After finishing my hike up and over Mount Greylock, I came upon a large stand of rough horsetails (Equisetum hyemale) at the base of the mountain, at the edge of a boggy, wetland area. These plants are primarily found in riparian zones, around springs and seeps, in wet forests or other wetland areas. The rough horsetail has 2- to 3-foot tall vertical jointed hollow reed-like green stalks. Each node, or joint, along the stalk is marked by a ring of…
My favorite crane fly memory (I mean, who doesn’t have one of those?) was from graduate school: I was in my bedroom upstairs when all of a sudden my two housemates started screaming in the living room downstairs. I came running down to find them pointing up at a corner in fear, and one of them exclaiming, “That’s the biggest mosquito I’ve ever seen! Just think of the size of the bug bite you would get from that!” To their…
With the start of October comes our slow turning towards the cold season. My yard is peppered with acorns, leaves are starting to yellow, and many wildflowers are noticeable now more for their striking seed pods than their colorful blooms. One of my favorites (is it weird to have favorite seed pods?) are the seed pods of the milkweed genus (Asclepias). One of our common native milkweeds is butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), also known as orange milkweed. Where it is…