I was walking today and came upon a sweet smell. Excitement built as the fragrance intensified only to be disappointed. The fragrance was a familiar spring scent that I only remembered when I saw the plant. Its white to light yellow flowers hung against its silvery green foliage - yes you guess it - autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata). This deciduous plant can be consider a small tree or shrub. The stem, buds and leaves are covered with scales that are silver in color. 

 

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Like other plants, wildflowers bided their time in Spring this year. In recent weeks, though, the display was wondrous. From bloodroot to trillium, to the luck of the bluets, woodland flowers are ever magical.

Fothergilla flowers are showing us stamens, white filaments topped with pollen-bearing anthers. The female pistils are lower on the flower stalk, not in the same blossom, thus these are monoecious rather than perfect flowers. There are no petals. Our horticultural fothergillas are hybrids of two native species.

I've received a number of reports recently from landscape managers and arborists of thin cylindrical strands of white sawdust appearing to ooze out of small holes in the trunks of recently planted trees. These delicate, odd looking structures are sometimes called "frass toothpicks" and are the calling card of Ambrosia Beetles. They also indicate trees are in serious, irreversible trouble.

Have you ever experienced this - noticing something for the first time, yet realizing that you must have seen it for years without realizing it was there. That was the experience of a group of plant lovers earlier this spring. Oh, my, what we were missing. Beautiful red flowers, unfamiliar, on a familiar tree.

The overwintered eggs of Oystershell Scale are hatching in Ohio with first instar nymphs (crawlers) afoot in the southwest and northwest parts of the state. This is a critical event because the mobile crawlers are susceptible to a number of control options that are not effective against other scale developmental stages.

There are many lessons of Nature to be learned from the words of others. Though Shakespeare intoned: "In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a little I can read", even that little may be most wondrous.

The Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra) is the state tree of Ohio. It is a native tree to the midwestern and plain states. The tree can reach 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide in an open area, but is about 1/2 that size when growing in an understory or shaded location. 

 

The Ohio buckeye prefers a moist but well drained site. It can adapt to drier sites, but will often exhibit some leaf scorch when conditions are too dry.  It is also susceptible to a leaf blotch and powdery mildew when conditions are right. 

 

The leaves are arranged opposite of each other...

Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is found throughout the buckeye state and most of the Eastern United States. It grows naturally as an understory tree or along woodland edges, and is often found in areas that are moist.

 

A single tree can sometimes become a "pawpaw-colony" through root sprouts from the parent plant. The mature height of this tree is 25 feet and the mature spread is 15 feet, when not crowded by other plants. The leaves are rather large giving the plant a tropical feel. 

 

While the plant is noted for its fruit, the flowers are beautiful but...

I opened my garage door this morning to find a seething mass of Pavement Ants roiling around the expansion joint where the driveway meets the garage. This was not an "ant swarm" where large numbers of winged ants (alates) emerge to fly off and mate; it was a full-blown, no-holds-bared ant war