Freeze-Dried Amanitas

Day 38: My photo software continues to be problematic, so I have taken the liberty of getting a few items ready for posting during a moment when it chose to be cooperative. I hope my regular readers will forgive any geographic redundancies which may occur (e.g., this image was also shot at Longmire, as was yesterday's).

Last week, a cold snap took the Plant Kingdom by surprise. My dogwood and mountain ash had just begun to shed their leaves, and neither my Japanese maple nor the contorted filbert had dropped a single one until the temperature plummeted abruptly into the low 20s. The chilly temps were accompanied by strong winds...drying winds, as I was soon to discover when I looked out on a scene of withered, pendant foliage still clinging to the twigs. A few more days of wind carried the maple's leaves into the neighbor's yard, but the filbert is still hanging on to its little flags. In the course of a discussion yesterday, I learned that the lack of cold prior to this weather event had not permitted the formation of the ablation layer of cells required for normal leaf-drop.

This photo shows a phenomenon I've never seen before in the Pacific Northwest: mushrooms freeze-dried in situ. These Amanitas, formerly thick and plump, shrivelled until they were thinner than a pancake (and resembled one at first glance). Now papery and brittle, the drying winds and accompanying cold dessicated them where they stood, just as the weather had sucked the moisture out of the deciduous foliage. I will be interested to see how this affects next year's growth.