Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa, family Bignoniaceae) trees are in full-bloom in southern Ohio. Last year, I posted a BYGL Alert! extolling the virtues of catalpa trees; both northern and its southern cousin (C. bignonioides). Of course, I recognized a few minor shortcomings, but no tree is perfect. I noted that whether viewed as a beautiful, resilient native tree that will compliment any urban landscaping, or a coarse, messy, tree best confined to forested bottomlands, no one can ignore the beautiful bell-shaped blooms!

This is a byglbook-alert, premature since I have only read the first chapter of the featured book, but I have started down its path of poesy and prose and hope you will too. The book is On Trails by Robert Moor (not “Moop”, for George Costanza fans).

 

  Robert Moor set out to hike the Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine, in 2009.  He speaks of this and then from there starts to muse deeply on the idea of trails, of paths, in his words “a meditation upon trails.”

 

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Now we turn to a second plant identification discussion from arborist Carrie Paulus: this one of a native small tree or large shrub.  The above photograph is credited to Carrie.  She saw this small tree with husband Bill at Lake Hope State Park on Mother’s Day.  It is bladdernut, Staphylea trifolia.  It is not rare in Ohio woodlands, but often it is not noticed.

 

  Bladdernut eludes the usual mnemonics for native woodland trees with opposite leaf arrangement such as MAD BUCK (maple, ash, dogwood, buckeye) or BAMEV DOGWOOD (same along with tree-sized euonymus and...

Is this a cross between the weird David Lynch genre and early Stephen King horror?  No. I was meeting with an arborist extraordinaire earlier today and when we exhausted our arboricultural topics she showed me a picture of what she purported to be, scarlet campion.

 

  I thought not – and for once was right – it was fire pink, Silene virginica.  She encountered this great woodland wildflower with her husband Bill at Lake Hope State Park in southeast Ohio on Mother’s Day. It is unusual to see such brilliant red color in the spring and summer woods.

 

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Participants in Monday's Southwest Ohio BYGLive! Diagnostic Walk-About held at Stanley Rowe Arboretum observed final instar nymphs, called "pupae," of the Mulberry Whitefly (Tetraleurodes mori) on the undersides of holly leaves. The round, shiny black pupae are ringed in a white fringe and are commonly mistaken for a scale insect. Indeed, whiteflies are not "flies" (order Diptera); they belong to the same order (Hemiptera) as scale insects and share certain traits with both armored and soft scale insects.

Populus grandidentata, commonly called large-tooth aspen, big-tooth aspen, American aspen, or white poplar, is a deciduous tree native to eastern North America. In northeast Ohio, it is in full bloom and the floss is falling off the fruiting structure and sticking to the sidewalks or turf. 

Several years back I bought this shade-loving shrub at one of the Secrest Arboretum sales.  This is the first year it has flowered.  I can’t find the tag naming the plant.  Can you ID it for me? - Thanks, Skip. 

 

  This was the e-mail impetus for this bygl-alert, coming from Dr. Skip Nault, Professor Emeritus, entomologist, and former Director of the Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster. The pictures in this alert are from Skip. 

 

  The answer to Skip’s question is that it is a...

On April 11, I reported that the adults of three leafmining sawflies were mating and laying eggs on their host trees in southwest Ohio (see BYGL Alert! Sawfly Leafminers Fly). Today, I noticed some heavy leafmining damage by one of the sawflies, the Hawthorn Leafminer (Profenusa canadensis), on its namesake host in a hospital parking lot in the southwest part of the state.

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) is one of the most lethal plants found in North America. This biennial weed is now producing flowers in southwest Ohio. So, the clock is ticking on preventing seed production by this non-native invasive plant.

In my May 1, 2017, BYGL Alert! posting (Please Report Early-Bird Periodical Cicadas), I noted that Gene Kritsky (Mount St. Joseph University, Cincinnati) was predicting that we will see an "early emergence" of some members of Brood X of the 17-year periodical cicadas (Magicicada spp.) this spring even though this brood is not expected to emerge full force until 2021. In fact, as you can see by the photos I took in Springdale (Hamilton County), OH, the emergence is now well underway.