Christmas Greenery

Today I met David Hopey at the prairie and we did a bit of exploring and a lot of clearing brush. David is student at Penn State with an interest in restoration and wanted to get involved with the priarie at Big Hollow, so today he got involved. We cleared quite a bit of brush from three of the smaller prairie patches and David showed me two new patches I'd never seen. The new patches (new to me, at least) are a couple hundred yards from the main prairie. David discovered them this fall, after many of the rarer plants would have stopped flowering and would have been hard to find, so they remain unexplored. We will both be keeping an eye on them next summer to see which prairie plants are still holding on there.

Most of the plants in Big Hollow are now dormant and brown, but a few remain green. Of course the White Pines and Eastern Red Cedars are a cheery Christmas green, but joining them is a little wildflower that could easily be overlooked. Round-leaved Ragwort (Packera obovatus, formerly Senecio obovatus) forms large patches in the dry woods around the prairie, where it seems to favor steep slopes. In the spring it will produce golden-yellow flowers resembling small chyrsanthemums, but in December only rosettes of green leaves are visible. This seems like one of the more promising local natives for gardening; I bet it grows easily and it forms a nice-looking ground cover when it isn't blooming. Most of the web pages I found in a quick search describe the foliage as semi-evergreen, but at Big Hollow the leaves have made it all the way to December and still look fresh - I am guessing they will be green all year long.

Open Season

This weekend was a busy one in the semi-wilds of Big Hollow. Deer season opened on Monday - Opening Day is not the first chance to hunt deer this fall, but it is the first chance to hunt antlered deer with a rifle, and it is almost a statewide holiday. Most schools are closed, many businesses are all but closed, and almost a million hunters take to the woods. The Monday season opening means that Saturday was the first weekend day of deer season, and when I arrived at the prairie around 10:30 there were three cars parked near the gates. Later as I was clearing brush at the prairie, several hunters passed by. None had taken a deer. Whitetails, the only deer in this part of PA (Elk are found in a few places in the state, but not here) don't seem to be particularly common at the prairie, but they do occur here. Deer browse many of the prairie wildflowers, and one of my concerns in clearing brush is that we are improving deer access to some of the rare plants. Deer seem to enjoy Whorled Rosinweed (Silphium trifoliatum), and many of the plants I found this summer had the blossoms removed before they could bloom. The guilty party browsed parts of the plants that were 4 or 5 feet off the ground, so deer are the only likely suspects. Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa) also had the flowers taken off, and I suspect deer did that too. Now that we have removed a lot of the shrubs, I hope that we don't see even heavier browsing of the flowers. As the tallest and perhaps the showiest wildflower at the prairie, Whorled Rosinweed (if it flowers) would be a good poster child for the prairie. Last summer I found perhaps 50 individual plants (or small colonies) of Whorled Rosinweed. Only about 6 or 8 even tried to bloom because most are growing in too much shade. We have cleared the trees and shrubs from many of these plants and have high hopes that they will grow much stronger and bloom next summer - that is unless the deer get the buds first.