{"id":256,"date":"2006-05-28T02:40:25","date_gmt":"2006-05-28T06:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2006\/05\/28\/long-bike-ride\/"},"modified":"2006-05-28T19:13:38","modified_gmt":"2006-05-28T23:13:38","slug":"long-bike-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2006\/05\/28\/long-bike-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"Long Bike Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Out on the Minuteman trail as usual, to the Bedford train station and back.  It is curious that I have yet to be bitten by a mosquito this year &#8211; I&#8217;m pretty sure that by this time last year I was being eaten alive.  The ride was exceedingly pleasurable.  A bit of rain, which felt liberating, and got me good and filthy.  I recognized a killdeer&#8217;s call for the first time, and saw it flying far above.\u00a0 Heard a very clear and close wood thrush, too.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>pale hawkweed <em>(Hieracium floribundum)<\/em> (composite family) &#8211; this, and two other species, are all referred to as &#8220;king devil&#8221;.  The differences are pretty subtle.  This had hair on its stem, so it wasn&#8217;t smooth hawkweed, and the leaves didn&#8217;t seem hairy enough (they had a bloom to them) to be field hawkweed.  I continue to be annoyed by the family compositae, which seems far too fixated on the one trait of composite flowers and groups a lot of very distinct plants.  A good reason to learn more about systematics!<\/li>\n<li>tower mustard <em>(Arabis glabra)<\/em> (mustard family) &#8211; I can&#8217;t believe I didn&#8217;t notice this last year &#8211; it&#8217;s everywhere.  The first place I saw it was at the tick patch, but it&#8217;s to be found along the bike path pretty much all the way out.  It is definitely glabrous, with a marked bloom to it.  I&#8217;m not 100% positive on my ID here, since the leaves seemed entire to me, but I guess they are probably subtly toothed.  The drawings in <em>Newcomb&#8217;s<\/em> look entire-leaved, anyways, and everything else matched.  While I was at the tick patch, I noticed that the black locusts are starting to bloom.  I&#8217;m very excited to see more of the pea family as the summer goes on.<\/li>\n<li>black cherry (Prunus serotina) (rose family) &#8211; This is much like the chokecherry, but more of a tree, and with blunter teeth on the leaves.  Once I&#8217;d caught its in-flower gestalt, I was able to see that it&#8217;s really extremely common by the tick patch and the railroad-path heading out from there.  It&#8217;s pretty much the only tree around now with racemes of roselike flowers.  I&#8217;m not sure what the &#8220;serotina&#8221; in the name is about &#8211; the only context I know &#8220;serotinous&#8221; in is that of pine cones which don&#8217;t drop seed immediately, e.g. those of the pitch pine, which want fire to do that trick.<\/li>\n<li>rugosa rose <em>(Rosa rugosa)<\/em> (rose family) &#8211; This is a nice, big purple rose.  Wicked spiny at the top of the stem.  I suppose the &#8220;rugosa&#8221; refers to the leaves, which have sunken veins.  The flowers smell lovely.  I&#8217;d seen it a lot last year, but never got further in identifying it than calling it a rose.  Which, being a rose, it is.<\/li>\n<li>hobblebush <em>(Viburnum alnifolium)<\/em> (honeysuckle family) &#8211; Again, not entirely sure about the ID here.  I have not been having great luck distinguishing viburnums.  This one had the ring of huge, sexless flowers around the flower cluster, but they were not symmetrical as hobblebush&#8217;s seem to be.  I suppose this could have been a cultivated viburnum.  The leaves are also sorta reminiscent of alder leaves, which suits the &#8220;alnifolium&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In that general area, I also saw some members of the pink family starting to show their faces &#8211; white campion and bladder campion.  I was surprised to see the latter, which I think of as later than the white.  On the way out, I scratched my bike to a quick halt on the dirt path when I saw a large snake lying across it (and this but six feet or so from the Alewife parking garage!).  It made no attempt to move, and I was getting out my camera when some jackass came barreling by on his bike.  I thought he&#8217;d run the snake over, and was angry, but it slithered off seemingly OK.  I think it was just a garter snake, about two feet long.<\/p>\n<p>Out to Lexington&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>bluets <em>(Houstonia caerulea)<\/em> (madder family) &#8211; These were forming a gorgeous cloud over a lawn.  They&#8217;re also known, charmingly, as &#8220;Innocence&#8221; or &#8220;Quaker Ladies&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>wild geranium <em>(Geranium maculatum)<\/em> (geranium family) &#8211; These are also known as spotted cranesbill (the leaves are maculate and the seed pod looks like guess what).  I first saw a single specimen of these near the bluets.  It was small and irregular, and in a patch of poison ivy, so I wasn&#8217;t able to determine more than that it wasn&#8217;t likely a musk mallow, which is what I&#8217;d thought at first sight.  Later on I found a nice patch right by the side of the bike trail.  As I was trying to key them out, a guy rode past and yelled out &#8220;It&#8217;s an aster!&#8221;.  Desi (hard of hearing lately): &#8220;What?&#8221;.  Guy: &#8220;An aster!&#8221;.  Desi (at the now distant biker&#8217;s back): &#8220;Too early!&#8221;  He turned back and I keyed it out and finally found it.  He asked which flower book I have, and said he liked it, but it was for all the wrong reasons &#8211; he said it had a good color key.  He hated garlic mustard and invasive weeds.<\/li>\n<li>cuckooflower <em>(Cardamine pratensis)<\/em> (mustard family) &#8211; This is a sloppy sort of sprawling plant.  Also called &#8220;lady&#8217;s smock&#8221;.  It was growing along an extremely wet trailside, along with some Gill-over-the-ground and<\/li>\n<li>creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) (buttercup family) &#8211; I saw this one last year a lot.  It&#8217;s the one with the mottled leaves.<\/li>\n<li>ragged robin <em>(Lychnis flos-cuculi)<\/em> (pink family) &#8211; Also called &#8220;cuckooflower&#8221;, though &#8220;cuckoo&#8217;s flower&#8221; would probably be better.  I love that I saw two flowers with this name in one day.  This is a plant I saw last year, but only once.  This year it seemed reasonably common along the bike path &#8211; I saw at least 20 of them.<\/li>\n<li>birds-eye speedwell <em>(Veronica chamaedrys)<\/em> (figwort family) &#8211; This is by far the most beautiful of the speedwells I&#8217;ve seen.  The flowers are big, like almost 1\/2 inch, and intensely blue.<\/li>\n<li>large-leaved white violet <em>(Viola incognita)<\/em> (violet family) &#8211; the name pretty much says it all.  I thought the top petals were a bit recurved, but they were by no means narrow, and in every other respect it matched the description in Newcomb perfectly.<\/li>\n<li>one-flowered cancerroot <em>(Orobanche uniflora)<\/em> (broomrape family) &#8211; Also known as ghost pipe.  This is apparently parasitic, and doesn&#8217;t bother developing chlorophyll.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Out on the Minuteman trail as usual, to the Bedford train station and back. It is curious that I have yet to be bitten by a mosquito this year &#8211; I&#8217;m pretty sure that by this time last year I was being eaten alive. The ride was exceedingly pleasurable. A bit of rain, which felt [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[407],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}