Tag Archives: prairie

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Eliza’s Ice Photos

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A guest post by Eliza Perry, one of our Hubbard Fellows.  All photos are by Eliza:

Sorry to state the obvious, but it is cold. 

All kinds of internet wisdom has been popping up offering random coping mechanisms,
like “21 Hot Chocolate Recipes You’ll Need To Survive This Winter” and “23
Delicious Salads To Get You Through The Winter.” Salads and hot cocoa are very
important, this I can’t deny, but there’s also so much beauty in these frigid
temperatures. I am not new to the winter blues, but I try not to waste my sunny
day rations. Chris’s recent posts on still life ice portraits and river ice
behavior inspired me to venture outside with our new camera and make some
prairie ice art myself. It will be the last ice-related post for a while, we
promise!      (Editors note: I make no such promise.)

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At this point, my fingers were that odd red-hot feeling from the cold, so I gave up. I just loved how beautifully the ice distorted the landscape.


At this point, my fingers were getting that odd red-hot feeling from the cold, so I gave up. I just loved how beautifully the ice distorted the landscape.

On another note, I wanted to express my sincerest gratitude to all of those who have participated in the survey I posted last week. We’re learning some really neat things that will help us reflect on how we can do better.  I’m also learning a lot about how to conduct surveys!  There are already a number of things I would do differently in light of what I know now, but I’m learning that this is simply the nature of experimentation.

I will DEFINITELY write a post about my findings and supply links to any additional write-ups that I make.

For those who have not yet shared their thoughts about the blog, there is still time! I plan to close it for review this Friday. Click HERE to take the survey and fire away!

Flowers of the Night

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Not many plants wait for the sun to go down before they open their flowers…

Missouri evening primrose in tallgrass prairie at Camp Cornhusker (Boy Scouts of America) near Humboldt, Nebraska

Missouri evening primrose in tallgrass prairie at Camp Cornhusker (Boy Scouts of America) near Humboldt, Nebraska.  This photo was taken half an hour after sunset in early June.  Light for the image was provided by both the afterglow of sunset and the rising moon.

Like other evening primroses, Missouri evening primrose blooms overnight rather than during the day.  The plants can produce multiple flowers, which open at about sunset, but each individual flower blooms for only a single night.  The pollen grains of evening primroses are attached to each other by very thin elastic threads, which apparently stick very well to sphinx moths, their primary pollinators.  Night-flying bees also feed on evening primroses but are not thought to be effective carriers of pollen from one flower to another.

Flowers

A closer view of a Missouri evening primrose plant.

As some of you more botanically-aware readers surely know, the contemporary name for this plant is Oenothera macrocarpa, or bigfruit evening primrose (macro = big, carpa = fruit).  Many of us, however, still refer to it as Missouri evening primrose because it used to be Oenothera missouriensis, and I’m choosing not to break that habit.  So there.

Regardless, it is a beautiful prairie wildflower that typically grows less than a foot tall and has large yellow flowers.  Its four-petaled blossoms turn into very distinctive four-winged seed pods, which are often used in floral displays (there happens to be a glass vase full of them on my dining room table right now!)  Missouri evening primrose has a long taproot and usually grows best in soils with relatively little organic matter.

Most flowers bloom during the day, taking advantage of the numerous pollinators that fly around when the sun is high in the sky.  That’s a fine thing to do, but I can appreciate the strategy of evening primroses.  Why fight the crowds when you can monopolize the attention of a few specialized pollinators during the off hours?