northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a Common Box Turtle plodding through the springtime vegetation. I could probably also label it an Eastern Box Turtle , which is the subspecies of the Common Box Turtle most likely to be found in New Jersey. (The main exception to this would presumably be any other subspecies brought to NJ as a pet that either escaped or got released.) Remember yesterday's post about the Mayapple that had either an unopened flower bud or an unripened fruit? It turns out that Common Box Turtles are 1 of the few animals known to eat Mayapple fruits. Unfortunately although I saw the Mayapple and the turtle approximately the same time of the day, they weren't close enough for me to gauge whether the turtle had any interest in eating the bud/fruit. Had the turtle eaten it, we could say with confidence that it was a fruit. I'm told that Common Box Turtles are an excellent way for Mayapples to spread. The turtles are likely to poop out the seeds a fair distance from where they ate them...

Just after May, this was a Mayapple I saw in early June. Mayapple's weird lobes on a pair of stems, growing low to the ground, and being at their best before a lot of plants have recovered from winter makes that part of the identification easy. A trickier discussion is about the green orb growing off it. There are pretty much 2 possibilities: This could be the unopened bud of what will be a Mayapple flower. Or it could be the unripe fruit that a Mayapple produces from a fertilized flower. Visually I kind of like it as a fruit due to its smooth and shiny green appearance. Pictures I've seen of the buds are a little less smooth without a shine to them, though admittedly it was a pretty small sample size. Seasonally though, I think it's more likely to be a Mayapple bud. I'd generally expect to see buds in May and fruits in July, and June 3 is a lot closer to May than to July. I also believe that Mayapple flowers are more numerous than Mayapple fruits since Mayapples don...

The Mayapple has flowers, but you have to peek under their leaves to find them. When I help do talks on native plants, the question that frequently comes up is: Can I eat it? For the Mayapple, the answer is mostly no [1], but there are exceptions: Although most parts of the plant is always poisonous, that didn't stop Native Americans from using it. Whether they got away with this by keeping the dosage low or whether they had some process that destroyed some of the toxins is something I don't know. (One website said they used it to commit suicide, in which keeping the toxins would be main point.) Apparently the fruit is edible, even tasty, if eaten when fully ripe, but even then it's a little tricky. There's a theory that they taste better if they ripen on the plant than if they're picked unripe and allowed to ripen at home. And finding any while foraging in the wild is difficult [2], and the fruits are on the small side. If you do choose to eat the ripe fruits , ...

Here's a plant that's out about now, generally in wooded areas, the Mayapple . It's basically a mid-spring wildflower, never the first to show up, but probably gone by the time summer rolls around. The plant is almost entirely poisonous, though it sounds like you may be able to eat the fruit when it ripens to yellow. That doesn't prevent the plant from being used in Native American and folk medicine, but it's still not a good idea to eat it. It's got a neat looking flower, though it's not in my picture; bumblebees give it good grades for pollen/nectar. April 29, 2021 at Washington Valley Park Photo 128319557, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)