Highbush Cranberries
These grow just down the hill from our house, they are a sparse shrub that grows to maybe around 10-15 feet tall. On June 20,2020 they were blooming, so Sandy and I got some pictures of the blossom clusters.
The interesting thing about the blossom clusters is that there are two kinds of flowers. The little ones in the center have the stamens and pistils, and can be pollinated and set fruit. Surrounding them is a ring of larger, sterile flowers that are all petal. These are big and showy, and apparently exist only to draw the attention of pollinators to the smaller, fertile blossoms.
The flowers and the fruits are the part of the plant that make it identifiable (when the fruit is ripe, it makes these umbrella-shaped clusters of brilliant red berries that the bush holds onto all winter). If all you see is leaves, it is easily mistaken for a maple tree.
So anyway, this is a Highbush Cranberry, Viburnum trilobum. It gets the name because some people[1] think its fruit tastes like cranberries. It isn’t really a cranberry, though, as cranberries are in the order Ericales, while these are viburnums in the order Dipsacales. Any resemblance is therefore entirely coincidental.
It looks like the Highbush Cranberries are pretty much restricted to climates similar to what we have here. The range maps show them going from eastern North Dakota and southern Saskatchewan, across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and northern Michigan, and from there east across southern Canada and the New England states.
The berries are just about the last fruits that the birds eat in the winter. They mostly stay untouched all through apple season, and the waxwings and other fruit-eating birds don’t finally get desperate enough to eat them until around March in most years.
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[1] I personally don’t agree with those people. I tasted the berries from our bushes a while back, and they are extremely and unpleasantly bitter. Granted, I’m not all that fond of real cranberries either as they are more than a little bitter themselves, but real cranberries are at least edible.
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I’m fond of Viburnum trilobum, but mostly just for the bright red berries [1] that make for such beautiful photographs in the winter, when the rest of the photograph is all about the black-and-white beauty of snow.
But really, I’m just writing a comment at all because I wanted to thank you for this blog, which I discovered because I’m trying to research leeches. It sounds like I’m a lot like you–my biological research interests are based on one patch of land, which is full of more fascinating things to discover than I could ever get to in my lifetime. It’s 238 acres of city park, at least 90 acres of which are entirely “ungroomed” areas, aka not sports fields or boring-pointless-wasteful lawn areas. We have an old growth wood, never plowed and with glacial erratic rocks still sitting where they were dropped at the end of the last ice-age. We have a pond and a re-created creek, all but a few areas entirely “restored” into wildness by humans, but then nature takes over, and wow, now there are beavers and otters and coyotes, oh-my! You started out with photographing arthropods; my introduction to the woods and all the rest came with fungi. In 2015-16, I started photographing mushrooms. In the first three months, I caught over 100 species in just that one little woodland. Absolutely amazing … it makes you a proto-expert [1] in a very short time.
At any rate, your leech post was very nice, though it didn’t quite answer any of the big questions in backyard leech research; nice because it brought me to look at your blog. I have three adult leeches in my Odd Pond, aka a 3-gallon jar with an air pump and some captive weirdlife from the pond and creek. I love these little guys. One of them seems to actually like the sunlight, staying attached to the glass or the air-hose and reaching up into the top layer of duckweed, presumably to snag snacks of crustaceans or weak-shelled baby snails. One is currently brooding a batch of eggs, I think. She’s [3] the most beautiful of the three; when backlit, she has a bilaterally symmetrical dark patterning running down her length, which I eventually figured out is probably the dark iron of the blood from her last big meal. So that pattern is the shape of her gut, full of enough food to last half a year. The third one swims like a dancer, undulating quickly and gracefully to get where she’s going; but she’s recently headed down into the gravel, after I introduced a passel of tiny worms. I think I only saw her swimming because she couldn’t find any food in the substrate.
I look forward to spending more time on your blog–I just saw that you have a post on fungus gnats! Glad you’re still writing regularly, since there are so many blogs like this (ones I like immediately) that have died off over the years. Thanks for all the cool stuff to explore! ~KT
[1] So terrible-tasting, I haven’t even seen the birds eat them, and most fall off the bush because new growth pushes them off.
[2] Proto-expertise is the point at which everyone assumes you’re an expert, because while you’ve learned enough to realize you’re going to be in over your head for decades, everyone else is stunned by the fact that an average person, doing average things, could actually know about these completely unexpected details of a world they’ve never really looked at.
[3] Yep, leeches contain both male and female parts. But when the goal of either of those components is ultimately to lay eggs, why strain at the grammar of “they” and the indignity of “it”? She / her works fine for leeches. [4]
[4] Not for earthworms, though; they fight over who has to be the egg-bearer, who gets to go off without that resource-drain.
What a cheerful plant! I love the bright leaves.