What to See This Week

Pawpaw season is in full swing at The Arboretum! Pawpaws are a small tree that produce North America’s largest edible native fruit. They are unlike any other fruit that grows in our region, and that makes sense as all of the pawpaw’s relatives are native to the tropics. At The Arboretum you can find them in the Flowering Shrubs Collection or throughout our wooded areas growing as an understory tree. When they ripen, they soften up kind of like an avocado and give off a strong, sweet smell. They are only ripe for a short time and don’t travel well so they never became a popular commercial fruit. While you won’t find them in the grocery stores, they are popular with those who know about them!

Persimmons are another native edible fruit. For the most part persimmons aren’t quite ripe yet, but some are beginning to be ready to eat. Persimmons are a fruit you especially don’t want to try to eat before it is ripe. The unripe fruits have a very high level of tannins making them very astringent and causing a strong drying sensation. The ripe fruits are very soft and the skin will have begun to wrinkle.

White snakeroot is common around forest edges and has just begun to bloom. White snakeroot is a fairly plain looking plant, it has an interesting history. White snakeroot is toxic and is responsible for milk sickness which affected thousands of people in our region in the 19th century. Cows ate the white snakeroot and the toxins concentrated in their milk. It took a very long time before the cause was discovered. 

One of the showiest blooms of the fall belongs to New England aster. Each flower head is usually about an inch across with yellow centers and purple rays. There is variation between plants with flowers coming in all shades between purple, pink and white. Late blooming plants like asters are vital to pollinators.

September is full of garden spiders! Just walk along an area with tall grasses and you are likely to spot at least one if not ten! Garden spiders, like this banded garden spider, build beautiful circular webs and can most often be seen waiting in the center with their head down in an X shape. They will be laying their eggs soon if they have not yet already and they spend the rest of the season fearlessly defending their egg sac before they die in the first hard frost, leaving their eggs to overwinter and hatch in the spring. 

It has to be tough to be a bug. Several species of sphinx moth, or hornworm, have been featured in previous weeks but this is the first week with a pandorus sphinx caterpillar. What you may notice about this caterpillar is the massive amounts of white wasp cocoons attached to the caterpillar’s back. Parasitoid braconid wasps will inject eggs into a living caterpillar, the wasp larvae to feed on the caterpillar from the inside, then will emerge and spin their cocoons. The caterpillar remains alive until the wasps emerge. The craziest part is that none of this is particularly strange in the insect world and these sorts of interactions happen all the time!

Sunflower seeds from the Learning Garden are popular with visitors of the Bird Watching Garden. This cardinal looks like he’s having a bad hair day, but he’s likely in the process of molting. Cardinals molt once a year around late summer or early fall. While he looks a little disheveled, it could be worse! Some cardinals lose all of their head feathers at once, leaving them bald until their new feathers come in so don’t be surprised if you spot a bald cardinal!

Of course, where there is bird food, there are squirrels as well. Gray squirrels are a common sight in the Bird Watching Garden and this one was happy to pick seeds from the sunflower seed head.