Category Archives: Plants

Floating Bottom

In the dead of winter, it’s amusing to look back a few months to fall flowers:

Red and yellow

These yellow and white flowers are growing on floating bottom in the middle of a pond. Looks like a lush prairie:

PB010502

But if you step on it, you will sink through into water. Here’s what you find at the edge of the floating bottom:

Bladderwort?

I think that’s bladderwort, which is a carnivorous plant that eats small insects.

And for another color:

Red2

Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, 1 Nov 2009, Lowndes County, Georgia. More pictures in the flickr set.

Mistletoe

You know it’s Yule season when you see the mistletoe.

Mistletoe

Clumps Actually, it’s evergreen, so you can see it all year if you want to; we just go looking for it around the winter solstice.

Phoradendron leucarpum (aka Phoradendron serotinum) is the common American mistletoe, one of 1300 species of mistletoe worldwide. It’s poisonous, and like many poisonous plants, had traditional medicinal uses. Nowadays it’s mainly noted as a forestry pest because it’s a parasite that takes resources from its host tree, although it is being studied for various pharmacological uses.

And a certain well-known friendly use.

It ranges from New Mexico to New York by way of Florida. And Georgia. Curiously, the USDA Plants Profile shows none in Lowndes County, Georgia.

Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, 13 Dec 2009, Lowndes County, Georgia.