Halloween barely registered with me this year. Long gone are the days when my kids went out trick-or-treating or I went to parties in Elvira costumes. [I figured I had the best possible chance of being beautiful when I could disguise my natural appearance with wigs and tons of makeup. I never had the slightest interest in looking scary, as many of my more confident friends enjoy. If I were ever to dress up again, I'd want to go as Morticia. Carolyn Jones as Morticia was the ultimate feminine role model--socially aware, compassionate, smart, and sexy. Oh, and beautiful.]
But Mother Jones gave me an idea .... Why not report on the creepy plants and critters I've encountered in my yard and elsewhere over the years? This can be my contribution to Halloween this year, and the Great Pumpkin should be pleased. Unlike pumpkins, though, most of these species won't be found here in Appalachia at this time of year.
Terry Krautwurst's great article, "Ghost Flowers! Earthstars! Hickory Horned Devils! And More Weird and Wonderful Oddities of Nature" is a great place to start, and I've seen with my own eyes (yes, I know that's redundant!) and been amazed by three of the five gifts of nature covered in his article at http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-community/odd-nature-zm0z10zhir.aspx, and I've added one he (or she) missed.
Krautwurst's first example is, thankfully, one I've never encountered. I have mixed feelings about caterpillars and worms. Some of them are okay, and some are downright icky. When I was a kid, I actually liked tent caterpillars, putting them in shoeboxes full of grass and sticks and petting their "furry" backs. Now they creep me out, most likely because they seem so much more prevalent than they did when I was a kid but also because of the nasty tents they make in trees, not to mention the damage they do to those trees. Last summer I saw an entire mountainside with fibery, silvery treetops--the hideous nests of these vociferous pests. [We read the short story "Tent Worms" by Tennessee Williams when I taught a course on writing the short story one semester, and that was a sad, sad story that didn't help my attitude toward those creepy crawlers.]
On the other hand, show me a monarch caterpillar on a milkweed leaf and it's a whole different deal. That is an exquisite little "worm," soon to be an even more gorgeous butterfly.
Like I said, thankfully I've never encountered the hickory horned devil, a mean-looking but harmless caterpillar that, according to Krautwurst, is about the size of a frankfurter. No, I'd rather not, thank you.
The adult moth, however, is rather pretty in the photos I found, and moths in general don't bother me (though I've known two women with dramatic phobias of them). I've found a number of interesting moths in my yard--luna moths (or fairies--I'm really not sure which), hummingbird moths, green-and-purple imperial moths. Twice I've found the huge (wingspan 5.5 inches) polyphermus moth in my yard. This is a beauty--no wigs or makeup required. My yard borders woods, and I first found this forest-dweller on my screen door one night. I had no idea moths grew that large. Its lovely wings in shades of brown sported bright yellow owl's eyes. I could see why most predators would ignore this morsel.
More recently, I found one of these "monsters" lying on the grass in my yard. I worried the dogs might have hurt or killed it, as it didn't move. I took a bunch of photos (below), and the moth appeared to be curling into death. I picked it up to put it into a safe place away from the dogs, and as I did so one set of the fading owls' eyes became brilliant again, and the wings expanded to reveal the other set that had disappeared when the creature curled in on itself, looking for all the world like eyelids opening. I lay it in the grass over the fence, and I hope it made it through the rest of the season.
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| Polyphermus Moth -- Huge! 5.5-inch wingspan. |
And I've seen the next wilding, too, but I couldn't hope to improve upon Krautwurst's description, so here it is:
You look down, and there it is: a tiny flying saucer, complete with a star-shaped outer ring and a central circular cockpit. You almost expect to see a miniature alien nearby. As out of this world as it seems, though, the UFO you’ve spotted has a distinctly terrestrial identity: It’s an earthstar, a relative of the puffball family.Exactly. I'd never heard of such a thing when I found my first (and only) earthstars. I was waiting for my honey who had gone into a country store on Savage River Road. I got out of the car and scanned the earth between the two-and-sometimes-one lane road and the river, ever on the hunt for new species to add to my life list, which at that time was still small and still is, of course, given the vast number of plants I'll never see.
My first discovery: partridgeberry, a lovely little trailing plant with white flowers and red berries that has no place in this essay, but grows nicely in my terrarium. (I only took it from the wild when I established several places where it grows profusely and this only after years of witnessing it thus. It is also for sale on the Web at native plant nurseries. I should add that individual plants don't grow profusely--it's slow growth pattern makes it a bad choice for ground cover in my experience.)
And then I saw it--that tiny flying saucer on its mossy landing pad. Fungi had always fascinated me, but I'd never seen anything like this before, this other-worldly form. And a few more grew near it. I oooh'd and aaah'd over them and showed them to Honey when he came out. I left them all there; in many hours in the woods, these were the only ones I'd ever seen, and I don't pick rare or endangered plants.
I had to wait until I got home to look the fungus up on the Web, the Internet not having arrived at the Savage River by that point (if it has yet), and the iPhone with satellite access not even invented yet. (And Steve Jobs still hale and healthy, sigh.) I googled "star-shaped fungus" and couldn't have been more delighted when I found its name--earthstar--and saw images of ones similar to those I'd seen that day and other species perhaps even more other-worldly. What a perfect name and a fine Halloween fungus, if ever there were one.
If you can imagine that tiny flying saucer opening its door and itty-bitty Martians rushing out, the images Krautwurst raises when describing the next species might strike you as familiar. I also find the subject beautiful, which gives me an idea for next year's Halloween costume.
Krautwurst describes the "brown, ridged, Styrofoam-like blob" deposited on plant stems that is the egg sac of the praying mantis. This Tyrannosaurus Rex of insects, according to Krautwurst, undergoes "incomplete metamorphosis," skipping a couple of steps (larval and pupal) many winged insects undergo.
When this sac, or ootheca, opens next spring, "from a dozen to hundreds of tiny mantises [manti?] hatch out, lacking wings but otherwise fully equipped as predators — with appetites to match. Their first meals may be their siblings" (Krautwurst).
I haven't seen an ootheca or watched it hatch, but a couple of weeks ago I found a huge praying mantis. At first I thought she was an unusual leaf lying between the cedar shrubs in the lava rocks, the leftover landscaping of my empty office building's former resident. She was the thickness of those Flair pens we oldsters can remember, but not quite that long. This is when my iPhone is my best friend--or sometimes is--the focus is off occasionally. I I immediately got a shot of this "monster"--no doubt a big, beautiful female looking for a place to deposit that sac Krautwurst describes.
Her size was impressive. I pulled a penny out of my purse to set beside her, moving my hand slowly so she wouldn't run off. It was a bright new penny, a shiny copper contrast to her nearly metallic green wings.
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| A praying mantis looking for a place to deposit her ootheca. Apologies for the blurriness. |
When I got as close as I dared, she lifted a leg in a defensive or perhaps even offensive posture--the one opposite me, though, interestingly. Maybe it was going to be the first foot down, Roadrunner-cartoon style, when she took off in the other direction. No wonder I was nervous and the shot is blurry. [She was so gorgeous, and I didn't like to scare her, but I love recording these things. This, I realize, is quite selfish, and I hope I didn't do her any harm.]
Time to start collecting green things--if I'm ever to go to a Halloween party again, no more Elvira or Morticia. It's a blob-bearing female mantis this time around! What can I use for those eyes?!
Next? Well, actually, I'm out of order. I liked putting the Martians spewing from the earthstar together with itty-bitty praying mantises spewing from the mantis-blob, rather like green and frenzied Martians themselves.
And I have not seen the holes in the trees created by yellow sapsuckers that was described by Krautwurst in between those two. I do, however, have a lot of sick-looking trees in the woods behind my house, and pileated and downy-or-hairy-or-both woodpeckers live in those woods. The smaller ones have come to my suet feeders. Maybe they're attracted to my woods by the dying trees, or maybe the trees are dying because of their drilling.
One of the dead trees has an oval hole in it about the size of a football, and I'm thinking it might be the work of the pileated woodpecker who swooped through those woods all spring, big as a hawk, and making its cuckoo call. (I've got to research its nesting habits.) Talk about a weird-looking creature!
[Woody Woodpecker, the cartoon character, must have been a pileated woodpecker, with his red crest and crazy call. A cereal company--can't think which--marketed Woody Woodpecker whistles back during my sixties' childhood. Andy Jones, the kid next door, and I both sent away for our very own. I think we had to save up a couple of boxtops and send a buck, too. No Happy Meal giveaways in those days! (Okay, now I really am sounding like an old codger.) But we loved those things. We had called each other every day until they came in the mail. They had a little lever in the hole so you could make the sound go higher and lower like Woody's laugh.]
And now for the species that first caught my attention while browsing the Mother Jones Web site. This perfect Halloween plant is known as "ghost flower" and "ghost plant"! Indian pipe, another common name for this woodland wildflower, lacks chlorophyll, so it "stands in clusters, white and translucent, seemingly sculpted of wax" (Krautwurst).
I can vouch for this, as I have found the plant once in a woods I'm hoping to somehow preserve because pink lady's slippers and many other Appalachian woodland plants grow there--and Indian pipe is high on the list of wildings we must protect. This one grew in a grove of woods that, at that time of day, was surprisingly sunny, a small white specter rising from the leaf litter, exactly as Krautwurst describes it. I knew its name due to many hours perusing field guides, and I wasn't tempted to pick it or dig it up as its little cluster stood solitary in that big grove. I do worry, though, because it grows in open spot in the woods where town teens like to hang out. I've intended to return to see whether it comes back each year, assuming it survives the traffic, and next summer I will. This time, I'll have my trusty iPhone with me to take its likeness. And I have a few strategies in mind for protecting those woods.
Okay, I have to add at least one original idea to this blog, so I'll describe one more creepy Halloween plant, also known colloquially as "ghost plant." This is one I first found, again, near the Savage River and, again, I had to wait until I'd returned to the wired world to identify it. But I was in no hurry--I was in wildflower heaven on an early spring day. I found a bonanza of white and lilac hepatica, the most exquisite wildflowers, growing alongside Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, and trillium. Then I saw a strange blue-ish-brown stalk crookedly twisting up from the forest floor, looking dark and out of place among other species' fresh green leaves. Its own blue-brown leaves clung to its stalk with long, veiny "fingers." Creeeepy. Close up, I could see brown flowers with bright yellow centers. Brown flowers? Fleshy brown symmetrical flowers, quite pretty, actually. I had a camera with me that day, and this is the result:
I sent the photo to a Facebook friend known for her love of the creepy and told her it made me think of her. She loved it, saying, "Looks evil--My kind of plant!" I've since found this plant, blue cohosh, in the woods near my house. Unrelated to black cohosh, the plant known to help "women's issues," blue cohosh is said to be an aborticant. ("Cohosh," by the way, comes from a Native American language, possibly Algonquin, and meant "plant.")
Whenever I find blue cohosh in the woods, I can't help but smile. The plant seems to be proof that nature or God or the Universe has a sense of humor.
And, hey, why not--here's another:
Of course, the ultimate Halloween creepy plant must be the Jack O’ Lantern (Omphalotus illudens), an orange mushroom that grows in clumps on decaying wood. Jack O’ Lantern gets its common name due to its color, of course, but the name is even cleverer because the species’ chemicals are said to make the ‘shrooms glow in the dark, with “stories about 19th-Century pioneers finding their way back to their cabins, in the dark, following the Jack O'Lantern's glowing gills” (Kuo).
Michael Kuo, however, insists that this is all a big conspiracy by mycologists who like to think of us amateurs sitting in the dark, waiting for our mushrooms to glow .... At least he did until, as reported on an addendum to his post: “This summer I walked ("stumbled" is a better descriptor) 100 yards through pitch-black woods between my cabin and a camp fire, holding aloft a brilliantly glowing clump of Omphalotus illudens. The trick, it seems, is to wrap the mushrooms in damp paper towels when you collect them.”
And another reason this mushroom is creepy is that it is easily mistaken for the delectable chanterelle, and eating it can make you very, very sick. Whatever the truth is about its luminescence, Jack O’Lantern is a fall mushroom here in the Appalachians, so it could well be spotted on an All Hallows Eve. It is, therefore, a perfect entry for this category.
And I haven’t even mentioned spiders or snakes yet …
Happy Halloween!
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References
Kuo, Michael. "Omphalotus Illudens: The Jack O' Lantern." Mushroom Expert Nov. 2007 http://www.mushroomexpert.com/omphalotus_illudens.html
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