Articles written by Violet Snow
Showing 54 Articles
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Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
Gorgeous, fragrant flowers, edible pods, food and habitat for monarch butterfly and other insects, a source of material for string: the virtues of milkweed go on and on.
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How to Identify Ferns
Certain fern species are unique and easily identified, while many look almost identical and require careful comparison of leaflets, spore cases, and other features.
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Catkins in Spring
A catkin, or ament, is a strand of tiny unisexual flowers, blooming on many species of trees in a form that brings to mind the graceful trees on a blue willow plate.
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Harvest Wild Plants for Tea
Whether you seek the healing properties of plants or the flavor of a fresh, wild, no-cost, caffeine-free drink, you might enjoy harvesting your own plants for tea.
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Medicinal, Food Plants in Winter
Plants that stay green in winter under the snow include a handful of herbs that can be easily harvested for medicinal use; some of them are also edible.
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Winter Survival Foods
Trees provide several sources of nourishment in the winter wilds, but they generally require more processing than greens and are not as palatable.
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Edible Green Plants of Winter
There are plenty of edible greens in the warm months of the year, but what is there to eat in the wild when the ground freezes and most plants are dead or dormant?
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Identifying Trees by Their Bark
When there are no leaves on the trees, we have to rely on bark, buds, and growth patterns to identify the species, a fascinating challenge.
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Identifying Trees in Winter
Tree identification is always a matter of detective work, and especially so in winter, when the leaves are not present to offer their distinctive clues.
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Mullein (Verbascum thapsus)
Mullein is an easy plant to identify, with its towering flower stalks and thick leaves like flannel that stay green even in winter.
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White Pine (Pinus strobus)
White pine is a source of medicine, inspiration, building materials, and the pleasant concoction known as pine needle tea.
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How to Make Cordage
Once you have collected stalks of milkweed or dogbane, or twigs of basswood or elm, you must detach the bark, since the fibrous inner bark will be used to make string.
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Cordage Plants
Twig bark is available year-round, but fall is the time to harvest the stems of fibrous plants for making cordage, otherwise known as string.
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City Street Trees
It's difficult for most trees to tolerate the pollution in city air and the pressure of trampling feet over their roots, so the number of urban species is limited.
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Aromatic Tree Identification
Certain types of trees have inner bark (and, in some cases, other parts) that exude a distinct, usually pleasant, odor that is specific to that species.
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Seeds to Flowers to Seeds
Flowering species-including the trees-represent the top of the evolutionary line for plants, with a reproductive process that generates seeds to carry on the species.
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Seeds versus Spores
Fungi, mosses, lichens, and ferns are among the plants that produce spores rather than seeds as their vehicles of reproduction.
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Fall Fruits in the Wild
One welcome feature of the cold weather is the late edible fruits that appear on the wild plants, some of them growing sweeter after the frost hits.
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Trees with Compound Leaves
A minority of trees have compound leaves, i.e., multiple leaflets on a single leaf stem, giving many species a feathery beauty and the student means of identification.
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Trees with Simple Leaves
Leaf shape, while often a distinctive identifying feature of trees, can also be confusing when many trees share leaves of similar shape.
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Identifying Oaks and Maples
Most people can tell an oak or maple leaf when they see one, but distinguishing the different species within the Quercus genus or Acer genus takes careful observation.
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Jewelweed or Touch-Me-Not
Jewelweed, widely known as a poison ivy remedy, is abundant in damp areas, blooming throughout the second half of summer and into the fall.
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Elderberries and Elderflowers
Elderberries begin to ripen in late August and hang on the trees through much of September, both a tonic and a comfort as the summer declines and winter approaches.
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Birches White, Sweet, and Silver
The various species of birch trees are distinctive, easily identified, elegant, and have been historically useful to humans for making medicines and tools.
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The Composite Family
The Composites have floral parts consisting of multiple tiny flowers--complete with minuscule pistil, stamens, petals, and sepals--merged into one head or disk.
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Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
Yarrow, which blooms at the height of summer, is a hot-weather plant that can treat wounds instantly and help cool down the body, just as it lowers winter fevers.
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Poisonous and Aggressive Plants
Plants with thorns or irritating oils may not endear themselves to humans, but they are nature's way of trying to reclaim disturbed areas and return them to wilderness.
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Trees with Oval Leaves
A number of tree species have oval or egg-shaped leaves, but specific characteristics enable us to identify them.
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The Parsley Family
What do these plants have in common: wild carrot, wild parsnip, parsley, celery, dill, fennel, and poison hemlock? All are members of the powerful parsley family
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Identifying Trees by Their Leaves
Shape, size and texture of leaves are easy to observe, but many tree species have leaves of similar shape, requiring careful observation for accurate identification.
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The Rose Family
One of the larger plant groups is the rose family, which includes many familiar fruits (apple, pear, plum, raspberry, strawberry, cherry) and useful herbs.
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Healing Mints
The pungent aromas of certain plants indicate the presence of volatile oils that have specific effects on the human body.
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The Mustard Family
Like broccoli, cabbage, and other related vegetables, many wild mustards are tasty and have anti-oxidant properties which help prevent cancer.
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The Mint Family
Plant identification can seem overwhelming when the novice is faced with the multitude of species, but learning about plant families can speed up the process.
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Stinging Nettle
Although painful to the touch, stinging nettle is a nourishing edible plant and an important component of the herbal medicine chest.
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Plant Identification
A field guide is useful for identifying plants, but it's useless without knowledge of the words used for separating plants into groups.
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Spring Lawn Flowers
A lawn in flower can be gorgeous as a garden. From a distance, dots of white and gold and blue-violet glow against the glossy green.
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Dandelion
Traditionally, dandelion leaves are eaten as a spring tonic, to gently cleanse the body with the change of seasons, but they are also edible in summer and fall.
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Garlic Mustard
Garlic mustard is an invasive species native to Europe, but its superabundance makes it ideal as the main ingredient in pesto, which requires large quantities of greens.
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Trees are Budding
A delightful but sparsely observed phenomenon is the budding of trees in spring, a process that, contrary to widely held belief, does not involve formation of buds.
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Wild Leeks
As soon as the snow melts, wild leeks poke their twin green blades through the rocky soil of hardwood forests, offering the observant forager a pungent spring treat.
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Spring Ephemerals
April is the usual month for those exotic beauties known as the "spring ephemerals", fragile wildflowers that pop up in a brief window of opportunity.
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Red Maple Trees
With half the sugar content of sugar maple sap, red maple is nevertheless used in some regions to make syrup because it is widespread and grows fast.
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Lichens and Mosses
Lichens and mosses played important roles in plant evolution and continue to be essential to the processes of breaking down rock and wood and building soil.
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Identifying Features of Trees
When learning to identify trees, it helps to know the features by which trees are grouped, and the terms that are used to describe them in literature and field guides.
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How to Tap a Maple
Whether you want to drink the nutritious sap or boil it down to make syrup, you can tap maple trees in your own yard, using a drill and a spout from the hardware store.
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Opposite Tree Identification
A good first step when trying to identify an unfamiliar tree is to decide whether the growth pattern is "opposite" or "alternate".
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Fragrant Plant Skeletons
Strong-smelling plants keep traces of their odor even after months of drying out, and by simply rubbing and sniffing the leaves or seed heads, we can identify the plant.
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Plant Skeletons in Winter
Some plants have dropped all their seeds by winter's start, but the dried skeletons of the taller weeds and grasses continue to aid in the dispersal of late seeds.
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Wild edibles and life cycle
Suppose you have decided to harvest wild burdock root for a meal or to make an herbal medicine. It will help you to know that burdock is a biennial.
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Life Cycle of Plants
Plants grow, reproduce, die or go dormant, and sprout again according to patterns that vary species by species. Most flowering plants fall into one of three categories.
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Pines, Conifers, Evergreens
Pine, spruce, fir, hemlock, cypress, cedar, larch--not all these trees are evergreens, although all have needle-like leaves and produce cones, so they are conifers.
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Latin Plant Names
You don't have to know Latin names to enjoy plants, but when trying to identify a species, an understanding of the Latin binomial (two-name) system can be useful.
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Seed dispersal
Species that survive are species that reproduce and spread. Plants can't walk, so in order to spread, flowering plants need ways to get their seeds to new locations.
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