Other common names for this plant are ditch daisies, beggarticks, black jack, burr marigolds, stickseeds, or tickseeds.  I think the “tickseed” part of the name refers to how the seeds of this plant stick to the fur of animals or the clothing of people as they brush past the plant – the seeds grab on like ticks do.  In fact, each seed has a flat shape with two barbs on it.   

The tickseed sunflower is probably originally native to the Midwest, and gradually spread much further afield.  Now it can be found abundantly in wet areas from all the way to the East Coast, and from Ontario to Florida.  How did it get here?  Presumably it spread by traveling on animals and people.

The preferred environment for this plant is a wetland – hence the name “ditch daisy”.  It normally blooms in October, and makes profuse, electric-yellow displays of flowers.  An annual, it’s used often in wildflower gardens.  However, in the Augusta area, that’s probably not such a good idea unless you have a wetland available – otherwise you will be watering a lot.

In a wild format such as the swamp, the seeds of the tickseed sunflower are eaten by an array of birds – ducks and many others.

I was surprised when I asked two people with biology backgrounds what this plant was called.  I received two confident answers: tickseed sunflower and coreopsis.  When I looked those up, I found that tickseed sunflower generally carries the Latin name of Bidens aristosa, whereas Coreopsis is a different genus.  Both Bidens and Coreopsis genera (“genera” is the plural of “genus”) are grouped in the Aster family (Asteraceae), and there are a number of Bidens and Coreopsis species that are hard to tell apart, or maybe hard to separate clearly into either the Bidens or Coreopsis designations. 

It turns out that biologists are currently revising the Bidens and Coreopsis genera, because now organisms are being analyzed through DNA to determine their degree of relatedness.  Before DNA analysis became so readily available, the methods biologists used were direct examination of physical characteristics.  So biology categorizations are currently in a state of flux.   Both answers I was given verbally can claim to be correct – and tomorrow there may be a different answer.

I continue to be amazed at what science doesn’t know.   Somehow that makes it even more interesting to look at what’s happening in the swamp on a given day.   For more information on visiting the Phinizy Swamp: http://phinizycenter.org/

The Golden Garden Spider , or Argiope aurantia, has other common names, such as yellow garden argiope, yellow garden orb-weaver, golden orb-weaver, the writing spider, and others.  Females are larger than males.  An orb-weaving spider weaves a web in a circular format.  Argiope aurantia is found throughout most of North America.

A large spider of this type will be a female – she is ¾” to 1 1/8” in body length.  An adult spider which is only ¼” to 3/8” long is a male.  In our area, the climate should be warm enough for many female spiders to live several years (?).  Males evidently die after mating, in their first year.  Sometimes after a male dies, his female partner will eat his body.

Both males and females weave thick zigzags into their webs.  The zigzags are called stabilimenta (the singular is stabilimentum), which implies they function to help stabilize the web’s structure, but that is only a theory.   Another idea is that maybe the zigzag helps birds see the web better so they don’t destroy it by flying through it.  Or does it somehow attract prey by its dramatic and noticeable appearance?  Or maybe  the zigzag draws attention away from the spider itself, serving as camouflage?  Isn’t it amazing what biologists don't know yet?

Males move around in search for females.  When he finds a female, a male will build a small web with a thick white zigzag in it, or he will build the zigzag into a corner of a female’s large circular web.  Males attract a female by plucking her web – this causes it to vibrate. 

After mating, a female will produce a papery looking web sac with hundreds of eggs in it (sometimes she will produce several of these sacs, attached to her web).  Evidently she does not stray far from her own area during her lifetime.

This kind of spider doesn’t see well, but it is very sensitive to air currents and vibrations.  It can easily tell when an insect (or even a small lizard) runs into its web and gets caught on the sticky cross strands.  The spider often vibrates her web when an insect lands in it.  She will wrap up the prey with more spider silk.

All types of spiders bite their prey, injecting a venom that paralyzes it and starts to break down its body tissues, making the prey easy to digest.  But if a person gets bitten by a golden garden spider, it will not cause more harm than a bee sting.  If you don’t try to touch the spider or mess with its web, it probably doesn’t know you are there.  So leave it alone and let it catch insects.

Females build the big, impressive webs.  The spider starts her web by spinning and attaching long, strong lines of web filament that are not sticky.  These structural strands radiate from the center of the web and diverge at the edges, where they are attached to anchor points that can be several feet apart.  The cross strands begin at the center of the web, in a spiral format.  The cross strands are sticky enough to trap insects that run into the web.  The spider normally waits at the center of the web  with her head pointing toward the ground.  For some reason, she often holds her legs together in pairs.  

Who eats these spiders?  Lizards, wasps (especially mud daubers), some kinds of birds, and shrews, mostly.


For information about visiting the Phnizy Swamp: http://phinizycenter.org/

Spanish Moss, or Tillandsia usneoides, is not a moss but an epiphyte in the bromeliad family.  It likes warmth and humidity.  In the Augusta area, you are most likely to see it hanging from trees near a body of water.  It tends to grow on larger trees, especially live oaks and bald cypress.  Why those trees – is there something particular about them?  As with so many of my questions about the natural world, it’s not easy to find an exact answer.  Certainly the bald cypress is a good option, since it is usually found growing in or near water, which provides the humidity that the spanish moss needs.  One idea is that possibly bald cypress and live oak, more than other trees, tend to exude the chemical nutrients that the spanish moss needs to live, such as calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. 

Does the spanish moss plant hurt the tree it grows on?  Probably not.  As an epiphyte, spanish moss does not infiltrate the tissues of its host tree, as a parasite plant would.  Epiphytes get most of their nutrients from the air.  Spanish moss plants have no roots.  The long strands of the plant (which are basically leaves) curl around tree branches and cling to bark textures.  There is an argument that if spanish moss is hanging very thickly from tree branches, it is cutting off some of the light from the tree’s own leaves.  On the other hand, if you see a tree in obvious decline with the spanish moss hanging very thickly from it, it’s likely that the spanish moss increased its growth only after the tree’s outer branches and foliage started dying off for reasons unrelated to the spanish moss.  Most experts advise you not to worry about the spanish moss – it is just hanging on the tree, not hurting it.  However, there are pecan farmers who clear heavy spanish moss growth off their crop trees.  Very thick spanish moss accumulation can be heavy enough to break a tree branch, especially after rains, when spanish moss plants absorb several times their weight in water. 

When there are long periods between rains, spanish moss can go dormant.  It does have flowers, and they are usually quite small.  Water and other nutrients are taken into the plant through scales on the outer surface of the leaves.  Spanish moss usually spreads to new locations via tiny seeds.  Each seed is attached to a small puff of lightweight fibers, which makes it float on wind currents.

Most traditional and historical human uses of this plant relate to using it as a padding, stuffing, or filler of some kind – the uses ranged from stuffing upholstery cushions to mixing it with clay to make a building material.   Spanish Moss may have some future medicinal uses – it has been tested in recent years for controlling blood glucose and for some protective skin effects, although such products may not be on the market yet.

Various kinds of animals use thick areas of spanish moss as a shelter – bats, reptiles, amphibians.  Some birds build nests with it.  There is a jumping spider (Pelegrina tillandsiae) whose only habitat is spanish moss.  

But what about chiggers?  Have you ever been advised not to touch spanish moss because chiggers will come out of it and bite you?  The most scientific advice I could find says that you should only fear getting a chigger attack from collecting spanish moss off the ground.  Spanish moss hanging from trees should be chigger-free.  But it might not be free of jumping spiders, bats, and snakes!


For information on visiting Phinizy Swamp, see: http://phinizycenter.org/

This kind of sedge has a great-looking seed, which is why I drew it.  Actually, it’s a kind of multiple seed. 

Is it a weed?  Some sedges are definitely considered weeds because they spread rapidly in plowed fields, interfering with the growth of a farmer’s crops.  This particular one could be classed as either a weed or an ornamental, depending on your point of view. 

Sedges are rather grasslike.  Perhaps they would be considered closer to grasses if we didn’t have so very many kinds of grass worldwide – there are something like 10,000 grass species globally.  There are also a lot of sedge species – at least hundreds, possibly 2000 or more.  In practical terms, not many people differentiate that closely among all the various kinds of sedge. 

If you’d like to be able to impress your friends with your ability to distinguish between grasses and sedges, you can use the following rhyme or a variation:

Sedges have edges,
Rushes are round, and 
Grasses have nodes where
Leaves are found.

This means that if you roll a grasslike plant stalk between your fingers, you can usually tell if it’s a sedge if the stalk seems to have angles, meaning it’s more or less triangular in cross section.  You can find nice closeup photos here:

http://www.hiltonpond.org/ThisWeek060615.html



















I can’t tell you for certain that the sedge plant I drew and photographed is Carex lurida, also known as Lurid Sedge, Shallow Sedge, and a few other names.  It might well be.  And it it’s not, then some plant nurseries around the country have made the same mistake.  Lurid Sedge is known for its large and impressive seed head, as well as a noticeably yellow-green foliage.  Maybe the “lurid” in the name refers to the chartreuse color, which is brighter than the foliage of the surrounding plants in my photo.

Lurid sedge needs extremely moist – even wet – soil.  As a gardener, you might want it if you are planting around a pond.  Birds and other small animals in the swamp use sedge in various ways: they eat the seeds, they use the leaves for nests, and they shelter among the plants.

Although I’d never heard it before, the cattail plant is sometimes called “corn dog grass”, and for obvious reasons!  As a casual name, it seems more descriptive than “cattail” – because one of the most noticeable features about a cat’s tail is its flexibility, which the cattail seed area lacks.

There are various species (about 30) within the genus Typha, spread through wetlands all over the world.  Our local cattail is usually Typha latifolia.  Each plant has both male and female flowers, which is not unusual in the plant world.  The male flowers are at the top, where they wither after the pollen has dispersed.  The female flowers are clustered further down the stalk, where they form the “corn dog”.  The seeds are individaully attached to tiny fibers.  In late summer and early fall, the seeds will loosen and float away on the fine fibers.

Cattails increase their numbers by seed and by growth of the rhizomes.  They prefer muddy, marshy areas such as creek banks and swamps, and do well with the fluctuating water levels of wetland areas.  Cattails spread very quickly, crowding out many other plant species.  They can grow up to 10 feet tall, but ours are usually 4 to 7 feet tall.

How does the cattail plant support such long, slender leaves that stick straight up from swamp muck?  The answer lies in a structure called an aerenchyma (pronounced like “a-RENG-kim-ma”) – these are air spaces spread throughout the stems and leaves of the cattail plant.  You can see sketches of them in cross section on the right side of my drawing.  The open spaces surrounded by tough cellular walls make for a lightweight but sturdy structure that can hold up the slender cattail leaf from bottom to top.  In a general way, you could compare it to the structure of corrugated cardboard.

The other major function of an aerenchyma is to supply oxygen to the roots of the plant.  Most plants which spend large portions of their lifespans with their roots submerged in water have special adaptations to get air flow to the submerged portions, so that the plant’s regular metabolic processes can continue.  For the cattail, the solution is lots of aerenchymas (or arenchymae, which is probably a more proper pluralization).

Cattails have several functions in their native ecosystems.  The seeds, leaves,  and rhizomes are edible.  Many animals nest or shelter among the plants – waterfowl, redwing blackbirds, deer, raccoons, muskrats, frogs, turtles, and tiny animals called macroinvertebrates.  Birds use cattail fluff to line their nests.  

Various groups of people around the world have found a use for almost every part of the cattail plant – they have eaten starch produced from the rhizomes, the young leaves, the pollen, even the unripe “corn dog”.  The leaves have been used to weave baskets.  The leaves can be broken down into long fibers, which can be used to twist ropes or to make fabrics.  The seed fluff can be used as tinder to start fires, or as stuffing for cushions.  There are some traditional medicinal uses for the roots.  A glue can be made from the goopy sap in the stems.  Here’s my favorite use: dip the “corn dog” in melted wax, and use it for a candle!  The wilted male part of the flower serves as a wick.

To plan a visit to the Phinizy Swamp Nature Park:http://www.phinizycenter.org/

Also called Swamp Rose Mallow or Rose Mallow.  This plant is in the Hibiscus genus, and it contains various species that often hybridize with each other, and that can make exact designations hard to define.  Hibiscus moscheutos and Hibiscus coccineus seem to be the commonest swamp mallow species names.  

Some of these varieties have white, pink, or red flowers, but ours in the Phinizy Swamp are all white.  The plants prefer moist, rich soil, and can grow in standing water.  They tend to be salt-resistant.  Swamp mallow grows wild from Texas up through the Southeastern and Atlantic states to southern Ontario.   The swamp mallow plant needs lots of sun, and likes hot summers.  Each flower is open for one day.  

I really like the curving spiky projections around the base of the flower and buds, as well as the geometry of the buds and seed pods.

There is a rose mallow bee that only pollinates this plant – it eats both the pollen and the nectar.  It looks a lot like a bumblebee, and its official name is Ptilothrix bombiformis.  It’s possible that the rose mallow bee is what is working on the stamen of the swamp mallow flower in this photo (the bee has been seen in our region), though it’s really hard to tell since the photo doesn’t have enough detail.

Why is it called a mallow?  It looks a lot like the Althaea officinalis plant, which is also called the marsh mallow plant.  The roots of marsh mallow plants have a thick, goopy substance (similar to the juice of okra pods) which can be extracted and used for medicinal purposes – and also, when cooked with sugar and water, to make the type of candy which became known as “marshmallow”.  Later, marshmallow candy was made with egg whites as a substitute for the gel of the marsh mallow plant.  I haven’t broken a swamp mallow plant to see if it contains a gel.

Above: a mass of swamp mallow plants in the swamp.  This area is often underwater.

To plan your visit to the Phinizy Swamp, check out:
http://www.phinizyswamp.org/
(The Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy has changed its name to the Phinizy Center for Water Sciences.)

First, I enjoyed making this drawing just because the pine cone is such a great-looking object.  In the green, unopened state, a pine cone has a solid form that is dense and satisfying.  The longleaf pine tree’s cones are the largest of any of the southern pine species.  And the pattern of scales follows an interesting mathematical pattern, though it may not be immediately clear exactly what it is.

I’ve learned through experience that the type of spiralling pattern seen on pine cones follows the Fibonacci number sequence.  For a fun, snappy 5-minute video on this topic, see Vi Hart’s Youtube episode “Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant [1 of 3]”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

There are a lot of interesting things to be learned about longleaf pine trees (Pinus palustris).  They are fairly easy to recognize because their needles are the longest.  My favorite longleaf life stage to look at is the bottlebrush form in which the young tree grows straight up to a height of 3 to 4 feet with no branches.  They do look like giant bottlebrushes (or if you haven’t seen a bottlebrush, think of a giant, very plushy pipe cleaner).  The “grass” stage is also aptly named – seedlings look a lot like a tuft of grass and remain in this state for several years before shooting up into bottlebrush form.  Mature trees reach a height of 110 feet or more, and can live 200 to 300 years.

Longleaf pines have an interesting connection to fire and the practice of controlled burning.  Since longleaf pine trees have a significant ability to survive fire at certain life stages (as seedlings, and then later when the trees have developed thick bark), this kind of tree will become relatively more abundant after a fire.  Periodic burning in longleaf pine habitat can create an open type of forest in which mature, tall longleaf pines form the upper canopy, with an open, grassy understory that harbors lots of biodiversity in terms of both plant and animal species.  This was the forest that Native Americans promoted over a number of centuries through the use of controlled burning, and later colonial settlers in our region continued the practice.  There are very few of these mature longleaf pine forests left, for various reasons including commercial emphasis on faster-growing pine species, reluctance to employ controlled burning, and encroaching development.

The photo above is from  http://www.tarleton.edu/Departments/range/Woodlands%20and%20Forest/
Longleaf%20Pine/longleafpine.htm

Find out more about visiting the Phinizy Swamp:http://naturalsciencesacademy.org/

Most people would recognize the adult dragonfly, but the smaller drawing shows an immature form of the insect, called a nymph.  A dragonfly actually lives most of its life in the nymph form – around two years in many cases, though this life stage can range from several months to as long as five or six years.  As an adult, a dragonfly lives only several weeks.

Fishermen might recognize the nymph form, but most people probably wouldn’t – because dragonfly nymphs live underwater, breathing through gills.  The gills are located in the insect’s rectum (interesting).  When I looked at a live nymph under a microscope, I saw its rear end pulsing little jets of water – in fact, the nymph propels itself through the water using this method.

I started looking at dragonfly nymphs in macroinvertebrate workshops offered through the Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy.  Ruth Mead, Senior Education Specialist, runs workshops in which live macroinvertebrates (small invertebrates that are large enough to see with your naked eye, but not large enough to see well) are dipped out of the swamp water, and then you get to look at them under small microscopes.  I tried drawing a live dragonfly nymph, but was only able to get so far with a living, moving creature before it was time to put it back in the water.  Here’s the result (second drawing, below)  – a decent start, but missing details.  Next, I was wondering – how do I draw an adult dragonfly without killing it?  Sometimes people find good-looking dead dragonflies, but I wasn’t having any luck.  I could photograph a live one and draw from that – but it’s actually pretty challenging to shoot a live dragonfly.  They just don’t stay still for long.  And the more I looked at adult dragonflies flying around, the more I wondered at the variety of colors and wing designs I was seeing.  Could those really all be dragonflies?

It turns out that dragonfly species are numerous, and they vary a lot in body shape and color.  And plenty of them are actually damselflies.  Dragonflies and damselflies look pretty similar – both have two pairs of wings, a long, sticklike body, and a helicopter-like flight pattern.   Taken together, there are 5000 or more species of dragonflies and damselflies.  Both kinds of insects belong to the order Odonata, and then dragonflies group into the suborder Anisoptera, while damselflies are in suborder Zygoptera.  The order Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) is a rich category, and there are strikingly interesting-looking variations in color and body shape.  At least 80 different species of Odonata have been found just in Richmond County.

A great resource for examining Odonata in detail is this website:  http://www.mamomi.net/Home.html  It’s run by Marion Dobbs, and has lots of his amazing photographs of these delicate insects.  He gave me permission to draw from some of them.  The adult dragonfly I drew is the Piedmont Clubtail (Gomphus parvidens), and the nymph form is the Common Sanddragon (Progomphus obscuris).  These are the dragonflies in the first drawing shown above.  Both species have been found in Richmond County.  


Find out more about visiting the Phinizy Swamp through the website of the Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy:  http://naturalsciencesacademy.org/

This is poison ivy.  In the eastern U.S., the species designation is mostly Toxicodendron radicans.  When is it safe to touch poison ivy?  The best answer is – never.  At least half the human population is seriously allergic to poison ivy.  A tiny amount of the oily resin from the plant, if it sinks into a person’s skin, can cause nasty, painful blisters that take two or more weeks to heal.  If you get enough of the resin on your skin, or on the most sensitive areas of your body, or even worse if someone burns poison ivy plants and you breathe in the plant resin in the smoke – you could get into a true state of medical emergency, and you should definitely seek medical care.

It is true that a few people are never allergic to poison ivy.  But it is also true that some people don’t react to the poison ivy resin (called urushiol) at first, but become reactive later.  Very possibly about 85% of people are allergic to urushiol –if not now, then at some point in their lives.  The human body’s immune system response to urushiol is complex, and scientists are only beginning to understand it.  If you are exposed to urushiol, you should wash it off your skin as soon as you can – within an hour if possible.  Cold water works well, and also rubbing alcohol (and you can find some special products at the drug store if you want).  What you want to do is keep the urushiol from sinking into the skin (since hot water opens your skin pores, stay with cool water).  Once the urushiol sinks into the deeper layers of your skin, your body’s immune response will probably start fighting it.  The redness and blistering of your skin are actually collateral damage inflicted by your immune system in the effort to destroy the urushiol.

More bad news is that urushiol is not found only in poison ivy.  It’s also in poison oak and poison sumac, and all of those plants grow in Georgia (and across the U.S.).   Worldwide, urushiol is found in some fascinating plants, such as the Japanese lacquer tree , whose resin is used to make lacquer, which is a beautiful and water-resistant kind of varnish.  Applying  lacquer is a very specialized skill in Japan because only a few people can withstand the urushiol.  Urushiol is found in mangoes, in the cashew plant (but not in the nut itself), and in ginkgo biloba seeds.  Native Americans on the west coast had some traditional uses for urushiol-bearing plants, such as lacquer, black dye, basketweaving from the woody stems, and medicinal uses.  But please don’t make any experiments – it’s very dangerous.

How do you recognize which plants NOT to touch?  Most poison ivy plants have leaves in groupings of three (though there are other, harmless plants that also have this pattern of three).  Our local poison ivy is usually found as a vine (shown in the drawing in its winter/early spring state as a thick, hairy vine twisting around a tree trunk) or a low-growing plant.  Sometimes the leaves have a nick in the sides, or several nicks, or none.  Often the leaves are attached to stems that show a reddish tinge.  Sometimes the leaves are shiny, sometimes they are matte.  Poison ivy shows a lot of variety in its form.  Poison oak leaves have the 3-grouping, with more rounded nicks in the leaf shape.  Poison sumac deviates from the “group of 3” structure – it’s usually in bush form with leaves in groupings of 7 to 13.

Is it okay to touch poison ivy vines in the dead of winter, when the leaves have fallen?  Definitely not.  The urushiol is active for years after the plant seems to be dead.  If you’ve gotten urushiol on clothing or anything else, don’t count on time to get rid of it.  Wash clothing or gear thoroughly before wearing it again.  So maybe it’s not that surprising that you could get an urushiol rash from petting a dog that has been running through the woods.

So why doesn’t your dog get a rash?  I can’t find the answer to that one.  Humans seem to be the animal that is most reactive to urushiol.  Deer actually enjoy eating poison ivy leaves, and are not harmed by it. 

As people clear more land and build more roads, poison ivy growth increases because the plant prefers open but partially shaded areas.  At the same time, as the deer population decreases near developed areas, the poison ivy is not getting eaten as fast.  And then it turns out that climate change is a bonanza for poison ivy!  As the level of carbon dioxide increases in the air, green plants grow faster, and the vine plants respond especially well.  Poison ivy plants are much larger in our area than they were 50 years ago, and the urushiol they produce is significantly more toxic now.

At the Phinizy Swamp, science center staff put a concerted effort into keeping poison ivy off the paths and boardwalks.  Poison ivy grows quickly, though, and you can often see it on the edges of the paths – because an open but somewhat shaded area is its ideal location.  It’s a good idea to learn to recognize the plant.

For more information about visiting the Phinizy Swamp:
http://naturalsciencesacademy.org/