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This is a thread for chatting about wild plants and trees and stuff you saw on a hike or whatever! Tell me about all the nuts you collected or herbs you foraged! Want to talk about gardening or horticulture? DIY has some good threads for that: Horticulture/botany/ornamental/houseplants:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3543738 Vegetable and herb/fruit/food gardening:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3085672 Trees Trees are amazing things that live for hundreds of years, provide us with countless useful products, shade us from the hot sun, and provide homes to zillions of animals and bugs and mosses and stuff. I come from a long line of foresters and I love being around big trees. As a kid I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in western North Carolina-one of a few stands of virgin timber on the East Coast- and was completely overwhelmed by the huge tulip poplars. I've since learned to ID most all the native trees in my little area of the Southeastern US, and it fascinates me how in a square mile the trees change completely from dry sandy piney woods where it gets burned and oak/hickory where it doesn't on the hilltops to huuuuuuuge water oaks and magnolias in the river bottoms with little outcroppings of Appalachia on the limestone shelf in between the two-Carolina Basswood, Beech, black cherry, holly, bigleaf magnolias and mountain laurel. It's pretty incredible stumbling across a Bigleaf Magnolia in bloom:  It has the largest simple leaf and largest flower in North America, I believe. Trees are fairly easy to ID and are a good first step in learning the basics of plant identification. The National Audobon Society field guides fro your region are pretty good, as are the Peterson field guides. Here are some great books about trees! "The Forest Unseen" by David George Haskell-University biology professor tells you everything you never knew about that happens in a square meter of Appalachian cove forest. Not just about plants, but it has a whole lot about plants and is an excellent excellent book. There's a cool chapter about how fungi mate that blew my mind. His other book, "The Songs of the Trees" is good too, but more specifically about trees and a bit preachy at times. "The Tree" by Colin Tudge-Pretty exhaustive look at the trees of the world (and you had no idea how many wildly different types of trees there are in tropical forests) but also great stuff on tree biology. Some of it gets a bit technical, and he describes about every major family of trees which can get a bit exhausting, but also very fascinating. "Native Trees for North American Landscapes" by Guy Sternberg and James Wilson-Sort of a tour of native North American trees with their culture requirements and use in the landscape, as well as a bit about propagation and uses/cultural facts about trees. More a guide for a gardener, and kind of an expensive book, but beautifully photographed and it will make you want to go plant some trees (which you should do!). A good one to borrow from the library. Shrubs/Forbs/Grasses/Sedges There are so many of these I don't even know where to start with learning about them. My forester uncle once told me that in a square meter test plot of Longleaf Pine savannah forest floor, there can be dozens if not hundreds of species of forbs and grasses. That's really neat to me, but a challenge to ID! Sometimes you stumble on beautiful stuff like this guy:   Lilium michauxii (I think) Edibles There's tons of wild plants you can eat! While not generally as risky/dangerous as mushrooms, be sure you know what you're eating! My favorite is the young tender shoot tips of Smilax/greenbriar.  Perfectly good raw, but they cook up nicely like asparagus with some lemon and butter. I think you can eat the roots as well, but I never have. You can eat cattail roots and they aren't bad boiled with some butter. Wild grapes grow around here and they aren't bad if you can get to them. Watch out for drunk yellowjackets. On the subject of wild fruit, wild plums, persimmon and wild black cherries are good, if small and hard to reach. American Beautyberry is also edible raw in small quantities or in jam and has kind of a cool, strange flavor. Nuts and mast-producing trees are of course another great source of nibbles and the fall when they are dropping is a pretty time for a walk in the woods. Hickory nuts are a bit hard to get the meat out of, but have a really exceptional, spicy flavor, and black walnuts and pecans are a little friendlier to eat and delicious. Acorns are sort of edible, but the tannin levels (and thus bitterness) varies from tree to tree hugely. You can leach the tannins out and make jelly or flour but I've never done it. I occasionally have tried a nibble of a big fat swamp white oak acorn raw and if you get one that isn't bitter, it's not terrible. Chinese chestnuts aren't native here, but you see them around abandoned house sites sometimes and they are delicious. I just found this website, but it seems great: https://www.foragingtexas.com/ Another: rojay posted:For foraging in the Southeast, Eat the Weeds http://www.eattheweeds.com/ is pretty good. He's got a pretty goofy series of videos, too: https://www.youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds Anyway that's all I've got! What awesome plants did you see today? Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 14:10
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Sprue posted:Let me tell you about Ostrich Fern Fiddleheads! rojay posted:For foraging in the Southeast, Eat the Weeds http://www.eattheweeds.com/ is pretty good. He's got a pretty goofy series of videos, too: https://www.youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds
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Aug 29, 2020 13:37
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It's a big mast year for the live oaks this year apparently. So many acorns falling on my house- good time to be a squirrel.
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Oct 29, 2021 21:50
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I was gonna say it's not a bigleaf magnolia because MA is way north of it's native range, but apparently there is one (or some) growing at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. The leaves in that pic look a little more like umbrella magnolia-I don't think of Bigleaf magnolia's leaves as being quite so organized on branch tips. Bigleaf magnolias have bigger leaves than umbrella magnolias, but that's kind of hard to tell without two of them side by side and would vary by individuals/growing conditions as well.
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Apr 16, 2024 21:09
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At ~7 years in the ground (planted from a 3gal container), 5" DBH, and ~20' tall MY BIGLEAF MAGNOLIA is blooming for the first time this year:  I'll try to remember to takes pics as it opens over the next few days. They don't smell quite as good as M. grandiflora but still a nice smelling flower. Some tree pics for comparison-just overall to me looks a little shaggier and less neatly organized than the pics of umbrella magnolias.  
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Apr 17, 2024 19:05
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