Hi everyone, this is Brilliant Botany Episode four, and today I'm going to be telling you
about four common New England plants.
Forgive me for not shooting outside, which I prefer to do, but my lens on my camera kept
fogging up tried to take a picture this morning, so we're inside today.
Now the first plant I'd like to tell you about today is Impatiens capensis, Jewelweed, or
Spotted Touch-Me-Not.
It is shown here without the flowers because the plants that I could find weren't yet in
flower, and shown here in a picture I took last year during one of my soil science labs.
You'll find jewelweed in swamps, moist woods or along streams.
This is my herbarium specimen of Spotted Touch-Me-Not.
So when you press a plant it loses a lot of its color and it actually really vibrant orange
flowers as you know from the previous picture.
And the leaves aren't quite as dark in person as they are on here.
Now the second plant is really cool in my opinion, and it is Eastern Skunk Cabbagem
Symplocarpus foetidus.
Now I was gonna go film it outside this morning but as mentioned it was very hot, so I have
my herbarium specimen of it.
This is only the upper part of the plant, I didn't get the underground rhizome, and
the leaves are greener in person when they're not pressed.
Now the very cool thing about skunk cabbage is that during the winter it's buried underground,
a couple feet, I believe, but when Spring starts to come, it undergoes cyanide resistant
cellular respiration, basically it produces a lot of heat, up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Which allows it to melt the snow so that its stem can work its way up and then start putting
out leaves.
So you'll see them in early Spring sometimes when there's still snow on the ground.
Now plant number 3 is Oxalis stricta, also known as wood sorrel.
You can find it in open fields, along tree lines, along roadsides, those sorts of areas,
we have it along the tree line and in the grass at my house.
It has five yellow petals and its leaves have three leaflets that look a lot like clover.
But it's actually in a completely separate family from clover.
And finally we have Lilium philadelphicum, the Wood Lily.
You'll find it in dry, open woods and in clearings in the New England area, it has six petals,
which are orange with purple spots near the center.
All right so those are four common New England plants you'll find, so the next time you see
them you'll know what they are.
If you liked this video, hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to keep up with future
videos.
As a sidenote, I'm going to be at the Plant Biology 2013 conference this weekend, which
is hosted by the American Society of Plant Biologists, I'll put a link to that if you're
curious about what that is, if any of you are going to be there, please let me know
on twitter, @brilliantbotany, via an ask or in a comment on here, because I'd love to
meet you and say hi.