Mulberry Feast
The mulberries around here are ripe and just starting to fall from the trees. The animals are really taking advantage of them. At one white mulberry tree by a pond near me, I have seen, at the same time, canada geese, mallards, grey catbirds, grackles, and grey squirrels all eating together. It's quite a scene.
6/12/2009 1:01:28 PM
Appalachian Plants Scouting
This past Saturday I spent some time exploring some land about 10 miles up the Shenandoah River from Harper's Ferry, just off the Appalachian Trail. As a result, you will see some new plants and some new photos from the area. Appalachian upland plants. Sweet birch is awesome, and only found from the mid-Atlantic region to the lower northeast. There is also a really awesome spotted wintergreen image from the trip. Many more plants and images as well.
6/8/2009 11:59:37 PM
WildPlantDatabase 3.0 - Major Redesign
During the recent (and ongoing) redesign process, I noticed in the activity log that it had been almost 3 years since I last updated the system. I had been intending to get back to it for a while, and I recently became motivated again to get back to this project. Over the past week, the website has been totally redesigned. The technical infrastructure was completely reworked into a much more stable and efficient system. Of course the look and feel have changed drastically as well. The good news is that I am now able to make updates to the site much more easily, so that should lead to much more frequent updates (without 3 year intervals, for example). The bad news in non-existent. There are more features planned for the future. Work is ongoing.
6/8/2009 11:46:51 PM
Great Falls Plant Discoveries - New Plants
I spent some time in Great Falls, VA recently, near the Potomac River. I was able to identify a few new plants in the floodplain area, including Slender Vervain, Swamp Milkweed, and Swamp Smartweed. The river was also unusually low, which allowed me to get pretty far out by using the normally-submerged, but now exposed, rock outcroppings. There were many plants growing on these exposed islands, many of which must be able to survive extended full or partial submersion. Seashore Mallow grew commonly in this environment, along with several other plants I have not yet been able to identify. On one particular outcropping, I found a plant I didn't know, but I managed to narrow it down to some type of Dogwood (Cornus). It was not until the next day, while flipping through a plant book, that I found an aside-reference which allowed me to identify it as a Silky Dogwood (Cornus amomum). So, I went back out there later that day, headed down to the river, and jumped from rock to rock until I found the same individual and got some photos.
8/12/2006 10:23:34 PM
Genus Polygonaceae: Etymology
The genus Polygonum, within the family polygonaceae, is easily recognized by the evenly-spaced, enlarged, sheathed nodes along the stem, where the angle of growth usually changes slightly. The term 'poly' is, of course, the greek root 'many'. The latter part of the name is from the greek word 'gona', meaning knee or joint. Therefore, this plant is so-named for its many joints. The common term 'polygon' has the exact same root, referring to a figure with 'many joints'.
8/12/2006 10:17:42 PM
More Interface Improvements: Plant and Image Tagging
I am in the process of tagging the plants and plant images in the database. I have added a couple new features: 'Browse Plants' and 'Browse Images'. In this way you can search the database by looking for plants of pictures which have been tagged with relevant bits of data. For example, you could look-up a list of all plants tagged with the phrase 'red stem'.
Update (6/8/2009): No you can't. Not anymore anyway. This is no longer the case due to a technical redesign of the system. Perhaps you will be able to do this again later though...
8/10/2006 11:11:08 AM
