The rounded, five lobed, purple calyx on the back of a pokeweed berry ( Phytolacca americana) reveals what the flower once looked like. The berries have formed on false Solomon’s seal ( Maianthemum racemosum ) so the leaves aren’t needed anymore. I think this one is a purple cort (Cortinarius iodeoides.) In the case of mushrooms, it’s actually fruiting time. I’ve watched this for 2 years now and it shows that mushrooms have “bloom times” just like flowers do. Once the purple ones appear there are fewer and fewer orange ones seen. There can also be occasional red ones but orange dominates the forest until the purples appear. Here in New Hampshire white and brown mushrooms can be found at almost any time, but the really colorful mushrooms usually start in about mid-July with yellows and oranges. The little black bug on one of the fruiting bodies is so very small that I didn’t see it until I saw this photo. After many attempts, this was the best I could do. Unfortunately it’s also one of the smallest, which makes getting a good photo of it almost impossible. The honeycombed domes of the Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa variety porioides slime mold make it one of the most beautiful, in my opinion. I think this example might be a pigskin puffball ( Scleroderma,) which is poisonous. Here is a real puffball-at the size of an egg many hundreds, if not thousands of times bigger than the wolf’s milk slime mold. John Tyler Bonner, a slime mold expert, says slime molds are a “bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia–that is, simple brains.” This slime mold is found on rotting hardwood logs and is one of the fastest moving slime molds, clocked at 1.35 millimeters per second. This is also called toothpaste slime mold but on this day the liquid inside the sphere was nowhere near that consistency. This is the surprise you get when you try to make wolf’s milk slime mold’s “puff ball” puff-you find that it is a fruiting body full of plasmodial orange slime. The diameter of the one in the photo is about the same as a pea.

The galls can also be found on smooth sumac ( Rhus glabra.) They remind me of potatoes.Īt a glance wolf’s milk slime mold ( Lycogala epidendrum) might fool you into thinking it was just another brownish puffball but, if you try to make it “puff,” you’ll be in for a surprise. Scientists have paleobotanical evidence that this aphid has had a relationship with its sumac hosts for at least 48 million years. They average about golf ball size and change from light yellow to pinkish red as they age. Red pouch galls on stag horn sumac ( Rhus typhina) are caused by the sumac gall aphid ( Melaphis rhois.) These galls look like some kind of fruit but they are actually hollow inside and teeming with thousands of aphids. I wonder if the idea for blue and white porcelain dishes first made in ancient China came from berries like these. They also twisted the bark into rope and made fish traps from the branches. Native Americans smoked the bark like tobacco. It gets its common name from the soft, silky hairs that cover the branches. This is a large shrub that grows in part shade near rivers and ponds. The birds love these berries so they don’t decorate the shrubs for long. The berries of silky dogwood ( Cornus amomum) start out porcelain white and slowly change to dark blue. The seeds of curly dock ( Rumex crispus,) when the sun is shining just right, look like tiny stained glass windows. The broken one in the photo shows that these are hollow. More often than not I find these growing in the hard packed earth near trails and they have usually been stepped on. I thought these might be Clavariadelphus truncatus but that mushroom has wrinkles down its length and these are smooth, so I’m not sure what they are. Some coral fungi come to a blunt, rather than pointed end and are called club shaped corals.

Because of its large root system, early settlers found it was an excellent choice for the “bricks” of sod houses. Before Europeans arrived this grass had a quite a range from Maine to the Rocky Mountains and from Quebec to Mexico. It is the dominant grass of the tall grass prairie in the U.S. This grass gets its name from its blue green stems.

The flowers of native big bluestem grass ( Andropogon gerardii) grow in pairs of yellowish male anthers and feathery, light purple female stigmas. I like discovering grass flowers and this one is a beauty. Here are a few more of those odd and unusual things that I see that won’t fit into other posts.

Blue stem grass photo