Lycogala Log

Day 231: Lycogala epidendrum ("Wolf's-milk") is a slime mold, despite its resemblance to a fungus. What is the difference? Well, a fungus is a single life-form. What we see and call a "mushroom" is its fruiting body. The main part of its structure is in the soil or other substrate, i.e., the mycelium, and that "body" may extend for a surprising distance. On the other hand, a slime mold is a group of single-celled organisms which have come together to feed and breed in response to chemical signals transmitted by others of their kind. Unlike the mushrooms in your collection basket, slime molds are capable of movement. They are also capable of communication in the form of those chemical signals I just mentioned, and they are capable of cooperation. This places them in a unique position cladistically, having at some point branched off from the Archaea to follow their own evolutionary path as the bacteria went the other way. Although the terms Protist and Protoctista are now considered obsolete, slime molds can be referred to as "protists" because their cellular structure is unlike that of plants, animals or fungi. Many of them spend most of their lives within their chosen substrate, as does the Ceratiomyxa of yesterday's post. I suspect that Lycogala behaves in a similar fashion because I find it in the same locations year after year. It emerges only during its breeding time. A "spent" colony can be seen as a black mass above the fresh pink "fruit" in this photo.

Ceratiomyxa Fruticulosa Var. Poroides

Day 230: Yesterday was a pretty exciting day. Not only did I find two nice colonies of the common slime mold Lycogala epidendrum (tomorrow's post), but I found one totally unfamiliar to me: Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. poroides. I have a slime mold expert to thank for the identification, a bit to my embarrassment because when I posted an earlier photo to a slime-mold identification group and identified it as Lycogala, I was referring to the single orange blob in a sea of white, dismissing the second larger organism as a phase of Lycogala. He "corrected" me, later admitting that he hadn't even noticed the orange blob. In any event, we got it sorted out and I am happy to present Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. poroides in all its beautiful glory. Had I not been prowling in a trailless section of forest at this specific point in time, i.e., had I come a day earlier or later, I could not have witnesses this plasmodial phase which lasts roughly 24 hours.

Sourgrass, Sheep Sorrel, Rumex Acetosella

Day 229: Okay, who remembers eating Sourgrass when they were a kid? I certainly did, and even today, I will pick the occasional leaf to chew while I'm pulling great handfuls of it from my garden and yard. The tangy flavour is quite refreshing, and although the plant contains oxalic acid, it does not occur in sufficient quantities that you should be concerned for your kidneys. You'd burn out on Sourgrass salads before that occurred. Known scientifically as Rumex, acetosella, Sourgrass is related to buckwheat and is sometimes called Sheep Sorrel. Unfortunately, it is an aggressive weed when it gets a toehold, and flourishes in the acidic soils common to western Washington. It propagates via an extensive system of rhizomes which, from personal experience, I can attest may extend ten feet or more from the parent plant. In fact, when I'm weeding, I sometimes see how far I can follow the network without breaking the rhizomatous threads. I'm usually defeated when sunken flower pots, fence posts or the sidewalk bring the experiment to an untimely end.

Re-cycling

 

Day 228: My bicycle hasn't seen much use over the last couple of years, largely because there's only one of me, and other forms of exercise have taken precedence. In a normal year, nice weather would find me hiking or kayaking if I had no other pressing obligations, so the bike has pretty much stayed in the garage. However, voluntary isolation has made me rethink my routine. Walking the same stretch of road and the same short wooded trails near home was beginning to get old, and I was feeling the need to change it up, broaden my range, so out came my trusty cheapo Schwinn and off I went on a patrol for Scotch broom infestations. I think walking almost every day has helped keep my legs in shape, but even so, a different set of muscles comes into play when you're pedalling. I made seven miles the first day, ten the next. Both still qualify as "short" trips in my estimation, although the inclines seem steeper than I recall. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with age. Nope. Suffice to say that even being firmly beyond seven decades of existence doesn't keep me from imagining myself to be half that old when the wind is whistling past my ears and the wheels keep going 'round and 'round.

False Lily-of-the-Valley, Maianthemum Dilatatum

Day 226: At first glance, you might mistake Maianthemum dilatatum for the Lily-of-the-Valley you thought was a good idea at the time (as the saying goes), later experiencing some degree of regret as your flower beds began sprouting it in profusion. Known as False Lily-of-the-Valley for its obvious visual similarity to the persistent garden plant, this Maianthemum is also capable of filling in shady nooks with alacrity, but perhaps not with quite the same vigour as its namesake. It is kin to much larger False Solomon's Seal and also Star-Flowered Solomon's Seal, both of which are frequently referred to in short form as "Solomon's Seal" here in the Pacific Northwest. Unlike true Lily-of-the-Valley, its flowers are not bell-shaped, but somewhat upturned to welcome a wide range of insect pollinators including bees, flies and beetles. It is only lightly fragrant. It is known to associate with several common PNW plants including Swordfern, Oxalis, Spring Beauty and Stream Violet and flourishes in the same moist soils and partial shade which these plants prefer.

Pathfinder, Adenocaulon Bicolor

Day 225: Pathfinder is a plant familiar to hikers in the Pacific Northwest even if they don't know what it's called or why it earned that name. Also known as Trail Plant, Adenocaulon bicolor's leaves are green on the upper surface, but silvery-grey on the underside. The stems are quite resilient and flexible, and when something (human or animal) passes through a group of the plants, it is easy to see the route they took from the turned-over leaves. This much is common knowledge, but a larger question arises: what evolutionary advantage does this give the plant? I like to ask the hard questions, so I turned to Arnie first, and then went prowling in the depths of obscure research papers to see if I could find the answer. In so doing, I learned that Pathfinder is a "sun-fleck" species (a fact I had not known previously, and should have observed). It lives where illumination comes as brief packets of light which only penetrate the upper canopy sporadically throughout the day, the plant returned to shadow as the sun passes through its arc above the trees. The silvery underside is due to certain types of crystalline structures within the cells. These serve to back-scatter the light into the plant's internal cell layers, increasing its ability to photosynthesize. I was unable to locate information regarding what type of crystals these might be, although in some other silvery-blotched plants, the colouration is due to calcium oxalate, but nothing I read referred to it as being contained in Adenocaulon.

During my reading, Arnie had answered my email, and his response prompted me to share what I had discovered. He said, "The truthful answer is, 'I don’t know.'  I thought about making up a good story, but inspiration is letting me down this morning." I probably would have bought it, too. I mean, he is the expert.

Twill Weave

Day 225: The red-white-and-blue (and a little green) theme of this image was unintentional, if appropriate to Memorial Day. The real story is that there are a lot of things going on in the weaving room these days. Some projects are top-secret because they're destined to be gifts, but they have one thing in common: they are all designed around using up my copious stash of yarns and threads in preference to buying more. In this, lockdown and social distancing have driven me to do something I should have done long ago; the sheer mass of fiber in my crafts room was fast approaching critical mass. I'm being compelled to be creative in finding combinations which work well together, both for weight and colour, and this often means breaking out the pocket calculator and the gram scale in order to maximize usage. Last night I lay awake figuring in my head, "If the piece is 24" wide and weaves up at 12 throws per inch, and there are 830 yards in that solitary skein of slubby black-and-white cotton, how many inches can I weave if I use a different fiber for the warp?" The answer was roughly 2.5 yards, but it wasn't easy to reach in the wee hours of the morning when any person of normal habits would have been sleeping. More to the point then, the photo above shows two possibilities for colour pattern using the same threading. It is a simple 2/2 twill, meaning that the weft thread passes over two threads and under two, progressing on a diagonal as the sequence is treadled. The plaid repeats 16 blue, two white, two green, two white in both warp and weft, and the houndstooth is four by four, alternating white and red. Both pieces are standard knitting worsted.