Beautyberry (10/14/2014)

You can always notice it is fall when the beauty berries in our yard start producing their bright purple fruit.  Beautyberries are a very common native (weedy) species in our yard.  We started with one, just in the right spot, and now two or three years later we have three additional plants scattered throughout the yard.  Since the fruit is a bird favorite, you can guess where we get the new plants: underneath existing shrubs and trees.  Birds eat the fruit and poop out the seed, usually when the sit on a perch.

I saw this when managing on a 400 acre ecosystem restoration project in the Indianapolis area.  We had planted tree seedlings in rows in all these acres of farmland and we were required to monitor the success.  We started to notice that volunteer seedlings were germinating everywhere.  While seedlings of plants with light seeds established were germinating throughout the area, we saw that seedlings from plants with fruits were germinating only at the bases of the tallest seedling we had planted.  This was pure evidence that birds were using the tallest seedlings as perches to look over the field and pooping out seeds.  Great to see nature in action like that.

Honestly, I love beautyberries. Callicarpa americana as it is known in scientific terms is a great native plant, it serves as food for birds during a time they are fattening up for winter or migration.  It seems that the plant has a chemical compound in its leaves that repels mosquitoes, and in our yard we need all the help we can get.

I am posting this picture as part of Cee's Fun Photo Challenge.  This weeks challenge was to post a picture with vibrant colors, and lucky me, I took this photograph this past weekend.

Newport News Park (10/12/2014)

 It was a damp cool weekend; and therefore great for some yard work.  We planted some perennial bushes and started noticing a lot of mushrooms popping up out of the ground.  Subsequently, we decided to go for a walk in the woods behind our house.  We soon were awestruck by the number of mushrooms everywhere.  So at the encouragement of my wife, it was time to break the phone out and start shooting some pictures of them.  About 5 years ago I did a whole series of mushroom pictures, so I am no stranger of walking through the woods braving ticks and taking close-ups of these wonderful guys.

We counted probably more than 20 different species ranging from very minute ones to huge mushrooms; and from eatable (chanterelles) to outright poisonous mushrooms.  No I do not dare to harvest anyone of them, since misidentification can prove deadly.  I just admire the heck out of them.  Having studied commercial mushroom growing when I was young, I love seeing them come up out of the ground for their day or sometimes hours of glory.  Before you get these great, what we call, fruiting bodies, mushrooms are nothing else but mold threads in the soil, that when conditions are ripe, come together as a group and all the sudden pop up out of the ground in these and interesting forms.  For example the eatable “hen of the woods” looks more like a white flower (gardenia) that has fallen on the ground.

Mushrooms help in the breakdown of organic matter in the soil, and a lot of mushrooms are micorrhizal, in other words they live on roots in a symbiotic relationship.  The roots supply the fungi (mold) with nutrients like sugar, and the molds help with the uptake of water and fertilizer by the roots.  In essence they scratch the root’s back and the roots scratch theirs.  So the soil and many plants need these fungi. 

Well, Sunday I took many photographs and here are two of the really poisonous ones.  I identified the reddish mushroom on the left as the “big laughing Gym”.  It is tall and has a circumference of about a foot.  That mushroom is hallucinogenic and according to my mushroom book causes “irrational laughing.”  The white mushrooms are as big as dinner plates, and are named “destroying angles”.  They are deadly when consumed; according to Wikipedia more than half the deaths from mushroom poisoning are caused by this mushroom; although it is a micorrhizal mushroom and really useful and important for plants.  An interesting world we live in indeed.  Although some are deadly to us, they are useful and essential for others, in particular plants. It was a fun walk through the woods and just great to see them all out.

New River Trail (10/10.2014)

On the way back from my trip all the way out west I decided to stop in Draper and take a short walk on the New River Trail.  The "short" walk turned out to be an hour and a half long, but it was just what the doctor ordered.  Granted I saw very little of the "Creeper" (see my post of two days ago), but the New River trail is still my favorite.  The Creeper took me 2 miles from downtown Abingdon and back.  So it was a bit of suburbia with some nice pasture land mixed in.  The New River Train from Draper starts in a very rural area, and before you know it you are outside the village in nature.  I am such a strong believer in Nature Deficit Disorder (I previously wrote about that and you can find more in the labels section of my blog).  However, yes it is either nature or sailing where I can clear my mind and think clearly.  Then coming home, I hear that my brother-in-law gave a lecture at Princeton where among other he talked about the philosopher Heidegger needing nature as well to think clearly.  Naturally no comparison here, but yes I need my nature fix.

Fall was gearing up in this area.  Leaves were starting to turn and seeds were ripening.  Birds were all over the seed heads along the trail.  The pictures below show the flowers of a New England Aster, a fall flower that has found a niche flowering this time of the year.  There is a photo of the fruit of a spice bush.  Spice bush is one of my my more favorite plants.  The leaves are very fragrant, and serve as host for many butterflies.  I harvested a few fruits to try to germinate and grow some plants here in my yard.

The bench is something I have done for years now, ever since I got into photography as a 16 or 17 year old.  Back then I represented a certain loneliness that felt after having been transplanted from a tropical island to the Netherlands at the age of 16.  At that time my parents decided to relocate after some 1960s riots on the island.  Here in the peak of puberty, having my first girlfriend, I found myself transplanted in a completely new surrounding.  I became the class clown, in the hope to get accepted and to be noticed in a high school class that had been together for a long time.  I was lonely and depressed back then and started taking pictures of empty park benches (the tears of a clown?).  But, it is something that has stuck with me, and even now (see even my New Kent picture from a while back), I enjoy taking pictures like that; although I do not consider myself lonely or depressed.  I'm happy and content, but it is something that I'll always be interested in.

 

Abingdon (10/9/2014)

The fun part about all the traveling I do is meeting people or reacquainting myself with people I have taught or interacted with in the past. People that I remember from the past really made an impression on me back then, and they did not disappoint me this time around.  Just pure fun.  The issue is that I basically have to be on from 8 am till 4 pm.  I have no fellow teachers this time around and I am horribly horse after a day of talking.  I am also tired as a dog, and basically collapse when I get back to my motel room.

Fun is seeing a new place in Virginia or seeing the same place again and thus seeing it in a different light.  Abingdon this week was such a place.  I was teaching at a location I had not taught before.  Yesterday and today I ate dinner at a places I had never eaten before.  I really try to explore the local cuisine.  Chains I can eat at at home or while driving; I tend not to eat at chains while at home.  Call me strange, but somehow I do not think a chain has creativity and being a cook myself, I like creativity in food.

This picture was taken in the restaurant I ate tonight.  Bella's Pizza and Subs is a great local restaurant.  I enjoyed it and even yellep it.

Rails to trails in Western Virginia (10/8/2014)

A little bummed out, in Abingdon tonight and I had hoped to be able to report that I had biked all four rail to trail sites I western Virginia that I know.  Taking my bike out the trunk of my vehicle I noticed my tire was flat and pretty darn past repair.

Oh well, time to at least walk the Creeper (for the second time). The Creeper is an abandoned railroad that was converted to a bike trail.  Others in the area are the High Bridge Trail (subject to last week's post), the New River Trail, and the Huckleberry Trail.  Of these four trails, the Huckleberry is accessible to both road bikes and off road bikes.  I would do the other trails with a bike with fat tires.  The most scenic one (of the areas I've seen, walked or biked is the New River Trail, although the view from High Bridge is spectacular, and I have only seen 2 miles of the 37 mile Creeper.  Maybe I can get my bike repaired tomorrow and try it.

I took these pictures during my walk this afternoon, it was fun.  The walk back was right into the setting sun, so that was bothersome.