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BLUETS AT THE BRIMFIELD ANTIQUE SHOW

I went to the Brimfield outdoor antique show and ended up driving over and crushing some of these flowers. I was directed to park on this spot. I still own what I did to those little delicate flowers but in a strange way I was actually helping the local population of that species. You will have to read on for that explanation!

This beautiful spring wildflower is tiny, colorful and elegant, floating above the ground on the thinnest and most spindly of stems. They thrive on moist flat areas where the grass is diminished and mowed moist fields where the grass is continually kept at bay. The world renowned Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield Massachusetts is a great place for them to thrive because acres of moist soils are continuously mowed to make way for the largest antique extravaganza in the world to take place three times a year. Many of them do get run over by tents and parking cars but the the conditions are still so favorable that they continue to thrive! I drove over a bunch of ‘em and when I loaded my van with all of my recently acquired antique finds I took great care to not crush any more! I did feel guilty for the ones I ran over with my automobile.

However, interestingly enough the huge show is helping the species locally by requiring the continuous mowing of fields to park cars on, even if many of them ending up getting crushed.

The complicated world of species survival, local species extirpation, and unintentional species codependency grinds on.

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Red Oak trees, planted from acorns in 1985. Reporting from Monson Massachusetts

In 1985 I acquired two acorns sourced from Thayer Road in Monson Massachusetts. I planted them at my home on Moulton Hill Road, about 8 miles away as the crow flies. I got them in the fall and put them in some dirt filled pots and se5 them in the damp basement for the winter. By spring the acorns were swelled up and ready to sprout. I chose two locations that today I would not have picked, because they are too close to 1, a drainpipe and 2, a septic leach field. Over the years I have watched the two trees grow, sometimes suffering from too much water nearby, the occasional insect infestation and one of them was accidentally mowed over in its sapling state.

This is the one that got mowed down in 1986. It looks about 45 feet tall. Below is the one planted near the septic system.

A nice place to sit, in front of the Mayapple patch featured in yesterday’s post.

The circumference of the mowed down one is clocking in at 7 feet!! Measured in the trunk about a foot above the end of the flare.

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REPORTING LIVE FROM MONSON MASSACHUSETTS

Dear readers and subscribers: while the rest of the internet goes on and on about all of the topics it goes on and on about incessantly, here at the Sanguine Root, in our little corner of the internet, we are measuring Mayapples with a tape measure and discussing a very fascinating aspect of this specie’s morphological variations between New England and Southeastern Pennsylvania!

So welcome to this respite and its accompanied breath of fresh air as we discuss the differences in morphology between like populations.

Upon immediate observation, the Mayapples that grow in and around Monson Massachusetts are much bigger in every way than the ones that grow in Southeastern Pennsylvania. They are noticeably taller, and have much larger leaves and leaf spans. The stems are twice the thickness. It is a startling difference. I’ve not yet found anything written about this in the literature and would love to see it. We are going to present our hard data and make some reasoned arguments, so fasten your seatbelts.

So this is a large patch of Podophyllum peltatum, that I planted from a locally sourced donated specimen. The picture below has the leaf span clocking in at almost 22 inches!

Why are Massachusetts Mayapples so much bigger, larger, wider, taller than Pennsylvania Mayapples? The simplest explanation is probably the correct one: The only Mayapples that survived in Massachusetts are ones that can withstand the late Spring snowstorms, so the ones that had a genetic variation favoring larger and thus stronger stems survived over time, leading to the existing populations overwhelmingly having these features. They can survive the occasional late Spring snowstorm and still make it to flower. The Pennsylvania Mayapples are to a less of degree likely to have this problem and thus are more diminutive in their morphology. Why grow larger or any more taller than they need to?

Genetic variations within species between geographic regions is an endlessly fascinating topic!

The stem base at one inch! In Southeastern Pennsylvania, these are 1/2 inch! What a difference! Below is my cultivated patch.