pictures of little plants

This is a very image-heavy post, already out-of-date, because I took the photos a week ago, and spring is springing apace! Click on any photo for an enlarged view.

This Jackson Pollack-like closeup of the budding plum thicket shows only buds; now it's in bloom. In this photo it is still a complex mass of gray twigs, bearing pale green blobs of buds.



Walking down the lane, I observed that the sporophyte generation of the local bryophytes is about mature.
The mosses and liverworts have to do their genetic recombination at a time when the sperm can swim through the surface moisture on the plant to get to the archegonia structures where the egg cells are -- no bees to carry pollen for them! So this cycle definitely cannot happen in July -- late winter is their time.

Now the gametes have met and fused, the diploid spore-producing part of the life cycle has grown, and the spores are about to be released to drift to a new potential home.



Water on the plant surfaces has actually not been a problem this season. The greenish spot in the left center of this view of the wet, privet/greenbriery thicket by the pot-holey lane, when examined closely, is a puddle full of filamentous algae. This shows that it has beet continuously wet for a long time. Where'd the algae come from? Beats me. I'm not an expert on the drought-survival strategies of the local algae.

A few days after this picture was taken, this submerged green patch of algae had multiplied its mass and floated up to make a bubbly mat on the surface.



Poking up through the dry oak leaves by the lane in the low woods are the first leaves of the white violets. Amy tells me today that the plants I sent to her in Houston are beginning to bloom, and are sturdy plants with a dozen leaves or more. This one has a ways to go — I believe it has five little leaves so far. Isabel always looked for them by her birthday, March 27, in Cooke County; here they are usually in bloom by mid-March. Not this year, though, I don't think.
[edit — 25 March — three or four plants have flowers]


Here is the runoff water merrily trickling around, over, and through the old cookstove "erosion control." More non-vascular plants are evident, though I haven't worked my way through the privet and briers to get a close look.


I have noticed several of these bright orange fungi on dead twigs on the woods floor recently. Several lichens are also evident here.


And finally I saw some actual flowers on the walk, these tiny bluets. I need to look them up; I think they are an introduced "weed," not a native. But anyway they have flowers, which I was longing to see.