It has been said that it is ‘the little things that make the world go round’. The renowned author E. O. Wilson had ants and beetles in mind. But it could also be said for sedges. They are a group of grass like plants, also referred to as graminoids, about which most of us know…
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-Henry “Weeds” Eilers When we think about our woodlands – what comes to mind? Perhaps the earliest wildflowers after a long cold winter or hunting for morels a bit later. And then there are large trees of course, such as oaks and hickories. We think less often of the understory, unless such iconic species as…
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Henry “Weeds” Eilers After recent burns and while getting my exercise by cutting down and piling brush at the Shoal Creek Conservation Area, I checked the few plants of Spicebush that had survived that devastating 2012 drought. Though mostly small, 3’ or less, they all indicated considerable age by their sizable basal crowns. The largest…
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-Henry “Weeds” Eilers One of our chapter members in October suggested that I do a plant profile column for the INPS newsletter on this native shrub. It had been only a week ago that I was privileged to accompany Nathan Aaron, a skilled botanist who is working in the Meramec Hills section of the Missouri…
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Better start out with a definition of ‘weeds’ first. That means something quite different, whether you are an industrial farmer or a lawn obsessed suburbanite. Even polling our readers might yield wildly different definitions! One of my few favorite Facebook pages is ‘Illinois Botany’. Some visitors to the site barely know the difference between dandelions…
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After a hiatus of several years I have again be collecting seeds for the Chicago Botanical Gardens SOS Millennium Seed Bank Partnership. They issued a priority list but were looking for other species as well. Apparently, there have been few collectors for the Southern Illinois Tillplain Region. Not all species are easy to collect, for…
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The Chicago Botanic Garden contacted me again this spring about collecting seed for their SOS [Seeds of Success] seed-banking program. I had done so some 5 years ago. One of my first collections was Oxalis violacea, a fairly common plant in our woodlands and barrens communities. When the sun shines, it is very showy with…
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The ‘Naturalist at Large’ by the retired biology professor Bernd Heinrich is a feature in the Natural History Magazine; always a favorite of mine. In the last issue of the magazine he writes about ‘The Lives of Trees in the Forest [Growing up in a tough neighborhood]’. Last year in his northern New England woods…
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A nice colony of Pale-spike Lobelia [Lobelia spicata] is in early bloom in my garden as I sit here one of the last days in June. It is a rather dainty species as compared to its well-known relatives, the robust Great Blue Lobelia and the Cardinal Flower and therefore perhaps less well known. The flower color…
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Rare plants, unusual plants, that were some alternate headings that came to mind. This exploration is prompted by a long list of plants that I have come across over a period of time that had not previously recorded from ‘my neck of the woods’. They were often far removed from their main area of distribution.…
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