Missouri's Only Native Pine

The Short-Leaf Pine tree is Missouri's only native pine, and the map says that the eastern edge of Missouri, the Ozark foothills where the soil is rocky/sandy, sunny and dry, is about as far north as you can find them. It's a tree of the American Southeast. Here it is growing ever taller on the property's southernmost southern-facing sandstone cliff. It's rocky/sandy, sunny and dry there all right. Before European settlement and the invasive cedar trees that accompanied the settlers, Missouri was covered with Short-Leaf Pines, the conservation department says.

I like their powdery-soft look. The needles, two or three inches long, are "bundled" in twos or threes, and the bark looks scaly. Male and female cones grow on the same tree (very handy for them), although it takes a few years for the tree to produce cones. The wood is great if the tree is mature. The trees pictured must have taken root in 2002 or later, after the cliff's original face was blasted off for road widening.

While cedars, alien invaders in Missouri, require at least an inch of soil, and I know that because I chop them down and rip them up trying to preserve the property's native oak-hickory forest, the Short-Leaf Pine (pinus echinaceus) is tougher. I have no idea how these Short-Leafs cling to the foot of a St. Peters sandstone cliff and find nourishment, unless they simply like life.

Two Cheers for Conservation

I trekked down Highway FF to see what those earth-movers and heavy-equipment operators spent three weeks doing down by LaBarque Creek during the hotter weather. The conservation department or somebody demanded our landlord provide erosion control at this creek bend. Wait any longer and the LaBarque here, give or take a few flash floods, could undermine the road.

I could tell you why. More paving, especially a parking lot built in 2014 right next to the creek, makes runoff. This encourages the gentle LaBarque to rise and flood. During 2015's heavy rain this was no flash flood: the creek was torrential for a full day, eroding its own sandstone channel, filling its fishing and swimming holes with sand, changing  the creek's floor--it's now all shallow--and its shape, and dumping sand up and over the creek banks for 50 feet on either side, instantly altering the ecology of its entire riparian corridor. Back then I climbed a cliff to take a photo and show you the aftermath. Happened again in 2017. Flash floods now grow ever faster and taller, and when meeting this bend here they hammered a new channel through our other soil: clay.

Was I surprised to see rope for erosion control; 100 yards of woven rope to hold the creek bank all around its bend. Conservation people forced the landlord to uproot invasive cedars nearby and rope them into the creek bank's walls to try to mitigate the pounding this clay side of the creek will still take during flash flooding. Why? Because the other side is sand.

Rope doesn't solve the problem. The only real solution is to dredge or straighten the channel. The LaBarque did have its own very pretty and reasonable channel, but now it's clogged with sand.

Gift Wrapped

A full inch of rain had barely woken or greened anything because it's been so dry. Dry means no mushrooms, not since late April, and no chanterelles for sure -- normally the woods is paved with big ruffly yellow ones, and my lawn, when soaked in summer, is host to as many as 17 different fascinating Missouri fungi. Today I saw for the first time that the juniper bush under which grew, annually in autumn, 20 pounds of rare Hen of the Woods 'shroom has been pulled out: sigh.

The walk led me to the former mushroom capital of my woods where there wasn't even an LBM ("little brown mushroom," as in "Never eat little brown mushrooms") to be seen; it simply hasn't been wet enough. As for any hunter, some years are plentiful and some not. I turned to retrace my steps and saw these Dreamsicle heads of Chicken of the Woods, beautifully fresh, ribboned with orange, yellow and white. I took the smaller head, about the size of a cabbage (see the glove, at the very bottom, I put in the photo, for scale) and within half an hour the fronds were roasting to a crisp in my toaster oven preparing for my Sunday guest.

Why didn't I take the big Chicken, or both? Didn't need it, and conservation means don't rip everything up out of the earth. Why not take the big Chicken and freeze it for later? Freezing fungi dehydrates the best out of it.

Secretponding

A spring day so intoxicating it sent me bushwhacking, off the path, in search of--I didn't know what, until I realized I wanted to hunt and collect secret ponds: either tiny dots on maps, or unmapped. This one's at Glassberg Conservation Area. Hard to get to; all around, cedar trees, which grew thickly, have been deliberately cut in order to conserve and restore the native oak and hickory forest.

The Survivor

I admit trying to kill this red-cedar tree for the sake of the native oaks and hickories the invasive red cedars are displacing. Baby cedar trees plant themselves mere inches in front of baby oaks, choking off  their sunlight and selfishly drinking all the water. In spring I chop down or uproot any young cedars endangering the oaks.If they're too big to chop, I might strip some or all branches so at least they won't block sunlight from the other trees that deserve to live here.

I learned from red cedars that everything in nature wants the best for itself and will do all in its power to survive.

Don't recall exactly when and what I did to this tree, but it outsmarted me. It looks very happy and blithe. As you see, there are still plenty of grown red cedars around for them that likes 'em.

Winter What??

I was outclassed by the lady at the annual Missouri Mycological Society Photography Night whose slide show of fungi was not only gorgeous--so was mine--but she had everything identified and labeled with its Latin name. It's the way the Society closes the year, and I'm a bit sad because morel-hunting season is four months away and in the meantime, in winter,  there are no fungi to hunt, eat, or study, outside of books.

Wrong.

In a city park so dull I usually walk its half-mile path while reading my phone, I look up and see mushrooms growing high on a dead tree. Into the tangle of trees I go to investigate. What to my wondering eyes should appear at that tree's base but the hugest freaking trove of edible oyster mushrooms, each six to eight inches across (they're usually oyster-sized--not very big). Oysters have no poisonous lookalikes in Missouri.

Pinpointing the tree with GPS I get a bag from my car and remove about three pounds of mushroom--hoping no one is watching because I don't know what the laws are. An ethical forager takes only what she can use. At home, I take a spore print to confirm my ID. Poach some in beer, and roast and make quiche and pizza with the rest. They're delish. The next week, I take another four pounds and share.

Okay, I was simply super-fortunate to find an oyster log. Today I'm out puttering next to my propane tank, and spy there my first-ever Earthstar mushrooms, side by side, like petaled flowers, each with a central sphere full of spores. These are very old and dry so I can't identify which type of earthstars they are; when fresh, they're grayish-white. Earthstars are inedible. But I'm still bowled over: Earthstars at Christmas! What could top this? But something will!

Great News About LaBarque Creek

I would lay down my life for this LaBarque Creek that has given me and all my human and animal friends so much sustenance and new kinds of happiness. A group of area property owners called the Friends of LaBarque Creek Watershed has fought development and other incursions with hard work and fundraising and just plain love. Some facts or information about the watershed: The creek is 6.4 miles long and the watershed is 13 square miles. 86 percent of the watershed is forested. The creek supports 40 species of fish. Rare plants, insects and lichens abound in it and on its banks. I have shown you some  of them in the 470 blog entries I have made about life and nature in this area.

So I was ecstatic hearing that two large tracts of land in the LaBarque Creek watershed have been purchased by the state of Missouri and now belong to all of us forever, the larger tract eventually to become Don Robinson State Park, Missouri's 51st state park. Across the road from me is a 330-acre parcel that borders on the Meramec River and for ten years I have wished to explore it. (I watched the wooden fencing around it fall apart, uncared for.) But that land was private. Soon it will belong to us all. The other substantial tract of 843 acres, the size of Central Park, not a half-mile from the 100-acre Divine property, was willed to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in 2008 by Mr. Don Robinson.