Aug. 9—The forest floor is a bit dry as I walk through on this midsummer day. July did not give us much precipitation as June and hot days brought about evaporation. Even though not so damp, there is plenty to see here as I move in the woods.
A few tiny wood frogs, recently coming from the vernal ponds, hop through the scene. Ferns that grew so well earlier are still doing fine in the shaded woods. Many are now holding developing spores. Also on the leaf-covered ground are large growths of mosses and club mosses. Among the greens of these plants are the latest batches of mushrooms.
August is a great time to find these growths on the ground and downed logs. Recent sporadic rains have allowed them to grow. Among the mushrooms, the most numerous are the russula. Whether the caps are red, yellow, white, brown or gray, all have white stems. The milk mushrooms (Lactarius) are here, too, as are some yellow and white amanita.
At one site, I note a patch of golden chanterelles (Cantharellus). With the boletes, I locate two of my favorite ones: scaber stalk (Leccinum) and old man of the woods (Strobilomyces). This latter one is a dry and rough-looking mushroom of gray and black. Corals and false corals are in the soil.
Growths that are not very common here in this midsummer forest are wildflowers. They thrived and flowered early in the season and some of their leaves can still be seen here. But I did find some forest flowering flora.
In the shade grows a strange flower that has no chlorophyll and does well without sunlight. This ghost plant (Indian pipe) has a stem, flowers and leaves — all devoid of chlorophyll. I find several on this walk and earlier, I also found its cousin: pinesap. And I see another wildflower in bloom in this dry shady summer woods: a spotted coralroot.
Coralroots are kinds of orchids. They are not as obvious and easy to see as the lady slippers that get us all out looking in late spring and early summer.
We have three kinds of coralroots in the local forests. One, often seen in spring, the early coralroot, has simple white petals. Striped coralroots grow in the mixed forests in early summer. As the name says, the petals are full of purple stripes. The spotted coralroots I found here on this summer day get their name from the purple spots on the light-colored petals.
This group of spotted coralroots (I find five) are only about 8-12 inches tall with not much green and look almost like a stick standing in the shady woods. The stem is light or purple with no real leaves. Without much chlorophyll, they need to get nutrition in other ways. Like other coralroots, they have fungal mycorrhizal relationships with the surrounding plants.
Orchids are a large and diverse group of flowers. While we tend to think of the dazzling yellow lady-slippers, the pink lady-slippers (moccasin flower) or the pink and white large plants of showy lady-slippers. These also hold big growths of green leaves. Many other orchids in our region are much smaller and less colorful. They grow in a variety of places: bogs, wetlands, forests and even prairies.
I came across these spotted coralroots just by chance. They show again the variety of plant life in the northern forests. Flowering will last for a while, but plants remain alive in the subterranean rhizomes until next time, which may be next year or more.
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Publish date : 2024-08-09 07:17:00
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