Short Nature Post

[rubyelf]

Today ended up being nicer than I expected it to be... the sun came out even though the wind was chilly... so I stopped on the way home to take a walk on the other trail (the one that isn't by the lake). This is the trail along the creek where I always find all the red trilliums, and I figured it was much too early for them yet, but I might at

Comments

[ragnarok_08]

Those photos are just brilliant and I did not know that about trilliums, that they didn't have leaves.

[rubyelf]

Plants always have surprises.

[offski]

The May apples look as if they are going to take off. Maybe they're waiting for the Rapture?

[rubyelf]

I think they come up like that because they grow in forests and they have to push through all the leaf litter from the year before...

If they are waiting for the Rapture, they should make sure to warn the rest of us.

[moth2fic]

We have the garlic mustard here, of course, but not may aples. I wonder why some plants migrate happily and others don't even though the climate etc is roughly similar? You might know. I now think maybe what I thought were trilliums in our garden in Portugal aren't - I googled for more images and I think the leaves/not-leaves are all wrong. But the flowers are three petalled and white, so... Must photograph them when we get back out there! Thanks for the walk, as usual!

[rubyelf]

May apples don't spread easily from place to place, although they do spread in clusters. Also, they're not really good to eat or used for medicine. Most plants that migrated did so through deliberate or accidental human intervention, and it would be hard not to notice that you'd managed to pick up a fruit the size of a large cherry.

There are quite a few species of trillium and this is our eastern USA variety. Yours may look different.

[bluegerl]

Hahah -- just as I was googling Trilliums and espying the fact that the flahs are PART of the leafy bit... and then I read your last para!!! teehee

[rubyelf]

Cyanide is very popular in the plant and insect world because it's an extremely simple molecule, so it's easy to synthesize, but it attacks very basic metabolism functions that are toxic to almost everything.

And yes, if you were patient you could probably sit on a sunny day and watch the May apples open up.

[matheius]

Trout lillies. Home of the trout.

Ants have little glass capsules inside them that contains the formic acid and stops it melting them from the inside. The anteater has little rocks inside it's stomach to break the glass and melt the ants, and the glass is then turned into marbles and sold to children all across the world.

Isn't Trillum what Dr. Octopus used to power his artificial sun in Spiderman 2?

[rubyelf]

I'm not sure about Dr. Octopus, but Trillian was a character in "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Now I know where marbles come from!