How Righteous Is Our Maple Tree?

This righteous.

I have no idea what a tree has to do to get a halo, but clearly, this is a very, very good tree.

Random nonplant event: bird's-nest fungus

Yet another yard fungus. (Previously.) Most of what we get here are pretty normal, little beige mushrooms, but something about the unusually cool, wet summer must be encouraging the weirder ones. Or maybe something about the unusually cool, wet summer means that I spend more time outdoors, and am therefore in a better position to observe weird fungi. Whichever.

That on the left is a Portulaca, is that gives you any sense of the scale we're talking about.
I'm not sure what species or genus this particular specimen is; according to Wikipedia, the color of the peridioles is a good indicator of the genus, and these being black means that this is probably a Cyathus.

Bird's-nest fungi are so named because they look like tiny little nests with eggs in them. They're not actually eggs, obviously -- instead, they're peridioles, which contain the spores for the next generation of fungi. The spores are dispersed by rain: the shape of the "nest" is such that a raindrop hitting it will eject the peridioles as far as possible (up to 3-4 feet / 0.9-1.2 m).

The houseplant/gardening consequence of bird's-nest fungi is basically zero: they don't attack living plants, and they're so tiny it probably wouldn't matter if they did. They make a living from breaking down the cellulose and lignin in dead wood into sugars, so you'll occasionally run into them in potting soil (which often contain composted wood). I can't find the post now (maybe I didn't actually write one?), but I've seen a clump of them growing out of the drainage hole of a plant at work once:

So not a big deal. Kinda neat, though.

Random nonplant event: stinkhorn

Fungi aren't plants, and aren't even particularly related to plants,¹ but people tend to think of them as plants, and this fits the scope of the blog insofar as it's something that grew in the yard, so I'm making an exception.

A few weeks ago (3 Jul), I encountered this in the yard.

I recognized it as a stinkhorn, a type of fungus, and eliminated a few species from the possibilities, but I couldn't narrow it down much better than that. My best guess is Phallus rubicundus, on the grounds that Mutinus species lack a clearly defined "head," and this definitely has a clearly defined head. P. rubicundus also seems to be relatively common in this part of the country, even though it's not native to the area -- the short version of the story is that it was probably introduced here via mulch; interested readers can find the long version here. I'm pretty sure that there was some mulch spread on this part of the lawn at some point since we moved in, though I can't remember why. So the odds would seem to favor P. rubicundus.

It's not clear where P. rubicundus is actually native; apparently it's been found on every continent but Antarctica. The first specimens discovered in North America were in South Carolina and Texas; it generally favors tropical and semitropical areas, but apparently frost isn't a dealbreaker: it's been introduced and established in the U.S. as far north as Wisconsin.

The brownish slime on the head contains the spores. It's supposed to smell bad and attract flies, though I didn't notice a smell when I took the picture. (Also it's supposed to be green, not brown; it's possible that this one wasn't fully mature.) New fungi are started when the flies carry spores away on their feet.

As to where the spores come from, well, fungi have a very different understanding of sex and gender than we do; I don't even want to try to explain. Try this: A Fungus Walks Into a Singles Bar.

Both 1) things that smell bad to attract pollinating flies and 2) fungus are going to appear on the blog again a few times in the next couple weeks; I know this because I have so many things to blog about all of a sudden that I've managed to schedule the blog for near-daily posts through 19 August.² Haven't done that in a while. (It's possible I still won't. But that's the plan.)

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¹ (Fungi actually have more genes in common with animals than with plants.)
² (Two days off in the next 24 days.)

Pretty picture: Buddha

We have a couple prisms in the kitchen windows, and a number of Buddhas around the house; both are the husband's deal, but I like the prisms and don't object to the Buddhas, so whatever. The above is what happens when one of the little rainbows from the prisms happens to land perfectly across one of the little bronze Buddhas. Without a regular-light photo to compare to, this is maybe not that impressive: the reader could be forgiven for assuming it was painted. But in normal light, this is mostly bronze, with black hair and accents.

The angle of the sun is now such that this can't happen again for a while, and I'm not in the kitchen that much during the morning to begin with, so getting this picture was mostly the luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Other: Menards Parking Lot

Events lined up for me yesterday such that the plants were all watered and the husband had a free day, so we went to Cedar Rapids so he could watch me buy plants. Except he didn't even do that, because he stayed out in the car with Sheba, so really it was more like, he drove me to Cedar Rapids and then watched me bring plant-containing bags out of stores. It's apparently more fun than it sounds like.

Sheba, meanwhile, threw up twice during the trip and then once again after we got her back home, which hasn't happened in a long time, and we're all a little confused about why it would have happened on this particular trip. She'd been doing so well with car rides previously. Sheba never seems particularly disturbed about throwing up, but she's also never really happy about it either, unlike some dogs. Mostly, yesterday, she just seemed kind of tired. (In fairness, the trip was cutting into her nap time quite a bit.)

But so anyway, the point is that I didn't have time last night to get a post together, by the time the plants all got unpacked and photographed and added to the spreadsheets and stuff. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have gone out without having a post ready first, 'cause I'm all responsible like that, but I've been working for a couple weeks now on a post about the trip to the Quad City Botanical Center, and it hasn't been going well. Also it might want to be three posts. I don't know. The upshot is that I've been running around a lot, and this could pay off in the form of all kinds of really cool posts about all kinds of great stuff at any moment, so be ready.

Meanwhile, for today, you get a photo from the Menards parking lot in Iowa City, which isn't plant-related but has to do with a plant-buying trip so it's, like, plant related by association, or something.


There's a pretty substantial Amish and Mennonite community around here, mostly south of us, in and around Kalona. And sometimes they need to go to Menards.

This is something one sees occasionally in the area, especially near Kalona, though it's fairly unusual to see horse-drawn carriages as far north as Iowa City. Too much traffic, I suspect, to be horse-friendly. I saw plenty of people doing double-takes in the parking lot. One couple even whipped out a camera and got a photo with the horses in the background. (Yes, I was taking pictures too. But it's different: I'm a blogger. I have to.)

If I can get one together, there will be a plant-related post this afternoon, but I also have to start watering again today, and there are a ton of pictures to sort, so that might happen, and it might not. We'll see.

Random nonplant event: Mushroom

I was bopping around the house the other day, like I do, and happened to catch a glimpse of this guy peeking through the thicket of Hatiora salicornioides cuttings. I think it photographed awfully well, considering.


Mushrooms will occasionally appear in potted plants. It can be really alarming, if you're relatively new to houseplants: they're pretty big, they pop up really fast, and they're not something you expect to see. Sometimes there's a weird color, too. (Around the time of the flood, we started having a weird variety of mushroom pop up in pots around the greenhouse: they were fairly normal-shaped, but they were also brilliant, fluorescent yellow. Yellow the way a yellow highlighter is yellow. They were freaky. For some reason, also probably related to the flood, I didn't manage to get a picture of them.)

So the question of whether mushrooms are bad for potted plants gets asked fairly regularly at Garden Web, and something I occasionally was asked at the garden center too.

The answer is: kinda.

Most of the time, a mushroom's primary interest is going to be in the pieces of bark your plant is growing in, and not the plant itself. A fair number of fungi will attack houseplants, but the ones that do are rarely large, mushroom-shaped things. They're usually more powdery, like mildew or soot. The one exception I can think of, from my experience anyway, was this stuff, which I found growing directly on a Spathiphyllum petiole once:


But most of the time, your mushroom isn't going to threaten the plant directly. However. Finding mushrooms is kind of like having fungus gnats, in that it's indicative of overwatering, or a bad potting mix. Sometimes both. The solution in both cases is basically the same: either repot the plant into a mix that will drain faster and dry out faster, or water less often, or both. Because both fungus gnats and mushrooms require a fairly steady source of moisture in order to function, letting your plants dry out between thorough waterings (which is what most of them would prefer anyway) will usually take care of the problem within a few weeks.

In the meantime, go ahead and pull the mushrooms out of the pot and throw them away. They'll eventually stop coming up.

I forget what plant these were in, but this is a nice little collection of birds'-nest fungi growing out of the drainage hole of something or another. They came off the truck like that, if I remember correctly, and didn't last in the greenhouse for very long at all.
I have occasionally bought bags of potting mix that must have had mushroom spores in them. You'll know this has happened if everything you repot for a while sprouts the same kind of mushroom. (I think the aforementioned "highlighter" mushrooms came from a few bags of the Ball mix we used at work.)

I don't think the mushroom in the Hatiora cuttings was from the soil I was using; I think it was my fault. The Hatioras are in a flat with some of the Salvia elegans (pineapple sage) cuttings I'm growing, and the Salvia need to be watered about every three days, so sometimes the Hatioras get water when they don't need it. I doubt it'll make any difference in the long run.

Random plant event (?): Blue Begonia?

Don't get all excited. It's not actually a blue Begonia in the way you're thinking. Though that would be cool, and I encourage somebody to create one like what you're thinking someday.

What it is is, I took some pictures of my 'Coffee Texas Star' (which might also be several other things, including 'Gladys Meyer:' I've run into at least four differently-named Begonia rex-cultorum cultivars that all look more or less exactly like my plant.) on Tuesday for the "yearbook." Because I never know how the light is until after I've uploaded the photos, I took some pictures with the flash, and some without. And in every single one of the photos with the flash, I got blue iridescence off of some of the leaves, particularly the leaves that were most directly facing the camera. Or maybe it's more turquoise than blue --


See? Above, with the flash; below, without:


And a close-up of the blue part, just for shiggles:


So I was thinking, wow, that's weird, I wonder why I've noticed that before. Maybe it's something specific to the flash on this camera. So I got a flashlight, and shined¹ it at the plant, and when the beam hit the leaf more or less perpendicular, I did see a little bit of turquoise bounced back at me, so long as my eye was more or less right behind the flashlight. Which looked approximately like the above picture.

So I guess it's a real thing. What does it signify? How does it help the plant? Or does it help? What structure or structures within the leaf are responsible? Do all Begonias do this? What does it all meeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaan?

I have no idea. But it happened. You know the blog's title.

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¹ I know. It sounds wrong to me too. But the internet says that if there's a direct object, "shined" is correct, and without it, it's "shone." So I shined the light on the Begonia, but yesterday the sun shone. This sounds really stupid and wrong to me either way, and I'm actually more, instead of less, confused by the direct object thing and should probably have rephrased the sentence as, "So I got a flashlight, turned it on, and aimed it at the plant," but that sounds kind of clunky too. So I think I'm just going to swear off flashlight-related writing after this post.

I can has frog: the conclusion. . . .

Those of you following the harrowing two-day saga of the green tree frog I found in the box of plants (original post here) will be pleased to know that the frog has been placed in a suitable home. Apparently one of the Iowa City Water Treatment sites has a good-sized terrarium in its lobby, and my husband took him there this morning at the advice of the local animal shelter.

Since the camera was with me today, I have no pictures of the new home, but I'm assured that it's nice, and I'm encouraged to come by and visit sometime.

The frog could not be reached for comment.

I can has frog?

Um. So I was pulling the plants out of boxes and taking the plastic sleeves off them and attaching price tags and whatnot, and after a few hours of this, I look down in the box of asparagus ferns I've been unpacking and see this guy.

(It's somewhat alarming, by the way, to look down into a box of plants and see movement. Just in case you'd ever wondered.)

There's no point in leaving him in the greenhouse, because the pesticides would get him. I couldn't bring myself to do that. Mercy killing was out of the question also -- that's never gone well for me either. So I caught him and brought him home, and now I have no idea what to do. We gave him a shot glass full of water and a few fragments of roast beef (the theory being that frogs are carnivorous, even if they don't normally kill and consume cattle -- though what a PBS nature special that would be), and a plant for oxygen, but this leaves a lot of questions open, obviously.

I suspect he's probably doomed regardless of what I do. But I'm willing to try to meet him halfway. Anybody want to make any wild stabs in the dark on this one?

UPDATE: I'm reasonably sure that what I have is a Hyla cinerea, or green tree frog. As it happens, they're a popular species of pet frog, and they're even the state amphibian for two states (LA and GA). The down side is that they are said to need a lot of space: the articles I ran into on-line all seem to agree that a ten-gallon is the absolute minimum possible, plus there's advice about non-chlorinated water and sterilizing terrarium materials in bleach-and-water solutions before adding them to the terrarium, and there's all this stuff about crickets, and . . . well, and I need another thing to take care of like I need another piece of caucus-related campaign literature, so something is going to have to be done. I just have no idea what one does with excess frogs. Pet stores? Animal shelter? Still trolling for suggestions, here. . . .

Oh, and -- they don't eat roast beef, but then we kind of suspected that.

UPDATE: The story concludes here.