Pollen

Raised just a little further north than I currently live, I find it difficult to turn on the air-conditioner until we are at least into June, and preferably not until the official beginning of summer on June 21st. That means our windows stay open and our windowsills, tables and floors are covered through spring with a fine, silky yellow-green coating of pollen. No matter how often I dust, which in truth isn’t often, it isn’t long before the cover is back.

One afternoon, while sitting on a screened porch just thinking about how lovely the day was and how much I should be doing at the moment, I watched a large, old white pine across the street as it ly waved in gentle breezes. Before long, great billowing clouds of yellow-green puffed out from all the branches in unison and floated off to the west. The great puffs, for that’s the only way I can describe them, occurred repeatedly over the course of 30 minutes or so, which explains the quantity of pollen appearing on my windowsills.

Pines aren’t the only plants spitting out their pollen—grasses, flowering plants, shrubs, vines and trees all produce pollen as a part of their reproductive efforts. Wind isn’t the only trigger for pollen release, either. Some plants are designed to eject pollen on their own schedule. As pollen-bearing anthers mature and dry, they split open and release the pollen grains to fall onto other flowers, or are moved to other flowers by rain. Pollen release can be triggered by the movements of bumblebees or birds. A great variety of insects, butterflies and moths pick up pollen on their legs or backs, carrying it to pollinate the next flower they visit.

All of this movement means that pollen, as tiny as it is, has to be tough. It has to survive wind, rain, and travel to successfully complete its task. It has to be produced in huge quantities, too—far more than could ever actually be used.

Because of its strength and quantity, pollen is often found in fossil records. Falling to the ground in deepening mats, settling in peat bogs, it is preserved for eternity, or so it seems. The earliest such record was from the late Paleozoic era, about 400 million years ago, when fish first began to move from the murky seas onto the land and ferns were trees. Pollen can tell us about both the abundance and variety of plant life, identifying what plants were growing at the time.
There is even the relatively new branch of forensic science that studies pollen found in crime scene investigations. Pollen is regularly deposited on victims, objects, and suspects, and studying that pollen can provide links from one to the other.

Plant pollen that travels by wind is often the greatest in quantity, as much simply falls to the ground, or on top of cars, and is lost. Flowers that are pollinated by insects usually produce far less—only enough to assure that sufficient is available for more than one insect visitor in case the first visitor fails to do the job. Some of the pollen picked up by insects, bees for instance, is taken back to the hive to be stored as a future food source. In this sense, the bees are taking more than their fair share, since they take nectar, too, but the food it provides to developing bee larvae assures future pollinators.

Many pollinators, including hummingbirds and butterflies, are interested only in nectar. The pollen they pick up and distribute is, to them, accidental. To plants designed to be attractive to these insects, the action is essential. Flowers are often matched to provide a welcome feeding station to the insects that will do the job. Flowers with a flat surface, Queen Anne’s lace (not a native, by the way) for instance, provide a good landing surface for butterflies. Passion flowers (Passiflora incarnata and P. lutea) have structures that work efficiently only for certain wasps, whose backs are coated with pollen as they sip nectar from the flowers. Some flowers, many in the Lamiaceae family, have “landing pads” for insects that are triggered to open and offer up their nectar only by an insect with a certain weight and probiscus (tongue) length.

Flowers are amazingly complex-- if you keep a little magnifying glass with you this summer and look deeply into the flowers, you will find yourself in a new world.

My windowsills aren’t the only measure of pollen. Allergy sufferers don’t need television weather reporters to give them daily pollen counts—their noses and lungs do that job for them. The fine grains, which feel silken between the fingers, can have spiky, rough surfaces that irritate tissues in our noses and lungs, causing from mild itchiness to great difficulty breathing. The rough surfaces assure that the pollen enters matching stigmas, pollinating a flower to produce seed for next year’s crop. It makes a lot of people lethargic, too, though I can only blame my own waning energy on advancing age.

Snowfakes

Does anyone remember frost ferns—those delicate, frozen patterns etched onto windowpanes by the icy breath of January? I have not seen them since childhood when I awoke in a cold bedroom, pulling my blanket around me and running down the stairs for warmth and breakfast. Frost ferns “grow” on windows in unheated rooms, developing from thin layers of moisture on the surface of the glass. As I recall, the frost ferns were on the inside of the window, something you will not find in today’s well-insulated, well-heated homes.

With newer building techniques and a warming climate, we are losing the opportunity to see these tiny works of art, but you may still find them on car windows on a cold morning when there has been some humidity in the air. Watch, too for ice flowers on puddles, rime frost that coats the edges of leaves and flowers, and hoarfrost, the spiky thin needles of ice that rise from grass, leaves or twigs on bitter cold days.


"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."
Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley 1925

You can see more of the work of The Snowflake Man, Wilson A. Bentley (1865 – 1931), at www.snowflakebentley.com

Native Americans had names for each month, usually related to significant natural events that occur regularly. January was known as Cold Moon, Wolf Moon (because of the wailing of hungry wolves), Snow Moon, or Frost On Inside Of Lodge Moon. We have not had much in the way of frost yet this year, though the weather may soon turn a little colder. Already our days are beginning to lengthen, adding about a minute of daylight each twenty-four hours. There is still plenty of time to observe the natural world in its winter state

Our weather brings chipmunks, who spent most of the summer and fall storing nuts and acorns in their underground tunnels, out of their homes on warm days. Gray squirrels, who have none of the foresight of chipmunks, are winter tramps, picking up handouts wherever they might be found. I always thought squirrels stored food for the winter, but learned that they have adapted a practice called scatter hoarding. This way, some of their food is protected—if one location is found by a competitor, they have others stores. Unfortunately for those of us who have plants in containers, which are handy sites for burying food, squirrels seem to forget where they put their food, digging up one container after another in search of their stores. This also means that they are out all winter long searching for food.

Birds are around in abundance and should be rewarded for their summer’s work with a few handfuls of seed or grain. Gaylord Johnson, writing in 1926, tells of an experiment by a neighbor to make his orchard attractive to chickadees. His friend put out seeds and grains for the birds and found that chickadees ate heartily of the offered food, but still consumed enormous quantities of tent caterpillar and canker worms. The result of the little experiment was that the birds stayed near the orchard all winter and into spring. As the orchard trees bloomed and set fruit, they bore far more fruit than the orchards of those who did nothing to attract the birds—where worms flourished and consumed more than their share of the fruit.

Carolina chickadees will consume many foods including aphids, ants and beetles; spiders; and seeds of plants and trees, including redbud, pine and mulberry. For your entertainment and the health of your gardens, provide sunflower seeds or unsalted peanuts for your chickadees occasionally. You may be rewarded with fewer insect pests next summer.

“Nature—wild nature—dwells in gardens just as she dwells in the tangled woods, in the deeps of the sea, and on the heights of the mountains; and the wilder the garden, the more you will see of her there.” Herbert Ravenel Sass (1884-1958)

January is a time of quiet in a garden—a time for taking note of structural elements that need updating, plants in need of pruning or replacement, leaves to work into the soil in spring. It is also time to peruse the seed catalogs that still arrive in some of our mailboxes. Email delivery is the most environmentally friendly way to receive such catalogs, but with a bit of admittedly happy guilt, I confess that a seed catalog in the hands with a cup of coffee in front of a crackling fire is a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

Mr. Sass would be proud of my garden, for a more tangled, wild place you would be hard-pressed to find. My herb garden currently serves as a comfy home for rabbits, turtles, and assorted birds, all of whom find safety in the disarray of overgrown weeds and the tangle of blackberry bushes. Spring may find me in the garden again, salvaging treasured herbs, but for the rest of this winter, I will leave the garden to those looking for a home.

While observing all that is in my garden, I notice, too, the bulging buds on the dogwoods. Take a look for yourself, and you will see that the bottom of the buds are already a spring green—nature’s way of letting you know that the end of one year and the beginning of another are simply artificial time keeping devices. Nature is a cycle, and in spite of frost ferns and ice flowers around you now, the dogwoods are telling you that spring is already lining up to appear.

Skunk cabbage

There is a bend in the road on the way to the top of a mountain in southwestern Virginia. Just as you round the bend, there is a large swampy bog to the left, loaded with skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus. It is an incredible display. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, which is amazing since my brother lives on that mountain. Guess I just haven’t visited at the right time often enough. A lot of us first learned about skunk cabbage as children. I remember being warned about them on early spring hikes, for the message heralded by this strange looking plant is “if you crush me, I’ll stink up your walk!”

Skunk cabbage is in the Arum family, along with some of our favorites such as Green dragon (Arisaema dracontium) and Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema tryphyllum). It grows in boggy areas from Southern Canada to Northern Georgia, but is a single species. It has a distant cousin, the Western skunk cabbage (Lysichitum americanum), which is a different genus.

The roots, which can form a massive tangle (which, by the way, makes attempting to dig and move skunk cabbage futile) contract as they grow, pulling the crown (rhizome) deeper into the mud. This explains why you seldom see the flower stem on a skunk cabbage—it is beneath any leaf litter and often underground. Occasionally you will spot one, but ordinarily the stem is far enough underground that the spathe appears to be stemless, just sitting on the ground.

In early spring the spathe rises from the earth so fast, in a process called “respiration,” that heat is generated by burning carbs stored from the previous year. The spathe has a hooded shape characteristic of the Arums, and as it inflates around the spadix (flower stalk) creates a little “room” that is warm enough to melt surrounding snow. The heat, and the carrion odor, attract any nearby flies or other insects that are active this time of year. The skunk cabbage provides warm room and board for these insects, in return for exchanging pollen with other nearby plants.

This process only lasts for a couple of weeks, after which the leaves begin to unfurl. They can grow quite large, up to three feet long, and are inflated with air and water instead of the usual cellulose. They also lack any cuticle (waxy skin), which ordinarily helps plants retain moisture. Therefore, they require a swampy location to keep them inflated long enough to store energy for the following year. Once they have done their job, the capillaries are cut off and the leaves wither into a dark, mushy mess.

In 1723, Thomas More sent a package of seeds to William Sherard in London, explaining that the native people called them “Skunkroot because of his stinking smell” and reported that it was used for smoking. “I dryed and smoaked some on’t but it stunk so wretchedly as to make me spew” he reported.[1] It also had a number of medicinal uses, including as a lotion for itching, for whooping cough, scurvy, seizures, and as an underarm deodorant.[2]

No recommendation is made here to try Skunk cabbage for anything other than observing in the wild, but it does serve as an early spring tonic for black bears, wild turkey, and Canada Geese. Squirrels and other rodents are also reported to eat the pea-sized seeds.

c.Katherine Schlosser, 2007.

[1] Coffey, Thomas. The History and Folklore of North American Wildflowers” (New York: Facts On File, 1993), 290-91.
[2] Foster, Steven and Duke, James A. Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants, Peterson Field Guides (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990) 202.