The last few weeks have been full of many endings and culminations for us here at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. We had our final week out in the field, visited the coasts of Maryland and Virginia, and got to see some amazing landscapes. Though it was cloudy and threatening to rain, both of our final sites, Blackwater NWR and Chincoteague NWR, proved to be beautiful:

Our paths through a field of Spartina patens and Distichlis spicata at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.

Wild ponies munching away in the marsh at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

Our visit to Chincoteague NWR culminated in an awesome show by the wild ponies there too! While collecting Smilax rotundifolia, we got an up-close-and-personal encounter with a group of wild ponies that came to get a drink of freshwater at a vernal pool next to the Smilax briers. Check out a video that we took of these guys: Wild Ponies!

We also got lucky enough to make a collection of Aristida tuberculosa, seaside threeawn, at Chincoteague…our first collection of it this season! It’s got absolutely beautiful seeds:

Aristida tuberculosa seed

Aristida tuberculosa plants

On another note, my 5-year-old hiking boots finally bit the dust. These boots have roamed many a landscape and have helped me perform tons of field work over the last 5 years. I first wore them as a Student Conservation Association high school crew member working in the Chicago forest preserves. It is quite a good ending for them to have died while working as a CLM intern. I can truly say that they have been well worn!

The sad soles of my 5-year-old hiking boots. They got a lot of use this summer on the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland!

Sadly, my minivan also recently broke down. However, during the course of this internship, she got to take me and my fellow interns on many trips to the North Carolina outer banks!

My 1996 minivan getting towed away this past week. It lived a long life and got to see lots of amazing landscapes this summer!

Today and tomorrow are our final days in the office. We’re finishing up the cleaning of our last seed collections and shipping them to the Cape May Plant Materials Center. This morning, we’re hanging out in a back office in the NCBG Totten Center, while the Horticulture Program has a meeting. It feels like kindergarten again: hanging out on carpeted floors playing with pine cones!

This internship has been an amazing experience for me. I moved to North Carolina about a year ago, and thanks to this internship, I really feel like it has become my home. I now know so much about southeastern flora and have gotten to explore both the Piedmont and North Carolina coast. At the beginning of the summer, I was most familiar with invasive plants and native prairie plants of the Midwest (I’m from Chicago, IL originally). Today, I know about 100 species of native southeastern grasses, trees, and flowers, and I’m still learning more every day! I feel proud to say that we made 234 seed collections this season, all of which will be used to restore coastal environments through projects for the Hurricane Sandy Mitigation Fund. Thanks, CLM Internship, for this amazing experience!

All the best,

Maggie Heraty

North Carolina Botanical Garden

CLM Intern 2015

After the threat of Hurricane Joaquin here in North Carolina, our seed collections were stunted for a bit as the rain started pouring down and flooding many of the sites we were hoping to visit. Luckily, for the past two weeks, we’ve still been able to find some beautiful ecosystems that were mostly undamaged by the Joaquin storms that rolled through a few weeks back.

This week, Jake and I did a short three-day-long outing around North Carolina and Virginia. We expected to not find much harvestable seed after the storm, but boy, were we mistaken! We were able to get 7 collections in 1 day at Belle Isle State Park in Virginia, for one thing!

All of our seed collections after just 3 days of being out in the field (notice the plastic bag full of cloth bags – a bag of bags!).

This past week, we spent a lot of time in marshes in particular. We first visited the beautiful marshy mud flat at New Point Comfort Preserve, where we found our first collections thus far of glasswort (Salicornia depressa) and Carolina sealavender (Limonium carolinianum).

We then went on to visit Belle Isle State Park (where we commenced the 7 seed collections in one day) to find beautiful marshes outlined by forests of Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and American holly (Ilex opaca) trees.

Belle Isle State Park marsh

The beautiful, blue berries of Juniperus virginiana

A sunlit boardwalk next to the marsh

Finally, we visited Vandell Preserve, where a marsh full of wildflowers and cattails has taken over the site of an old dam. There, we got to catch of glimpse of some very loud, swarming Canadian geese up in the sky while we collected seeds of hazel alder (Alnus serrulata) and small maid Marian (Rhexia nashii).

Collecting Rhexia nashii at Vandell Preserve

It was another beautiful week for us, trudging through mud and the mucky waters of marshes in the crisp autumn air! In addition to our collection success, we also just got word from our coworkers, Emily and Lauren, who are currently out in the field in northern Virginia and Maryland, that they beat our collections by a landslide…31 collections in 5 days!

Until next time,

Maggie Heraty

Fall is here in the Southeast, and some new seeds have ripened! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been collecting from a few plants that we have not seen ready thus far. One in particular that we are most excited about is our Rhexia mariana collection. We’ve seen this pesky Rhexia in just about every preserve and park we’ve visited, but until now it has not been ready. Luckily, we found some at Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge, and our long wait to collect came to an end.

Rhexia mariana flower

Rhexia mariana seed capsules. They look like little vases.

We also recently made our first collections of Polygonum sagittatum and Rosa palustris. Polygonum sagittatum has quite aptly received the common name of “arrowleaf tearthumb”, because of its prickly, recurved spines. Alongside the thorny Rosa palustris, both of these collections were a bit challenging at times. We had to be sure not to tear our thumbs.

Polygonum sagittatum

Rosa palustris. Look at those thorns.

Finally, we were able to make two collections of Aralia spinosa (which is also laden with spines along its stem and leaves!). Both collections were a lot of fun. It is easy to spot ripe Aralia spinosa by its bright maroon inflorescence. This made it easy for us to find as we drove throughout Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and Vandell Preserve at Cumberland Marsh.

Aralia spinosa with ripe, maroon inflorescences.

Dark purple to black A. spinosa berries.

– Maggie Heraty

North Carolina Botanical Garden CLM Intern

Yes, the North Carolina Seeds of Success team is still making seed collections! This week, we travelled to Virginia to check out some National Wildlife Refuges on the coast. We visited four sites: Mackay Island NWR, Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR, Mason Neck NWR, and Occoquan Bay NWR. All four sites had species on our target species list! We ended up making seven collections total over the course of three days.

Cornus amomum (“silky dogwood”) berries

We’ve started finding some species we have yet seen in the locations we’ve visited thus far. One such species was Cornus amomum. Unfortunately, C. amomum fruits only contain one seed per fruit, so it was a challenge for us to get upwards of 10,000 seeds, the minimum number of seeds we need for each collection we make. Luckily, we found a big patch of C. amomum along a roadside at Occoquan Bay, and we were able to collect approximately 10,000 seeds in the course of just 45 minutes. Pretty impressive. Some other collections we made included seeds of Cakile edentula, Mikania scandens, and Borrichia frutescens. We also found a large population of one of our favorite species (or at least one of my favorites), Asclepias syriaca, which we’re hoping to collect next time we’re in Virginia.

Cakile edentula (American searocket) seeds

Asclepias syriaca (common milkweed) is getting ready to collect. So exciting!

Emily showing off our collections. That’s only the ones from two weeks ago! Not including the seven we made this week. Woo!

So there you have it! Our collections are slowly building up. Now we just have to find time to clean and ship all the seeds between all of our traveling…

Until next time,

Maggie

This was the first week for us North Carolina interns to venture out into the field on our own, without our lovely supervisor, Amanda. We traveled through many National Wildlife Reserves and NC Coastal and Estuarine Reserves in search of seeds for our SOS East collections. Around this time of year, many of the seeds of sedges, grasses, and rushes are ripening, so we particularly had our eyes pealed for those.

We visited a total of four parks in search of seeds: Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, Alligator River NWR, Currituck Banks Coastal Reserve, and Kitty Hawk Woods Coastal Reserve. They were all extremely beautiful, and we ended up making a total of six seed collections over the course of the week!

Collecting Juncus effusus (Common Rush) while at Pocosin Lakes.

Lauren collecting drupes from Prunus serotina (Black Cherry).

We also found some Monarda punctata (Spotted Beebalm) which we are excited to collect from in the future!

Though our trip was filled with many seeds, wildlife encounters (we came across a total of six black bears while at Pocosin Lakes, as well as dolphins at Currituck Banks), and beautiful landscapes, we also had our fair share of wandering through thick forests! We found ourselves cutting through brambles of Smilax (like Common Greenbrier…their thorns will get you!), Quercus virginiana (Live Oak), and sadly, our least favorite Toxicodendron radicans (Poison Ivy) several times. Luckily, after unsuccessfully walking for an hour and a half through some thickets at Currituck Banks in search of some Typha (Cattail) species, we exited the brambles right next to our car! We felt this was a major victory and celebrated our chance to take a break in some air conditioning.

This is what we had just hiked through…

And this is what we felt like…

…But Emily, Jake, and Lauren were also pretty pumped that we came out of the woods right next to our car!

All in all, it was a great trip. The Outer Banks are beautiful, and we felt lucky to take a dip in the ocean after one of our long days out in the field. We’ll definitely be back here come August and September, so until next time!

-Maggie

CLM Intern at the North Carolina Botanical Garden

This past week and a half at the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG) has been full of settling in. The four interns here include Lauren, Jake, Emily, and myself (Maggie), and we have just begun to get to know one another, as well as our site.

This week began with our NCBG Intern Orientation. Though our specific CLM project revolves around the Seeds of Success East Program, the four of us have also been learning so much about NCBG and its amazing conservation programs in addition to SOS East. During Orientation, we had the chance to tour all of the Garden’s properties, including an arboretum and herbarium on University of North Carolina’s campus as well as hiking trails at Battle Park. We were also taken on a guided tour of the Botanical Garden itself. One special highlight included touring NCBG’s carnivorous plants exhibit, where we had the chance to cut open dried pitcher plants and examine the exoskeletons of all the unlucky insects that found their demise in the plants’ digestive juices.

The always beautiful pitcher plants.

Mmm, tasty bugs! 

This week has also been full of research. Over the course of the summer, we will be collecting seeds from native plants located across the coastal plain ecoregion in North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. With that task at hand, we’ve focused thus far on familiarizing ourselves with the species we will be collecting from. Today, we spent several hours researching the plants and their defining characteristics. Luckily, we’ve already become new best friends with our favorite Weakley and Radford dichotomous keys! We have also been practicing the challenging art of identifying several species of grasses, rushes, and sedges, which we will collect seeds from in the field. They are tricky buggars to tell apart!

Dichotomous keys and species lists: what a good combo!

Getting to know Dicanthelium scoparium

Lauren, Emily, and our trusty leader and supervisor, Amanda, checking out some grasses.