I’ve always preferred moths to butterflies. They aren’t flashy or cocky; they mind their own business and just try to blend in with their surroundings and live their lives.

~Kayla Krantz

Went for a walk in the woods yesterday and as I approached one of our woodland benches, my eye caught something on the large Tulip Poplar trunk next to it….do you see it?

It is one of my favorite moths, a Tulip-tree Beauty, Epimecis hortaria. It is very common here and a frequent visitor to our windows at night.

Their gray-brown colors, wavy lines, and scalloped wing edges help them blend in perfectly with tree bark, which is where they usually can be found resting during the day. They also have a very flat profile which helps camouflage them. Caterpillars feed on the leaves of several tree species in our woods like Tulip Poplar, Pawpaw, and Sassafras.

soft-soled sneakers step through
messy mud, slip on
stained stepping stones,
dealing death-blows to decades of
root work, rhizomes, winter rosettes of
limp leaves no longer lifelike, lingering
bereft, half-buried, burdened by
compaction
and lack of traction and
human tracks from

soft-soled sneakers, sealed over
brown feet, belonging to
bodies of brown men marching
mindless of my mental melancholy;
scaling steep slopes, not slipping
while gripping
rough ropes and roof ridges using
driver-drills, dawn to dusk
ratcheting roofing rivets while
saws shriek, cutting stick-straight seams in
patterned panels placed precisely under
expert eyes, as I
watch wanton waste from windows.

This is my privilege:
to prioritize plants over people,
woo wildlife without the weight of worry,
wander winding wooded paths protected
by my purchasing power bought
by my birthright as a
white-collar white woman.
Woke? but wallowing
while watching

soft-soled sneakers step through
messy mud

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

~Douglas Adams

Melissa and Mike’s top ten tips (plus) for camping in your truck…

1. Don’t run your truck through a mud hole that tops the hood on the first day. And if you do, hope for really good luck and that there are no adverse effects on your truck. Go ahead and camp at the end of a paved road, rather than the end of a mudhole-ridden gravel road.
2. Download and study the Motor Vehicle Use Maps (MVUMs) available from pretty much all National Forests (find the website for the forest you’re looking at, then click the Maps and Publications link in the left bar and look for the MVUMs there; most can be downloaded as a PDF). For the most part (and especially in western states), they show where you’re allowed to dispersed camp on National Forest lands. Then, use Google or another satellite view option to look for likely spots to camp. If there’s too many RVs where you are, just drive further over the bumpy, rocky, muddy stretches (contradicting rule 1), and you’ll probably find a spot you can camp without a next-door RV!
3. Find a water container that doesn’t leak. Good luck with that. If you find it, let us know.
4. Jury-rig any and everything. This may include:
   • creating a gasket for your above-mentioned leaking Igloo water cooler made from window gasket material
   • using some tubing to direct the water from your leaky water cooler out the truck door so even though the area around your water cooler is already pretty wet, you don’t make it any wetter while actually using the water as intended (rather than as an unintentional interior car wash)
   • adding a shelf for under your tailgate (for wet shoes and extra gear) made from a $6 piece of closet shelving and a few bungees
   • installing a cargo net between the roof handles in the back seat/storage area of your truck cab to shove your jackets, hats, bug shirts, rain gear, paper towels, etc. Use zip ties if necessary.
   • bringing along leftover bits of decking boards to use for leveling your truck on uneven campsites. Also use said boards for holding your extra water jerrycan up so it doesn’t tip over when you move the leaky Igloo water cooler (we could carry about 12 gallons of water at a time between the two water containers and water bottles).
   • covering most of the bed liner of your truck with super sticky gorilla duct tape so that the rough surface doesn’t catch on your mattress, sheets, clothes. etc. Then, use Velcro on top of said duct tape to attach all sorts of things – mosquito netting, battery powered fans, storage containers for your glasses and phones, curtains, etc.
   • sealing your truck bed camper with any and every material including silicone caulk, RV waterproofing tape, and yes, duct tape. If you use black tape it blends in better…
5. Get over your aversion to dirt and dust before you leave. You’re just going to have to live with it!
6. Prepare for all sorts of weather. This includes ice and snow. In August. And if you didn’t, just wear all of your clothes at once, get your sleeping bag out of the car top carrier, and hunker down to keep warm. Warm beverages and whiskey are both effective for internal warming in cold and snow!
7. Go to the west. There’s amazing mountains, and it’s dry (just avoid the parts that are on fire, please)! If your water cooler leaks all over your truck, it’ll dry. If you wash your really dirty jeans in a bucket with some Dr. Bronner’s, they’ll dry. If you take a bucket shower with frigid water, you’ll dry. When you breathe at night (which I hope you do, no vampires allowed please), it’ll dry… or turn to frost (see rule 6 for pointers on this problem).
8. Get a bucket, a pool noodle, and some wag bags. Use some of that jury-rigging expertise already mentioned and make yourself a toilet. As Mike said, “The bucket changed my opinion about pooping in the woods.” You’re welcome.
9. Make sure you don’t try to use your newly constructed toilet in a really flat area of Wyoming. You’ll have to get down in the dry stream bed to get out of sight of the road, and those really huge mud cracks created as the water evaporated from the clay soils that you thought looked really cool until you stepped into them and sank more than 6 inches into some of the stickiest mud you’ve ever experienced in your entire life — yeah, you should avoid them. Should you not heed this warning, note that it’ll take a lot of washing, including using sand and pebbles as an abrasive, to remove the mud from your shoes, socks, and pants. Even then, you may never remove all of the mud. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.
10. Every single day you’re out there, thank the native peoples that lived on these lands and stewarded them for centuries. Recognize that most of the places you’re reveling in belonged to someone else and were stolen. At the same time, thank the people who fought to protect these lands from development — native peoples, local and non-local advocates, earlier (and perhaps more statesmanlike) politicians, and many others. And revel in the natural beauty and vastness that comprises the United States of America.

But seriously, if you think you might want to start camping in a truck, here’s a few of our best hacks and favorite pieces of gear that made our truck camping experience more fun and comfortable (note that we are not sponsored by or getting anything from any of these links below – we just liked the gear!):

• Take a test run. My sister and I spent one night in a torrential rainstorm in the truck a few weeks before the big trip. This helped us realize a few things that really helped us out on the long trip, including the need for the jury-rigged under-tailgate shelf and having a small collapsible table that we could cook on under the tarp.
• Speaking of tarps, our Slumberjack tarp provided a place to get out of the sun or rain (and to keep the rain from coming in the back window while sleeping with the tailgate open).
• Though we didn’t use it until our return to the east, something like the Dac Inc. Truck Tent can help keep mosquitoes out (unless you’re camping in the western US, which you should be, in which case you won’t need this because you can sleep with the back completely open and not worry a bit about insects! This is what we did for most of the trip.)
• If your truck has an extended cab, remove the backseat to provide you with more storage area. We added some plywood platforms to level things out and give us space to shove stuff like shoes and tools underneath.
• Organize your stuff in tubs so you don’t have to dig too far to find what you need. We had a big food tub sorted into brown bags for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; but then had our daily food tub on top for easy access to the things we planned to eat over the next couple days inside. (Jerry, you would approve of this system! We didn’t quite reach your standard of organization, but it was MUCH better than our normal approach of throwing everything into a huge pile!)
• Along the lines of the previous tip — don’t let you stuff pile up! Put it back where it belongs or you’ll make yourself miserable!
• Limit the items that need to stay cool. That way, if you forget to get ice one day and then can’t for a couple days, nothing will spoil because, really, things like cheese, jelly, and pre-cooked bacon are pretty much shelf-stable. I also dehydrated lots of things before departing, and packaged meals (especially dinner) for easy preparation. A little experimenting with quantities of water and cooking times led to some pretty decent homemade dehydrated meals!
• Think about how you want to try to stay clean. We swam a few times in the southeast, but we also enjoyed using a portable shower with a 5 gallon bucket and some biodegradable soap. We didn’t heat the water (honestly, we just couldn’t heat enough to make a difference), so showering was definitely a warm-day only phenomenon (though we did shower near the Tetons with snow on the ground – but back to that thing about weather in the west: if the sun is out, it can be REALLY warm in the sun even when the air temp is in the 50s!).
• Research how you can power the gadgets you need. We purchased a sine wave inverter that had enough power to charge my laptop so I could reference the aforementioned Motor Vehicle Use Maps as well as search for places to camp and hikes to take on the internet (using my cell phone as a mobile hot spot). It was also perfect for charging our phones, the small rechargeable fan, and the portable shower.
• Be prepared for trouble. We had a full size spare tire with us (though we realized we hadn’t checked it in a while, so thankfully we didn’t need to use it) and a portable jump starter in case we accidentally killed the truck battery with all of our recharging (which we fortunately also didn’t need).
• Even if it’s cold, keep the windows and tailgate open, if at all possible (I refer you back to rule 6…). Condensation is a real thing while camping in a truck.
• Get off the interstate when you can! Some of our favorite spots were along back roads across the plains and into the Rockies.

If you want to try something like this, Mike and I would be happy to share more ideas, lessons learned, favorite places, and other tips. Just send us a note!

Ephemeral

Delicate, perfumed phlox;
A mist of columbine, clinging to earth;
Phoebe’s gravelly voice,
Titmouse — tender, sweet;
A dogwood cloud hover above
Vibrant, fresh leaves.

Fleeting
Falling flowers, already spent;
A garden, no longer my own.

A spring, a garden, will come again;
At home in the hope, the beauty.

Bittersweet
and fast-fading.

Always returning!

Mike has shared some of my poetry on his blog in the past; the poem above is another of mine. In fact, it’s the first I wrote as an adult. I went to a poetry session at an Outdoor Classroom Symposium at the NC Botanical Garden that was taught by a couple of teachers from South Carolina. The teachers gave us a few templates to get started, and sent us out along the garden paths to write. I found a spot amid a patch of beautiful columbine flowers. The first activity was simple – use your senses to observe the world around you, and pay attention to how that makes you feel. The poem above is the result of that short, sweet writing exercise. I have used the same simple steps many times since then in my own writing, and I’ve shared that activity with numerous teachers through my work. I’m incredibly grateful to those two teachers for reintroducing me to the world of poetry-writing!

But now, it’s time for our next flower parts adventure… this time we’ll take a close look at wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis). Wild columbine is one of my favorite spring wildflowers, and we have an abundance of it in our yard. The flowers hang on delicate stems and look like they’re floating above the ground. Each plant produces numerous blossoms over the course of  at least a month in our yard. In fact, a couple of years ago, one of the earliest blooms managed to get caught in a late winter snowstorm…

Because its so ubiquitous, it was an early target for my plant parts explorations – I didn’t feel too terrible taking a few blossoms off the plants when they were so numerous! Like the wood poppy, it is a simple flower, but because of the odd shape of some of its parts, it’s a little more challenging. As with the wood poppy and dogwood flowers, my first task was to find the sepals.

Given the overlapping nature of the flower’s structure, this was tricky. Which are the sepals, which are the petals? I took off one of each to see if I could tell…

It was still difficult to tell which was which, even after removing one of each part, though it seemed as though the smaller, leaf-shaped parts were attached higher up on the stem than the long, spurred ones, which would make them the sepals. I looked for some flower buds for confirmation, and indeed, the leaf-shaped part enclosed the bud before it opened. Mystery solved!

In these two images, you can see how the petals’ spurs extend and start turning red very early in the flower’s development. In the image on the right, you can even notice the developing stamens inside the flower bud; and in the right-hand image, the elongated stalks extending out of the flower bud are the undeveloped pistils (more on that in a moment). The spurred petals have a nectar reward in the bulb at the top where long-tongued pollinators like butterflies and hummingbirds can access it (while conveniently rubbing their bodies or heads on the stamens or pistils).

Since columbine blooms for so long in our yard, it was easy to trace the development of different parts of the flower by finding a sequence of ripening flowers.

In an early bloom, the stamens, with club-like yellow anthers on the end, slowly uncurl, with the interior stamens dropping first. Notice how, at this point, the stamens and pistils are about the same length. As the flower continues to develop, that changes.

The flower in the next two pictures is further along than the last one, and you can see how nearly all the stamens have fully uncurled. The pistils have also lengthened, and their tips have opened up as they’ve become receptive to pollen.

An interesting pattern among many flowers is that their parts often occur in multiples. The columbine is a great example of that. It has 5 sepals, 5 petals, and 5 pistils. And when I took the time to count the stamens on one flower, there were 40 of them (which is a multiple of 5!). Another example of this is with Easter lilies, a flower you might be familiar with, and perhaps appropriate to mention as we approach Easter weekend. Easter lilies (as well as other lilies) have 3 sepals, 3 petals, 6 stamen, and 1 three-pronged pistil. Maybe this is a new tool for teaching the multiplication tables for those of you who are now homeschooling your kids?

When the columbine flower is finished blooming, the sepals, petals, and stamens fall off, leaving only the 5 pistils behind. They slowly turn upright and the ovaries at the base begin to swell. Eventually, they will open up like 5-sectioned cups, full of dark-colored seeds that bounce out when you brush up against the plants. But for now, the seeds are still developing.

As with the wood poppy, I gently opened one of the one of the ovaries to see the seeds developing inside.

As with the other species, I was again fascinated by the way the columbine has adapted its structures to an entirely different arrangement. Flowers are so cool!

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

~Georgia O’Keeffe

So far this spring, I’ve had to cancel workshops that I was planning for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences taking educators to the swamp along the Roanoke River and to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’ve always been a huge proponent of sharing real experiences in the natural world with others, in large part because I learned the value of that so well from Mike. But in this challenging time when I’m no longer able to do that, I’ve decided to finally try to embrace the power of sharing things in a virtual way, while still encouraging people to get outside and experience the world around them. To that end, my colleague Megan and I have begun creating a series of online workshops for educators where we share some information through a video and then give them a couple nature journaling activities to guide their exploration of the nature in their backyards or local parks. My most recent endeavor in this series was to teach the parts of a flower and send folks out to apply that knowledge by observing flowers in their yard and recording what they notice. Looking closely into the world of flowers is fascinating, and particularly timely with the arrival of spring. So I wanted to share some snippets of what I’ve discovered with the Roads End Naturalist crowd!

Let’s start with a quick primer on flower parts. I spent time during a recent online meeting sketching one of the wild geranium flowers in our yard (ah, the wonders of turning off your video during a zoom meeting!) and created a diagram of the parts of a simple flower.

Parts of a wild geranium flower, as well as enlarged drawings of a stamen and the pistil.

The main parts of a flower are the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils. Let’s take a look at the arrangement of these parts in a simple flower that is abundant in our yard right now, the wood poppy, or Stylophorum diphyllum. This species is native to the eastern US, though technically not the Carolinas. However, it is native to the surrounding states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. I chose this flower as a starting point because it’s one of the larger flowers blooming in our yard right now, and it demonstrates most of the flower parts well.

Here’s the wood poppy flower. It’s about 1 1/2 inches in diameter and displays four vivid yellow petals. Petals are perhaps the most recognizable part of the flower. They are typically the most colorful part of the flower and often play a key role in attracting pollinators.

Wood poppy flower

But what about the sepals? According to Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary by James and Melinda Harris (yes, we own a copy of this book… what does that say about us?), a sepal is “a segment of the calyx.” So what’s a calyx, you ask? “The outer perianth whorl.” And a perianth is “the calyx and corolla of a flower, collectively.” I still don’t know what a calyx is… but corolla? “The collective name for all the petals of a flower.” Ah… botanical jargon. (Picture the eye-roll emoji here.) It just might be worse that geologic jargon. (In case you don’t know, I am NOT a botanist – my degrees are in geology, and I like to joke that you have to like big words, as well as hitting things with hammers, to be a geologist). At least I know what petals are (“an individual segment or member of the corolla, usually colored or white”)! The easiest way I’ve found to explain it is that the sepals are arranged outside of the whorl of petals. Sometimes they are green, other times they look a lot more like the petals. And I’ve noticed that they often seem to enclose the flower bud before it opens, which can be a helpful clue in identifying them.

So where are the sepals on the wood poppy? Normally, they would be underneath the flower, and might even be visible from the top-down view (some sepals act more like petals when the flower is open). But the wood poppy flower presented a mystery because underneath the petals is just the stem – no sepals! So does this flower lack sepals? To solve the mystery, I went looking around the yard to find some unopened flowers.

Notice the two hairy sepals surrounding the unopened yellow flower.

In this picture of a flower bud, you can see two hairy, translucent sepals just beginning to open, exposing the yellow flower inside. I also looked around underneath the flowers and found a few sepals lying beneath the plant. So it turns out that for this species, the sepals fall off as the flower opens.

I removed two petals and about half the stamens so that you can better see the structure of the wood poppy flower. Notice the lack of sepals underneath the petals.

So now we get to the important parts of the flower, the stamens and the pistil. Because why do we really have flowers, anyway? Not just to look beautiful in a vase on my kitchen counter. Flowers exist to produce new plants. Without flowers, there would be no fruits and seeds. Many flowers, like this one, rely on pollinators and put a lot of work into attracting them through vivid colors, nectar rewards, and sometimes even trickery (check out the part of this earlier post about the grass pink orchid). Other flowers rely on the wind to disperse their pollen (anyone else’s screen porch covered in pine pollen right now?), and some can self-pollinate. But back to the wood poppy, and most simple flowers…

Stamens are the male part of the flower that produce pollen. They are comprised of a stem-like filament and a pollen-producing anther. As the flower ripens, the anthers tend to shrink and shrivel as they produce pollen. An education student at East Carolina University once described a stamen as looking like an eye shadow applicator, and ever since then I’ve used that analogy, especially for ripe stamen that have granules of pollen (eye shadow?) on them.

This wood poppy flower has been open longer and is riper. The stamens are browned and shrunken, though a few at the center are still yellow.

In the center of the flower is the female part, the pistil. At its top is the pollen-receptive stigma. In some species, like the big star-gazer lilies that are often in grocery store bouquets, the stigma opens and has a sticky coating as the flower ripens, making it more likely that pollen grains will stick to it. Below the stigma is the thin style, connecting the stigma to the ovary, which is the swollen part at the base. When a grain of pollen reaches the stigma, it grows a pollen tube all the way down the style to the ovary, where it fertilizes an ovule (which I like to call a pre-seed).

Wood poppy ovary that has begun to swell as it ripens. Notice the stigma and style still visible to the right side of the image.

Eventually, the wood poppy drops its petals and stamens, and the ovary begins to swell. Inside, the fertilized ovules are developing into seeds.

You can see the white ovules developing into seeds inside of this wood poppy ovary.

This ovary had swollen from about 1/4 inch long to about 1 inch long, and the ovules likewise had enlarged, making them much easier to see. In the closer, backlit photo below, the developing seeds are even more obvious, and you can notice how each one has a furry-looking edge on one side.

This backlit photo of the ovary shows the developing ovules in more detail.

Apparently, this species’ seeds are dispersed by ants and that furry bit is a fatty appendage called an elaiosome that ants like to eat. For more information on elaiosomes, check out a couple of Mike’s previous posts on seed dispersal by ants in bloodroot and trillium.

As I’ve refreshed my memory on flower parts, I’ve started looking at all the flowers in our yard with new eyes. Different species have developed fascinating takes on this basic structure. I’ll add more posts in the coming days highlighting some of the other flower species I’ve been examining. In the meantime, take advantage of this beautiful weather and head out into your yard with a magnifier and see if you can identify sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils on some of your flowers!

And if you’re an educator interested in the online workshops my team at the Museum has been creating, send me an email at melissa (dot) dowland (at) naturalsciences (dot) org.