The 21st Century Matriarch

It seemed liked the heat of summer lingered into September this year…but we are already savoring a few cooler days and looking forward to fall foliage. There was plenty to celebrate this month:

Places to visit

**Butterflies at Botanical Garden of the Ozarks (in Fayetteville).** Celebrated finally seeing some of the larger butterflies although it was in Arkansas rather than at home.

**A few hours at the Lovett Pinetum**. The place is not a park…requires some coordination to visit. I visited as part of my Identifying Woody Plants class (Missouri State University) and celebrated the evergreens…but also the native plants that are growing in the unmanaged areas. There is also a lovely spring feed pond and then stream.

Japanese festival at the Springfield Botanical Gardens. Celebrating big drums and the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden full of people enjoying the fall day. We got ice matcha tea just before the booth was scheduled to close!

La Petite Prairie field trip. Celebrating the experience of walking through a prairie with grass almost as tall as me for the first time….and not getting bitten by anything (maybe because of my permethrin treated gaiters and hat…long sleeves and jeans).

Family ties

**Finding puzzles for Dad**. Finally…found a used books/puzzles sale that had some 300 piece puzzles. Celebrated and took them down to Dallas for my dad a few days later.

Around our yard

A cooler day. September had some hot days…but there are cooler ones where the high stays in the 70s to celebrate too.

Getting the yard mowed and the brush burning in the chiminea. I celebrated that I got so much yard work done on one of the cooler days…mowed the whole yard and burned a pile of brush that had accumulated during the summer.

Collecting pin oak acorns to sprout. Celebrating finding a video about sprouting acrons in water and starting the process with some carefully selected acorns from my neighbor’s tree that fell in my yard.

Planting pawpaw seeds. So many seeds from 2 pawpaws I got from an earlier master naturalist class! This time I stratified them before planting. I am celebrating that I got them in the ground…and hopefully will celebrate some of them coming up next spring/summer.

American Spikenard seeds turning red. Celebrating that the American Spikenard I planted a year ago has survived and is producing red seeds this September.

The Identifying Woody Plants class I am taking made a field trip to Lovett Pinetum last week. It was about 30 minutes in traffic getting there and 30 minutes back. 8 more woody plants were added to our list to recognize in the field…plus we saw some plants not required but interesting…and walked around a new-to-me place. I took my camera along.

Here are some of the plants I photographed at Lovett Pinetum. I share the scientific name and family for those that are added to the list of plants we are to recognize for the class…only the common names for those that were easily visible and pointed out to us in passing at the Pinetum.

Eastern wahoo…with lots of aphids on the stems.

Poison ivy - Toxicodendron radicans – Anacardiaceae: “leaves of three,” leaves are oval, but margins vary considerably

Black walnut – *Juglans niger* – Juglandaceae: with chambered pith. This is a tree I was very familiar with from Maryland…nuts on the ground in the fall are always very noticeable!

Joint fir (Ephedra): not native to Missouri but an interesting plant.

True cedar – *Cedrus* – Pinaceae: needles on short shoots, evergreen, cones upright, does not grow very well in Missouri.

Ozark witch hazel – *Hamamelis vernalis* – Hamamelidaceae: Woody seed capsule from flowering last January still not open; hairy twigs; shrub; leaves already changing. Flowers, when they appear, will have ribbon-like petals

American hazel – Corylus americana – Betulaceae – nuts will turn brown as they ripen; shrub; leaves wide oval and doubly serrate

Longleaf pines – Along Atlantic coast and Florida; white bud at ends of branches

Jewelweed (not a woody plant) was blooming in several places…particularly around the spring area.

There was large black oak that was pointed out on our trek back to the vans…but oaks must be for another class since it wasn’t added to our ‘must know’ list this time.

While we were at the Pinetum, we noted two animals: a black rat snake parallel to our trail (very sluggish, might have just eaten since it didn’t move while we watched) and a deer that watched us from across an open area then took off when we got a little closer.

It was a good field trip for identification of trees, vines, and shrubs!

Previous posts about my experiences in the Identifying Woody Plants class at Missouri State University