Plant Exploring

A deep acquaintance with Halibut Point of course requires, or should I say invites knowledge of its plant life. The endeavor touches my collector's pleasure in discovering and recording as complete a list as possible. I'm led into fields of botany, ecology, aesthetics, and agriculture that underpin a full appreciation of Halibut Point's plants. But my fundamental adventure in this microcosm of the world still revolves around adding new acquaintances.

Carl Linnaeus ushered in the modern era of organized inquiry by developing a universal system of classification to make possible precise communication about things encountered. Linnaeus had tramped through Lapland and the Swedish boreal forests.

Good God. When I consider the melancholy fate of so many of botany's votaries, I am tempted to ask whether men are in their right mind who so desperately risk life and everything else through the love of collecting' plants.'

Carl Linnaeus, Glory of the Scientist (1737)

 
My explorations at Halibut Point these days don't risk much more than entrapment by cat brier. But I savor forebears such as Frank Kingdon-Ward whose expeditions to the Himalayas resulted in titles like  Land of the Blue Poppy (1913) and Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World (1930).

This year I recorded three species new to me on Halibut Point. Each occurred in a quite different habitat.

Polygala polygama (Racemed milkwort)

It's likely that I have walked right past Racemed milkwort in previous years. It's nestled into the meadow and blooms only a short period in late June when more conspicuous features abound in the landscape.

Polygala polygama alongside Houstonia caerulea (Azure bluet)

Making matters less evident, the color purple recedes against brown soil. If it hadn't been for the adjacent Azure bluets I might not have seen them at all. The milkwort's grass-like foliage blends into the turf where the flowers drew me to a Lilliputian world.



Utricularia vulgaris (Greater bladderwort)

flowering above a water lily pad

One September day an incongruous spark of yellow appeared above the surface of a pond that I visit frequently. It rose above lily pads with no accountable plant in sight.

Submerged bladderwort foliage beneath a floating leaf

The flower had risen from a weedy mass named for the tiny air sacs that keep bladderwort afloat in the growing season, then deflate to settle the plant to winter dormancy at the bottom of the pond.

The bladders serve nutritional functions for this rootless species. They ensnare and digest tiny aquatic organisms with a trap door that ranks among the fastest plant movements known. Triggered by protruding hairs on the door, they open in about 0.5 milliseconds, sucking the animal in, and close in about 2.5 milliseconds. This comes to about three thousand feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound. Some of the microorganisms are retained to live within the bladder as a mutually beneficial community of bacteria, algae, and diatoms. [from Wikipedia]

Benthamidia (Cornus) florida (Flowering dogwood)

On a rainy spring day, walking absent-mindedly through a carpet of white tissue on the path, I became aware of another novelty in the Park. I stopped beneath a sapling that otherwise blended into the woodland. It turns out that the tree we have adopted for splendid lawn specimens is a native plant in Massachusetts. Its flowers are produced in a small green cluster surrounded by four showy white bracts, the tissue then on the ground around me.

The actual dogwood flowers after white bracts have fallen

Looking up the dogwood on the New England Wild Flower Society's Go Botany website brought me uncomfortably into the ongoing effort (battleground) of science to understand all things. The dogwood genus long familiar to me as Cornus (including trees, shrubs, and bunchberry) now consists of four sub-genera within the family of cornelians. My Halibut Point log now has to have a place for Benthamidia florida, the natural beauty arcanely named for a Mr. Bentham about two hundred years ago. Apparently recent genetic analysis has swung in behind the challengers. Today's gardeners, however, are unlikely to concede a favorite name for a strange one. Plant exploring should not require such hazards.