Seems Like Just Yesterday that the Sarvisberry Bloomed

I enjoyed reading an ecard quote this week that, "For teachers, the month of August, is just one long Sunday night."  Isn't that what it feels like as the first day of classes approach?

I started looking through my pictures from this summer.  From all the way back in May, I have a picture of serviceberry.  When visiting my brother-in-law he pronounced it very differently.  I thought it was just his Windber twang!  I discovered that his common name was more correct than mine and was spelled differently too, even though it was the same tree.  He called the tree sarvisberry.  I took the picture of this tree in May, long before conversing with my brother-in-law.  On the ride home from Windber, I read about this tree in the book:  Trees of Pennsylvania: and the Northeast by Charles Fergus.  The book is a wonderful way to get to know particular tree species; reading it, I felt like I was getting to know my friends better.

Serviceberry is probably a modification of the older name sarvisberry, which may be a name that settlers gave to the tree because the fruits resembled the Sorbus from their European homes.  Serviceberry on the other hand, has a relevance all its own.  The tree blooms early, about the time that the ground might have thawed enough to bury the dead, several hundred years ago.  The tree is also called shadbush because it blooms at the same time that fish (shad) were migrating up the river.  (And a quick YouTube search, led me to this video that suggests that not only are the fruits edible, a fact that my brother-in-law had told me, but so too are the flowers.)

Today as I reviewed my pictures from May, I felt nostalgia for the early parts of summer.  Here are a couple of my pictures. Ah, to return to the early days of May with the whole stretch of three months of summer ahead of you!

The genus is Amelanchier, and the family is Rosaceae.

Lots to Know about Willows

The willows are in bloom; they are very early bloomers, beat only by some even earlier flowering plants like skunk cabbage.  Willow flowers don’t, to my knowledge, have petals, and they often bloom before their leaves appear. If you aren't paying attention, it’s easy to miss the entire flowering period of willows.  For a teacher, if you are interested in using willows in your classroom, it may be worthwhile to mark willows in April as to whether the plants are male or female.

My daughter challenged me to find one hundred and one facts to know about willows.  Probably possible, but rather than be boring, I have picked a few favorites in hopes that they might inspire me to think creatively about how to use willows more than I currently do in the classroom. I found this site with some of the great “big picture” facts about willows highlighted:  http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jsavage/Willows.html

To me, willows are a background plant; if you study them enough they do stand out, but if you are just riding your bike down the road, they just look like a bunch of shrubs.  Like every plant (and every person), willows have their own interesting stories to tell but you may need to ask and listen to know the story.

1.  Willows are dioecious; some plants are male,  and some plants are female.

2.  Some willows have been reported to be ambophilous, using wind and insects to disperse pollen (Meeuse, 1978).

2. Over twenty species of willows can be found in Pennsylvania.  http://www.paflora.org/

3. Changes in the chemistry of willow plants may help explain cycling in Lynx populations.

Bryant JP,Wieland GD,Clausen T,Kuropat P. 1985.  Interactions of snowshoe hare and feltleaf willow in Alaska. Ecology 66: 1564–1573.

4.  Willows often like wet areas.

5.  Willows make compounds related to aspirin (Salicylic acid).

6.  Willows are related to Aspen, and I believe that I see the similarity when looking at the hairy buds on the branches. 

7.  Some gall-making insects attack willows, and there are reports that herbivory may differ between male and female plants. Furthermore, willows interact with many insects.  Wonderful pictures can be found here:

http://wanda.uef.fi/biologia/nyman/IOWexternalfeeders.htm

8.  You can make a cheap rooting solution by soaking severed young willow twigs in water for several weeks & then using that water on the roots or cut stem of another plant.

Willows in the classroom?

The capacity of willow plants to make rooting hormone certainly opens many doors to student experiments. 

The vegetative and flower buds of willows, especially “pussy willows” are quite appealing to students – so they provide an opportunity to investigate plant stem anatomy.

Dioecious nature of the plants provides an opportunity to ask questions about sexual dimorphisms in general.  Can you detect differences in allocation to resources between male and female plants? Why do male plants allocate resources different from female plants? Can  you detect differences in herbivory between males and females?