Identifying Woody Plants (Month 2)
/The Identifying Woody Plants field class I am taking at Missouri State University has met 5 more times since my last post about the field sessions on the campus.
I am continuing to take pictures of items in the classroom before class:
An opened Maclura pomifera (Osage orange) fruit
Some Quercus macrocarpa (Bur oak) acorns
An herbarium page showing Tilia americana (American Basswood) fruit which we have seen in the field, but my pictures were not very good.
Cuttings from two plants were brought in and we were asked to ID them based on our notes – with the hint that the first one had milky sap (hard to see since it had been cut):
Morus alba (white mulberry) – a non-native that is frequently seen as a ‘weed’ tree and Vitis (grape).
Recently the walk from the parking lot to the classroom building has been full of late blooming pollinator plants and fall foliage.
The one session where we stayed on campus added some new trees to our list:
Quercus bicolor (Swamp white oak)
Sassafras albidum (Sassafras)
Carya ovata (Shagbark hickory)
Quercus lyrata (Overcup oak)
We also saw some review trees and I got better pictures of Celtis occidentalis bark (Rough hackberry)
And some add odd growth of a Liriodendron tulipifera (tulip/yellow poplar). The trunk of the tree was growing at a slant rather than straight upward and it had small branches coming out relatively close the ground.
The hikes on campus and further afield have been more pleasant this past month because the temperatures have been cooler. There have been no rainy days in the field either!
Previous posts about Identifying Woody Plants field class
