Hard to believe we’re well past midsummer and have only one full month of summer left. While the beginning of fall isn’t until late September, August has the feel of summer already winding down. With July you still have the ambiance of summertime without feeling you have fall and winter breathing down your neck. The above flower is bunchberry which blooms in spring but in midsummer produces bright red berries.
It’s actually a member of the dogwood family, blooming perennially and spreading itself on the forest floor. The berries are said to be edible but many people find them tasteless. I have never tried them and prefer to leave them for the birds and other critters in the forest.
Another flower which appears in July doesn’t even look quite like a flower. In fact it is often mistaken for some sort of fungus. This is easy to understand as unlike other plants it has no chlorophyll and is pale white.
Called ghost pipes or Indian pipes this little plant is classed with the heathers and other heath plants though you would never guess it to look at them. It is a parasitic plant, feeding off of mycorrhizal fungus which in turn live symbiotically with trees, usually beech trees. This unusual characteristic limits its habitat and makes it nearly impossible to grow in your garden unless you have exactly the right conditions.
As for fungi themselves, I didn’t see much of them in the earlier part of the summer when we were under semi-drought conditions. But over the past three weeks, we have been receiving an abundance of rain which has stimulated them to send up fruiting bodies. They come in an amazing assortment of sizes and colors, some edible, some definitely not.
Fungi were originally included in the category of plants but once DNA sequencing hit its stride, it was discovered that they are actually in a class of their own and are more closely related to animal forms than they are to plants. In fact the biological tree of life we used to see in our old biology textbooks has gotten very complex and gnarly thanks to recent discoveries using DNA sequencing.
This diagram has been redrawn many times by scientists and will likely be tweaked repeatedly for some time to come. It bears remembering that the above drawing exists mostly for our own convenience in trying to make sense of the intricate biosphere we are part of. Organisms are under no obligation to fit neatly into this diagram. In fact there are a few that seem to delight in bamboozling us as to how to categorize them. One good example is the slime mold.
There are hundreds of ‘species’ of this bizarre life form. It lives most of its life or lives as single celled organisms. Then under the right environmental conditions, all the cells move together, congeal and form a single ‘body’ we refer to as a slime mold. Some molds form a single gigantic ‘cell’ with multiple nuclei while others maintain their single cell arrangement but unite with others and move as though they were a single organism. They seem to occupy the borderline between single cell bacteria and multi-celled critters like ourselves, cheerfully switching back and forth over the border depending on environmental circumstances. Scientists eagerly study these strange organisms hoping to gain insights into how multi-celled life may have got its start.
Slime molds are mostly harmless to humans and serve an important role in breaking down dead matter and recycling it. I actually came across one type of slime mold a few weeks ago.
This is known by the rather charming name of dog-vomit slime mold and it did look rather like something a dog might have up-chucked. As slime molds ooze about very slowly, I went back later in the day hoping to check on how far it had shifted, only to discover to my dismay, it had vanished. Had it slithered under the pine needles? Or finished its life cycle? Hard to say. But slime molds move according to their own rhythms, not ours.
It’s weird to watch time-lapse videos showing how slime molds get around. For all their seeming simplicity, they are remarkable complex life-forms which still hold many mysteries for curious humans to explore. Not for the first time it makes me wonder if we will ever recognize alien life-forms if we can barely even make sense of the creatures here on earth that are related to us yet utterly different in their approach to life. It’s easy to forget how provincial we are until we find ourselves face to face (?) with a slime mold.
Hmmm. So was that really a slime mold? Or an extraterrestrial exploring our strange planet? Inquiring minds want to know.
See you next month.