matthew Mills, and his great blog Backyard & Beyond, to bring you my own edition of Mushroom Mondays.
We don’t see too many mushrooms growing out in the Los Angeles desert, so all of these fine specimens were observed on a recent trip back East to visit my family. There’s been a nice amount of rain there, and the coming of Autumn is always heralded by some impressive fungi. I’ve never been great with identifying them, so I’ll just present them free of taxonomy here. Keep in mind, I spotted all of these within a week during my travels in upstate New York and Long Island. A mushie mega-crop!
The first (and maybe most unusual) mushroom was lurking in the woods behind my parents’ house in Hannacroix, NY. All the rest were photographed on a short hike at Welwyn Nature Preserve in Glen Cove, NY, an absolutely beautiful spot to visit if you find yourself in the area. The trails are impressively maintained while still allowing a sense of natural order to prevail– hence plenty of opportunities for decomposers like fungi to find a niche.
Dino Egg?
Nestled comfortably in the underbrush near the wetland behind my parents’ house.This is definitely one of the craziest looking mushrooms I’ve ever seen. I would not be surprised to see Yoshi leap out when the two halves finish separating.
Yellow Creepers
These little yellow guys are obviously trying to expand their colony on this delightful rotting log. Also note the lichen surrounding their territory.
Blushing Beauties
The apple-like hues of these woodsy groupings are so rosy and pleasant. They remind me of the dancing ones from Fantasia.
Perfect Formation
Another yellow family colonizing a rotting log in the forest. The structural integrity of this group is incredible. Each small umbrella projects out on a perfectly angled stem, neither too far from its companions nor too close. The yellow to brown shading of the mottled surface gradually darkens from bottom to top as the cap narrows, in a ratio perfected by nature.
Keep in mind these were just the highlights of the many fabulous fungi I spotted on this Glen Cove hike… The physical manifestations of the great ecosystem of decomposition going on all around us. Without them we’d be sunk– literally buried in a morass of refuse. Thank heavens for mushrooms!
~
Walking to my car after a long day on Wednesday, I happened to glance at the plants lining the sidewalk in Los Feliz and could not have been more surprised to see a familiar rotund, stripey shape!
Yes, a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar, chomping happily away on a plant I could not at first identify. It doesn’t look like the milkweed I grew up around back East, yet I know that Monarchs dine exclusively on milkweed plants. A botanical mystery!
There were four fat little cats in all, and I was so happy to see them I considered my day made. As a child I spent many happy hours collecting and raising Monarch caterpillars in a butterfly box my dad made for me. All through my childhood, I looked forward to their appearance in road-side stands of milkweed near the end of the summer. I watched them feed and grow under my care, coming home from school in early September excited to see pearly green chrysalises and then crumpled new butterflies where my beloved stripey pets had been. Over time, the plentiful supply of caterpillars gradually dried up, until at this point I haven’t seen any in Upstate New York in quite a few years. It seems that the migration pattern of the butterflies has altered to exclude the area. And now, suddenly, I find them beside a sidewalk in Los Angeles! It was a truly serendipitous reunion with a favorite creature.
Back to the botanical mystery at hand. As you can see above, the plant has some yellow flowers budding. The milkweed flowers I’m used to seeing on Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) are purple, and the leaves of the plant are wider and thicker. As far as I knew until now, that was the one and only type of milkweed. Come to find out though, the Asclepias genus is much larger than that, containing many species both domesticated and wild. What these little friends were enjoying was a Tropical Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica), native to South America.
They were really cleaning up shop on it, too!
I hope there will be enough foliage to sustain them until they pupate and fly along on their way. Butterflies in Southern California at this time of year could be headed a few different ways, since they can overwinter here in California or go elsewhere. They might go up the coast toward Santa Barbara or onward to Big Sur, or travel south to the San Diego area or Mexico. All of those areas are known for hosting huge colonies of monarchs during the late fall and winter months.
This milkweed is an area I frequent regularly, though I had never walked down that particular stretch of sidewalk before. I’ll be certain to check back there soon for green chrysalises hanging from the plants. Maybe I will spot them again before they journey off to blanket the Eucalyptus in their orange wings.
I‘ve tried many times before to make it to my favorite beach at low tide, but didn’t get the timing quite right until last week. Given the proximity of the Moon and the super-moon eclipse that occurred the day before, I’m thinking I may have witnessed a super-low tide. As you can see above, the amazing striated shelves were fully exposed. Tide pools in between held a plethora of treasures. I even met a new and wonderful creature!
Behold, Aplysia californica, the California Sea Hare:
Look at those ruffles! 
Since childhood I’ve had a special love for invertebrates, especially snails and slugs. I remember watching the nudibranchs glide beneath the sea with such delight in the Jaques Cousteau VHS’s my mom brought home from the library… Delight which was immediately recaptured when I spied this fat and friendly creature grazing peacefully in a small pool. I was amazed and snapped dozens of pictures of the this first one, only to realize that the beach was packed with them! A fellow beach comber suggested they were an “epidemic”, and certainly it did seem like they were the most common animal around. I’ve never seen even one before, though, so I can’t say for certain whether this was unusual. It could also be that the extra-low tide exposed more of their usual territory to our peeping eyes.
One of the most interesting things I noticed about them was their ability to remain alive when out of water, looking like shapeless blobs until submerged again. It’s amazing how they go from completely undefined mass to animal with distinct features in a matter of seconds. The other beach comber also told me that one “inked” her when she tried to pick it up, although that didn’t happen to me (maybe because the specimens I handled were all in blob mode when I put them back in the water to see what would happen). Wikipedia has a great picture of a Sea Hare releasing some ink.
They’ve actually got two different types of it; a purplish hue pictured above, and a milky substance. The Sea Hare is poisonous, so has few natural predators… another reason they roam the beach in such preponderance! A little further research shows that others have noticed the beach looking extra blobular this year, and warmer water offshore may be to blame. Global warming? El Niño currents?
Like so many natural events lately, my new friends could be a sign of climate change, and therefore not such a good thing for the environment. Since I can’t change their presence here, though, might as well appreciate it! I’m very glad to have had the special experience of making their acquaintance in such a beautiful spot.
After being told repeatedly that I absolutely had to visit the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, I finally made it there last month with the help of a friend who’s a member. Maybe our brains were addled by the 100 degree day, but we couldn’t help noticing the resemblances between the desert and undersea landscapes. Nature finds and settles on certain forms, repeating them in different contexts, as is demonstrated so wonderfully in the Ernst Haeckel compendium Art Forms in Nature, one of my favorite coffee table books. Once I started imagining I was on a visit to the aquarium instead of the botanical garden, I saw a beautiful synchronicity everywhere.
Golden Barrel cacti (Echinocactus grusonii), Snowball Cushion cacti (Mammillaria candida), several types of Cereus columnar cacti, and many other friends.
Starfish flower (Stapelia grandiflora). This one is clearly a shoe-in for the role!
Spider Lily, genus Hymenocallis. There are many species in this genus related to the Amaryllis, all of which look amazingly like sea creatures.
Still trying to identify this beauty. I’ll have to return and photograph all the signs too!
Echinopsis variety ‘Nancy Scott’.
Echinopsis variety ‘Pastel Pink’.
An extremely spiky variety of Echinopsis Mamillosa, I believe it’s called flexilis.
I just cannot say enough how marvelous The Huntington is! Walking amongst these bizarre creatures, we felt a surreal cool descend, even in the bright sun, as though we were divers viewing the sea floor. Look for more posts about it when I return soon…
Meet the reigning matriarch of my backyard, a gigantic Euphorbia tirucalli, commonly known as a Pencil Tree, Pencil Plant, or Pencil Cactus.
At first glance (and maybe even second and third) this huge specimen is easy to mistake for a pine tree of some sort. After all, who would think that a succulent could reach such impressive size and hold itself up? I tend to think of them as softer creatures, in spite of their obvious resilience and sometimes spiny exteriors, so seeing this tree-like euphorbia is something like seeing a caterpillar with a skeleton.
These are it’s small flowers at the end of the elongated leaves:
I have no idea how old my tree may be. My neighbors have lived next door for almost 30 years and tell me it’s been about the same size since they moved in. This is definitely a fast grower, but must have taken at least that long to get to this size and structural complexity, so it has to be 60 years old at minimum. How interesting it would be to go back and see it’s humble beginnings. Was it planted there? By whom, and did they have any idea it would one day dominate the yard so majestically? Pencil plants are a common house and yard plant around these parts, so I wonder if maybe it just took root here from a discarded clipping sometime back in the 1950’s or 60’s…
…Which brings me to a truly fascinating aspect of the pencil plant. Around the time I figured out that this “tree” was not what I thought, I also noticed that it exudes a viscous white sap when injured:
Not only does it closely resemble white glue, but this stuff seems to flow unusually fast, like the plant is pumping it out to try to get it on whatever is attacking it. Attempting to clean up some vines around my tree one day, I got some of it on my arms above my tall gloves. I thought nothing of it until I woke up the next day with itchy red blisters where the sap had adhered to my skin. Although I’m constantly encountering plants foreign to me, I never really worry about natural poisons. Here was my wake-up call!
Only a short amount of time online informed me that pencil plants of all varieties are poisonous, both through consumption and skin or mucus membrane contact, to humans and our pets, and are not recommended to be kept in the house.
The thick sap is referred to as a latex, and– here’s the really amazing part!– it’s a naturally occurring hydrocarbon. I did not even know that such a thing existed. According to the Wikipedia entry for Euphorbia tirucalli,, “E. tirucalli is a hydrocarbon plant that produces a poisonous latex which can, with little effort, be converted to the equivalent of gasoline.” In the plant’s native Northern Africa (nope, not a California native by a long shot) such processes have been proposed, but never really seem to have taken off.
Everything I learn about my tree makes me all the more impressed and fascinated. While composing this blog entry in my head, I attended a friend’s wedding where succulent terrariums were the table centerpieces. I spotted a recognizable friend in mine with renewed respect!
Perhaps 60 years from now this wee baby will become a giant, presiding over a hillside and giving the scrub jays a home.
~
‘Tis the season for the spiny and chubby plants of California to send out their bloom stalks!
While true desert cacti have a bloom season earlier in the spring, LA’s succulents are now bursting with mid-summer blossoms. Small and large, these plants are reaching their stalks to the sky.
The largest succulent bloom around is of course the American Agave (left), which I photographed at an amazing estate in Montecito, CA. Every year, agaves about to bloom are planted here, and then disposed of when they inevitably die after flowering. This form of reproduction is the agave’s last hurrah after 40-60 years of life. It’s almost unbelievable that the towering stalk can erupt from the relatively small plant– Where does all that energy come from?!
The blooms are definitely strange to look at, especially at a distance. Up close each individual floret is visible and the structure snaps into familiarity as a group of flowers on a stalk. People unfamiliar with agaves often mistake them for weird, Suess-esque trees.
All succulents can reproduce asexually by sending out runners, which I’ve looked at here before. So, why go to all the trouble to also produce these grandiose bloom structures? The answer is genetic diversity. Plants growing from runners are clones of the mother, with identical genetic codes. If the mother is threatened by insects or other environmental factors, the offspring stand no better chance of survival. Hence the necessity for mixing DNA with others of the species… and for flowers!
Other succulents may not be as dramatic as the agave, but their blooms are equally strange and interesting. Here are some of the best I’ve spotted around the area in the past couple months:
Echeveria ‘Ramillette’, Eagle Rock, CA. Note the similarly very tall stalks, compared to the size of this tiny plant in a neighborhood hedgerow.
Kalanchoe (?), Eagle Rock, CA. This velvety creature lives in a front yard on my street. I’m not 100% sure of its species.
Purple Echeveria, Montecito, CA. Not positive on the species here either, but it’s a stunner!
For the past couple weeks I’ve been a little stumped on what to write about here. I went back to Brooklyn for a week and was surprised to see less flowers there than I remembered. Maybe I’m getting spoiled! Upon returning to LA, one tree caught my eye, a magnificent golden bloom on my street. This is Cassia leptophylla, the aptly named Golden Medallion Tree.
At first glance, I actually thought it might be a yellow Jacaranda (no, there is no such thing, I checked). The foliage is similar, and it also stores its seeds in pods. You can see them in this picture I took while standing below the tree:
A more conventional pod-shape than the Jacaranda. The flowers are also a very different shape when viewed up close. I love the perfectly round buds!
Unsurprisingly, this tree is most definitely not native to Southern California. It comes from the tropical region of Southeastern Brazil. According to an article I found from the Pacific Horticultural Society, the Golden Medallion is a relatively recent addition to our area. In the 1960s and 70s, it was introduced by the Los Angeles Arboretum as part of an “ambitious plant introduction program”. Ambitious, because given this plant’s natural environment it is surprising that it was able to take hold here at all. The tropics dweller turned out to be much more tolerant of aridity than it’s introducers could have hoped, leading the author of the Horticultural Society article to call it a “Cinderella story”.
It is, of course, also part of a larger story, in which our native land is introduced to all sorts of exotic, flashy, and exciting newcomers it can’t really support. More and more I’m wondering what my area would look like without any of these, beautiful as they are. What would replace them? What plants would make a dramatic come-back? As a little taste of native California in gold, here is a different golden medallion growing right in my yard:
Meet my very own yellow-flowering prickly pear, or Opuntia. I’m not 100% sure of the species yet– there are so many! Every day this one gives me another couple beautiful yellow blooms, and I have yet to water it once. Less friendly than the tree, to be sure, but would a landscape covered in these be so bad?
~
Casual Flowers 