 I want to thank everyone for coming today. We have a little bit of weather today. And now, in November, we have these dark early evenings. So I appreciate your coming out tonight. My name is Hilary Bassett. I'm the executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks. And I'm very happy to welcome you here to our Landmarks lecture series this year. Landmarks mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. We have had a very busy year this year. We have been active in research, education, and advocacy. We are currently reviewing a great many projects in the new Indiistry Historic District, which just was approved about 18 months ago. And the city council has recently expanded that district so that more properties will have access to historic tax credits. We are also reviewing the master development plan for the Portland Company site, which is currently under discussion at City Hall. One of our staff members is there tonight learning about the transportation and civil engineering aspects. This summer, we conducted an architectural survey of over 350 buildings in the Oakdale neighborhood, which is the neighborhood just beyond USM. And we will be investigating the streetcar suburbs of Greater Portland in the coming year. We're finding out some really fun and interesting facts about these areas, about developments at the turn of the century in the 20s, and about kithouses. So you'll hear more about that soon. And for the winter months, we are working on a roster of workshops, tours, and special lectures that will focus on preservation in action. So you'll be getting more information about that. We'd love to keep in touch with you. I hope you put down your email addresses as you came in. We'd love to invite you to be members of Greater Portland Landmarks. There's more information on the table and in the newsletter you picked up today. And we also invite you to fill out an evaluation form. We have those pink forms on your chairs. Please take a minute and fill those out before you leave tonight and let us know what you think. Now, I would like to express some special thanks to some folks tonight at the Portland Public Library for providing the space and hosting this evening. Ocean Gate Realty, who is our sponsor, and I think Ed Gardner is here somewhere. Channel 5, CT and the Community Television. These lectures are shown on community television. So if you have friends who have missed the lecture, please connect them to our public community TV channel. And I'd like to thank our landmark staff, and especially Alessa Wiley, who greeted you as you came in. She's our manager of education programs. And Kate White-Lewis, who is also here, who is our director of development. And lastly, I'd like to ask you to consider a donation to support the lecture series if you haven't already made one as you leave. Now, it varies. My great pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight, Bill Colina, who is the executive director of the Coastal Main Botanical Gardens. He joined the staff in 2008 as director of horticulture and plant curator, and has been an instrumental player in the expansion and recognition of this nationally known garden. It is known for its outstanding thematic gardens and welcomes over 150,000 visitors each year. Bill is also a well-known author and recognized authority on North American native plants and holds degrees in plant science and psychology, has been working in plant propagation, nursery production, and garden design for more than 20 years. Bill's recent awards include the Scott Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Horticulture, the 2012 Perennial Plant Association Award of Merit, the 2013 George Robert White Medal for Advancing Horticulture, the 2013 Award of Excellence from the National Garden Clubs of America, and the 2016 Hobart Medal of Excellence presented by the Hobart College Alumni Association. So we're very, very honored and pleased to have Bill with us tonight to speak with you. And I'd like to welcome him. Thank you, everybody. I'll try to project. Can you hear OK if I talk at this level? OK, good. I'm sorry about the little wash on the screen there that they can't turn these lights off, so I hope that isn't too distracting. But this talk that I'm going to give, this came out of my work for many years. I ran native plant nurseries, especially the nursery for the new wildfires site. I did a lot of work on plant propagation. Got into doing restoration, that sort of thing. And so there's a lot of information about ecology and the way plants move across the landscape and how you can, in some ways, assist that. But before that, I've got to just turn my virus thing off for you. Hang on. I want to restart my computer. I've always hit the wrong times. It's not as seen to always happen. But just a little bit, if you haven't been to the coastal name of Tanahua Gardens, hopefully everybody in the room has. But just to show you a few pictures through the season, we just finished planting about 38,000 tulips. So they'll be ready to go in May, or late April May. Usually, they're in full bloom. The gardens are really just welcome, you know, spring or after a long winter with lots of color. This is a picture of our Rhododendron Garden in full bloom. It's about three acres of Rhododendrons. And we try to plant this so that there's color really from spring all the way through into fall. This is our vertical wall a few years ago. This looks, after we did it, I thought, this looks like a guy bending over here. You know, like a button. We just try to have fun with our gardens and really our greatest love is connecting people with plants and just spreading that sort of joy and positive energy that I think we all need as humans to connect with the world, you know, the extra human world. I think that's really fundamentally part of our humanity. So I hope you can come, if you haven't been before, if you are for your member. If you've been before, thank you, and we'll see you again. I actually just, you know, I'm not in my really fancy clothes because I've been out stringing lights. We, if you haven't heard, this is the second year and the dates are a little bit different here. This was last year's card. But we've got Gardens of Glow is opening up on Friday. It's the biggest light show in Maine. We just, we finished putting up about 375,000 LED lights. And so there's just a few pictures from last year. And, you know, the children's garden, this is the entrance going into the building, a view when we actually got some snow. The snow really does great things with the light. And, you know, so it's, the show runs from this Friday to the 18th and then after that Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday through New Year's Eve, except we're closed. Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. And we recommend that you go on the website and get tickets. We have different time slots for tickets to help with parking and everything like that. But it's really, it's going to be spectacular this year. It's really just, you know, I walked around and kind of just got into this happy days because it's so beautiful. So, but we're at, the other thing I'm doing tomorrow is going for final building, planning and zoning approval for the first project in our next phase of expansion. We are, this is a plan of the gardens, including the area, if you've been to the gardens here, this is our, you know, central gardens. But over the next few years, we're going to actually move the parking to the periphery. We're going to break ground on a new visitor's and administration building in January. And then, in 2018, hopefully, build a propagation research facility so I can be, you know, not personally, but we can be doing some of the things I'm going to be talking about tonight. Converting our current visitor center over into a culinary center. And then in 2019, 2020, build a 22,000 square foot conservatory. So, even in the winter time, you can come and see blooming flowers. And then add double the size of our gardens, add more education facilities and everything too. So there's a lot coming up at the Botanical Gardens over the next five or seven years. So, stay tuned. It's, you know, it's interesting when you look out at a landscape like this, there's sort of a sense of, you know, permanence to it that, you know, these plants have been growing here forever. And certainly, you know, in the human lifetime, trees live a long time. A typical tree lives at least as long as a human, often, you know, four, five, six times or more than humans do. But it hasn't been that long ago that this landscape, you know, was covered with ice. This is a picture from the height of the last glaciation, you know, 15,000 years or so ago. And, you know, most of Maine was covered in glaciers or right on the edge, you know, in these areas where the ice was just, just right down the, you know, down the street, so to speak. And basically just wiped out everything that was here. I mean, and it's not just here. If you think about, if you've been down to North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, or something like that, basically, that area 10, 15,000 years ago had a climate a lot like interior Maine, you know. So they had the kind of trees, the birch trees, the firs and everything growing in Raleigh, North Carolina that we had. And it's interesting, there's a line of plant research called phytogeography where they go and they take pollen cores out of bogs and ponds and they can carbon date those and figure out what plants grew in a particular area going back. And in doing that, been able to sort of map out what the, you know, what the United States look like during the ice age and after that, you know, the most recent ice age. So you can see the boreal forest, which is basically what we were kind of on the edge here now was really located more down in that area down in the southeastern U.S. And we were up here on the edge of the ice right along the coast in what's, you know, tundra. So, you know, basically this is what coastal Maine looked like, you know. This is taken up in northern Newfoundland base. Tundra, really what it means is it's an area where there's permanent frost. And so the ground never fully thaws out and because of that water doesn't drain. So everything is just boggy and wet. Trees can't really grow. And it's just a very, you know, very sort of tough, primitive environment. But as the climate warms, plants move back in. They saw the opportunities and migrated and, you know, and move back across the landscape and eventually the big trees of the eastern broadleaf forest returned and all the wildflowers and, of course, all the insects that are dependent on those things, including the bees and the caterpillars. And then the non-essex, like amphibians, like the salamander and, of course, birds. And so in a fairly short period of time, we went from, you know, tundra and ice to a fairly diverse, you know, very diverse forest in the eastern U.S. and the northeastern U.S. But, of course, then Europeans came over here and saw this great forest resources and said, well, let's just cut it all down. That's great wood, you know? And I think, you know, certainly Maine is a timber harvest state. And you can harvest timber in a sustainable way, I believe. But the way we did it back in the 19th century, especially it was really just to clear cut huge tracks of the United States all at once. And then a lot of that never really grew back to forest. A lot of that was cleared for agriculture and never really went back to forest again. We also inadvertently brought in diseases. This is a picture of an American chestnut, which was, you know, basically the sequoia of the eastern U.S. is giant trees. And in the early 1900s, accidentally a fungus was introduced from China that in 20 years wiped out all the chestnuts in the eastern United States. And that was an ecological disaster that was probably the biggest ecological disaster for the forests in the eastern U.S. in recorded history. Because so much depended on those trees. They fruited every year, produced nuts that many things fed on, huge pollen source, nesting cavities. They lived a long time. They're just, they're great trees. And still in the woods you can, especially down the Appalachian Mountains, you can still see these logs that are still there after 100 years. They're very rock resistant. Of course, we also build human habitation on what was forest too. And this fragmentation of forest is one of the real challenges that face forest ecosystem. Because as you kind of got from what I was talking about, plants move across the landscape. But they move typically in small steps. And if it's a big giant step you have to take from one patch of forest to the next one, it gets very difficult for many species to move from those areas. Some can move easier than others as I'll talk about. But that's another challenge that forests, forests ecosystems are facing in this very human dominated landscape. And then we have the issue of climate change. Certainly the earth is warming quickly. And it has in the past too. We've had, after the last Ice Age ended, there was this period of interrelational warming where actually Southern New England got up to temperatures that approached Virginia. And was there for several thousand years and then it went down again. So the climate does change and plants do adapt. But it's sort of the pace of change that scientists worry about. That it's happening more quickly than plants can migrate to take advantage of new opportunities. In one of the books I did, I decided to sort of look at. This was basically a hardiness zone map. Are you familiar with what a hardiness zone map is? If you're a gardener, you know that it's a map of average winter minimum temperatures across the United States. So what it says is that in coastal Maine, this area, we're in what's considered hardiness zone 6, 5 or 6. So the extreme winter temperatures we average get in the winter time is somewhere between negative 5 and negative 15 or so. But by looking at sort of the predictions, what it's showing is that in this, what's on the east is coming up the coast here. This is basically the sort of climate of coastal North Carolina and then Georgia, that sort of thing. That our growing season becomes longer, the summers become hotter, drier, and the winters become milder. And basically, snow cover kind of disappears. So what that means for plants is that the distribution of species changes. This is don't really about trying to read these maps. But what this is showing in yellow at the bottom there is the current distribution of sugar maple. And in green, the projected new range of sugar maple in a warmer climate. So you can see sugar maple has migrated north into Canada. So we'll be buying Canadian maple syrup in the future and not New England maple syrup for the most part. But then other species, like this is the persimmon, which is the southeastern species. And we do have it growing at the Tanwell Garden. It's a great native fruit tree. But you can see the green is its current range there. And then the blue is the projected new range of that tree as it's migrating north to take advantage of a warmer climate in the north. And this is important because obviously the plants are the cornerstone of the food chain for just about everything else. The native species of plants are depended on by insects, birds, mammals, invertebrates, vertebrates. And when they shift, those things have to shift, too. But I think there's also sort of a human context of this, too, that plants give context to where we live. When people think about New England, they think about the sugar maples. And they think about the desert southwest, they think about the saguaro cacti. And when you think about the southeast, you think of the palm of the palms. And so there's sort of a human context that potentially is going to change going forward in the future, too. It's amazing to see really what is out there in the landscape. One of the things I really try to encourage people to do, and it's something that we teach quite a bit at the Tanwell Garden is just to learn about what the native species are that are growing around. If you're living, obviously, in the heart of Portland, you're not going to have a lot of them. But as soon as you get out of the center of the city, then you see more and more species growing around. And this was when we lived down in Connecticut here. This is a picture of our house there. And I just went out one day and just started counting all the different species that we had in the yard. And it's about 125, 130 species of plants that I could just easily count growing on that six acre property. And I was sort of sad to think about the climate shifting, because we were really right on the edge for a lot of these things and losing some of those species to Canada, because we're not being able to migrate at all. So the difference between this picture and this picture is there's more diversity there, right? There's more biological diversity in this slide than there is in this slide. And I think one of the tenets of ecological theory is that biodiversity is important. And what that means is that with more species available in a certain system, in an environment, the environment is more stable, more flexible, healthier than it is when there's less species. And I think that's true in human culture too. I think it's been a rough election cycle. But diversity, I think, is a healthy thing. It's not always easy for people to accept, but I think it's important to have diversity. So if you're trying to personally, what can I do if I'm concerned about biological diversity on a small scale and a big scale, what can you actually do to foster biological diversity with all the sort of stresses we talked about going on with fragmentation and warming and loss of species and that sort of thing? There's large-scale things and then there's small-scale things. And I just want to go through a little bit. These are basically, from an ecological point of view, things that foster biodiversity. The first thing is a stable physical environment. And what this means is, basically, if you look at these two different biomes, that Tundra, Northern Newfoundland, almost at the Arctic Circle and then the Cloud Forest of Ecuador, and you think about metaphorically what plants need to survive in those different environments, if you're in the far north, you think about what it takes to get through a year. You have to store away all the food that you need, a very short growing season that's going to last you all through the year. You need to build up stores, shelter to get through that long winter. And so there's very few species that can actually do that. Tends to be limited number of species and they're very generalists and very tough and adaptive. And not to be, no offense, hopefully, in the audience, but if you're down in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador, you don't really need that much to survive. Climate is very stable from day to day, from year to year, and you basically have the plant equivalent of just a bikini and that's about it to survive there in that sort of system. So in warmer, more stable environments, you tend to have greater diversity because there's just less stress. The day to day survival is stresses are lower. And so as a rule, as you move toward the equator, diversity increases. So that's one of the positive things about global warming actually that people don't really talk about is that in a warmer environment, there's more potential for diversity in the North than there is currently. But obviously it takes time because especially with plants, they need to migrate to these new opportunities. But in general, as you go south, you're gonna find more diversity. The second thing is that varied physical structure within the environment increases the opportunities for species and thereby increases biological diversity. If you look at this lake, it's, there's a lot probably living underneath the lake, you know, the fish and the algae and the invertebrates and everything that's down there. But then you wave your magic wand and create mountains in that lake. Now you just created a lot more structure, a lot more potential habitat for other species. And so on a large scale, things like mountains are more biologically diverse than flatlands. And you can go, you know, go up in the mountains and if you've been traveling the mountains, you know that the North side of the mountains are very different than the South or the East side. As you go up in the mountains, the climate changes as it cools and gets wetter typically. And so you can, you know, you can travel around and look, you know, then you look down the valleys and it gets, it's much more homogenous. So there, you know, again, you can't really do much if you don't have a mountain in your backyard. But you can do things on the smaller scale that foster diversity to create more very physical structure. I think in a forested environment, the idea of doing something to the trees may be, you know, kind of sacrilegious, but you know, you can do things to create more diversity by creating openings like you're seeing in this landscape too. So now sometimes you might have to do a little, you know, cutting of the trees. This is like the, you know, the lumberjack's nightmare thing where the trees wake up and start coming after them. But, you know, typically what we have now in New England and in Maine is a very even-aged forests because the way we cut all of our forests down in the 19th century and sometimes earlier, you have forests that are, all the trees are basically the same size and they, you know, and when you have a situation like that, it's like when you've got a bunch of, you know, you've got 10 teenagers all in a car together. Not necessarily a good thing, you know. So you wanna have some adults in there and maybe some young kids and everything that just sort of balance it out a little bit and it ends up with a healthier sort of environment. You can tell I have a, you know, a teenager, but the, so one of the things that I do encourage people to do is to go in and sometimes thin even-aged forests to create glades and openings and stimulate some of the trees that are there to grow faster, but also let, you know, younger recruits coming in more diversity coming in. So you can, you know, you basically can edit your forest out, whether it's, you know, 100 acres or a half an acre to create these openings where other species can come in. It's sort of what we do at Coastal Name, Tano Gardens. This is down along the forest here and they thinned it out. You can see all the seedling recruitment coming in there where it was pretty much just even-aged. There wasn't really much on the forest floor before. And so now we'll go and we'll thin those guys out too and you'll get more, you know, balanced to the forest. So if we have a big windstorm and those trees blow over, they'll be young ones that take their place. And you can, you know, sort of take this a step further in a gardening way. This is farther out the Haney Hillside Garden where we're actually then going in planting our basis species, ferns, wildflowers and that sort of thing under those trees too. But if we had not thinned the forest out first, there isn't really enough light to let those other things grow. So you're creating more, you know, diversity of habitat the same way I did when I waved my magic wand and made mountains pop up in the stream. Now, you know, standing dead trees are important habitat for a lot of things. And if you just cut all the trees down or clean up your woods too much or eliminate that habitat, one thing that I actually do, sometimes if I, instead of just cutting a tree down sometimes I'll just girdle a tree and let it stand. And then the woodpeckers move in, the other, you know, the insects that feed on trees move in. It becomes more structure for more things to live on. And, you know, you don't wanna do this right next to your house but if you have some, you know, a little bit of woods where it can be off in a way when some of the branches fall down. But it doesn't, the trees sort of rot so slowly that it's not like it all is gonna fall down. I have trees in my yard that have been dead now for like 20 years and they're still standing. Although some of them getting a little rotten and getting a little like I gotta cut them down. And then even when you cut them down just leaving some trees on the forest floor like that is really important because that's, you know, not only habitat for, you know, small mammals, for amphibians, for insects but it's also a place where many tree seeds as we'll see soon, you know, that's where they like to germinate and grow and reproduce. So you can do, you know, create very physical structure in a big way with mountains and that sort of thing but a small way with things like logs even building stonework and stone walls creates niches for different things to grow. So I encourage you to just, you know, don't worry about cleaning up the woods too much. I hate seeing people go this time of year and blow out all the leaves out of their woodlands and take them to the dump. Just let them stay there and decompose. The, even lichens are, you know, interesting that, you know, for many years we learned that lichens were a union of a fungus growing with an algae and that was sort of the dogma and basically the fungus provides structure and actually scavenges nutrients and the algae that's photosynthesizing and providing energy but now they've learned that there's actually two different fungi in an algae growing together and very different fungi and that's why they can, people can never sort of get algae to reproduce because you have to have these three things come, three different organisms come in together to grow this thing and they grow on different kind of substrates so from the mountains to the log even the types of bark you have in your woods you get different algae growing there and they feed, I mean, different lichens feeding there and they feed different types of moths too. This is a moth in the top there you probably see pretty commonly. That's a species of moth that feeds the caterpillars feed on lichens. The last thing that, you know, encourages diversity is this idea of low competitive exclusion which sounds like a boring, complicated thing but it's, you know, fairly straightforward we probably learned this idea of the food cycle, right? The idea that you've got the fox eats the vole and then poops and then feeds the fungus which feeds the tree, which feeds the vole and that kind of thing and then the sun provides energy into that system so it's a fairly like a simple, almost, it's not really a linear system but it's a fairly simple system of one thing depending on the other. The reality is that food systems are really more like a food web than they are a food chain. This is actually a graphic that I took out of some analysis of a coastal saltwater ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest but you can use it for terrestrial habitats too and what this is showing is that each one of these blocks is a different species and that species has a relationship with certain other species in that system and some species have huge relationships, others are sort of marginal but what happens is that all those interrelationships are creating balance, like I was talking about where, you know, that they, if one dies off, becomes extinct there's enough other interrelationships that the whole system won't collapse and if one is sort of verging on getting a little out of control and throwing it out of balance there's enough restraint on that species too to keep it from happening so there's also restraint and support and that's what happens in a functioning diverse, biologically diverse system that's worked together for a long time and when we see these functioning biologically diverse stable plant communities or living communities we kind of recognize and we think about like a coral reef and now with all those different species and none of them really is dominating it's not, you know, you don't have one thing that's all, you know, that's there and huge perfusion of lots of different species where you think about like a prairie where you have all these different species of plants growing up there and so that's the idea of low competitive exclusion that in a diverse functioning system there isn't one species that tends to just dominate and prevent the others from existing there so you, it encourages biological diversity and one of the challenges that our, you know our native ecosystems are facing in the northeast is the introduction of these novel species by people, you know, so I like to think of this as metaphorically kind of like the cables on a bridge all holding everything together what happens is you introduce what we call invasive species this is oranobiter sweet that was brought in as an ornamental from China and in its habitat it is so competitive that it excludes lots of other species it grows so vigorously that chokes a lot of other things out and you get kind of a monoculture of that one species so not only are you losing like one species from that web but you're losing a whole chunk of it and that's when you can get the danger of, you know bridge collapse, of ecosystem collapse and, you know, Maine has been fortunate so far that we don't have the invasive species problem that you do farther south but as the climate warms and more species migrate we're gonna be, you know, it's gonna be as bad here if we don't watch it as the mid-Atlantic is now where most of their native species are, you know are gone or disappearing so not to be sort of doom and gloom like what can you kind of do about it I mean you can go out certainly and watch for invasive species I think it's important to be aware and to learn about that and recognize things as they're coming in and knowing the wildfire society is great resource for that, for information on invasive plant species and there's a chapter in Maine so they kind of keep up the date on that I think there's a bigger sort of question of, you know of ethics and what, you know what debt do we owe the non-human world because we're becoming so dominant in the world and so I think it's really, we have to see ourselves as because we've kind of put ourselves in that position of, you know, the sort of domination of nature is that we need to I think have a new understanding of our role in the system is not sort of the dominator but as, you know, part of this system and trying to heal the things that we've done so it'd be nice to say you could just clear these invasive species out and then just go by the forest in a can and sprinkle that out there and then come back a couple of years later and poof, it's all grown back again but it's unfortunately not quite that easy so there are things that I think we can do to manage these natural systems and what I would call minimally manage, you know the natural landscapes that are adjacent to human occupation, everything so that we can create more diversity, limit the problems with invasive species and just make them more beautiful too. So just looking at seeds and the idea of what we can do to help plants migrate and recruit and grow, obviously there are two ways that plants move there are actually three ways that plants move across the landscape one is clonally where they send out their roots and they pop up another place the second is through seeds the seeds moving and then a new plant growing and the third is really sort of on the genetic level of pollen, pollen moving across the landscape and spreading the genetic information that plant across the landscape but seeds are probably really the most common of the three and seeds can live a long time so even if you have an area where that you're in a suburban development and it's been sort of degraded there may be still some of these native species in the soil seed bank they can, seeds can live underground for even 100 years or more and when the conditions are right they pop back up again and so it's a good survival mechanism for them this is just, some of the species that popped up in my yard that I didn't have at all on my property and they weren't anywhere nearby either they just, it's possible that they blew in or they just came in from the soil seed bank so you can, it's one of the reasons why I say if you're interested at all in botany learning a little bit about plants learning to recognize plants it opens up a whole new world of, it's just like, I think most of us go through life as functionally illiterate when it comes to the native the non-human world and learning to recognize plants and what these different plants are it's like learning to read it just opens up a whole new world of understanding I of course like growing things from seed and it's really interesting to just learn you grow things from seed you can recognize when the seedlings are what they are and you really get even deeper understanding what these things are that are coming up out of the ground good or bad but plants move obviously without human intervention and one of the best ways that they can move by seed is through wind dispersal so when you have an area that was, the glaciers just recently left or the trees have been cut in a clear cut or there's been development disturbance the first things that tend to come in are these wind dispersed seeds they typically are small or they have these parachute type structures on them and they move very easily fairly long distances and so asters, aspens, we all know how dandelions move around even, you know, even birch trees birch trees have a great adaptation as do spruces and they drop their seeds in the winter time on the snow and then if the snowpack is tight enough the wind just blows them across the snow and they land somewhere new and so you can see often if you go out where there's a lot of birch trees and we have a pretty good snowpack and you look along the edges of houses and everything is piled up with birch seeds where they've been stopped by the house but really the great that kings or queens of long distance wind dispersal are the ferns and the mosses ferns like this maiden hair fern this is lady fern if you look underneath the fern fron you see those little I was doing a Martha Stewart show one time and she called those cat pillars but they're actually the little sort of cat and underneath there are spheres little clear spheres each one containing 32 or 64 individual spores and a spore is basically kind of a primitive seed it's a single cell encased in a little shell very, very tiny and they produce lots and lots of them this is coming up through the bluebells there's a species called Diplasium it's a New England native fern blade fern and here what you can do with any fern is if you pick it at the right time when those little spheres are about to release the spores depends on the species but it's typically early to mid-summer and you put that fron on a piece of white paper wax paper overnight when you pick it up in the morning you've got the spore print of all the spores that have dropped out of that fron and I actually counted how many spores were on these two frons this is what they look like all massed together each one of these tiny little dots in the spore I actually didn't count them all but I knew that there were 64 in each one of those spheres and I know how many spheres were in one of the little slits and how many were on each leaflet so I extrapolated they're about 10 million spores on those two frons and they just get picked up in the air and blown great distances so this is a great example this is a species of fern called Thaleptris called Patensis, it's hard to even say and it is native to the mountains of British Columbia Pacific Northwest but there's one population of it in Grossmore National Park in Newfoundland so that spore blew all the way across North America and found one little spot up there in Northern Newfoundland where the climate was very much like where it was from and settled there and it's formed a population of that plant 3,600 miles of course moving with the prevailing winds we all know Rhododendrons and Azaleas they're wind discurses too they have these tiny little seeds you can see the matchstick for scale and each one has a little sort of a paper wing on that so when they shake out this time of year there are little salt shakers the wind blows and they get blown they don't blow 3,600 miles but they can blow 50 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet maybe 1,000 feet if they get really picked up farther than that but for them to germinate they have to land in just the right spot and it turns out that where a lot of these species like the birch, like the spruce like the Rhododendrons like to germinate is in moss moss is another spore-bearing plant so any place it finds a place to grow it'll come up and where does moss like to grow? it likes to grow somewhere that's damp that where it has some light and where it's not being smothered by leaves and things like that so like the logs that you leave in your forest rocks places like that are perfect for mosses to germinate and grow and then these seeds of the azaleas, Rhododendrons birches or things settle down in there and stay nice and moist but they know they've got light and they're able to germinate and so many of these small seeded plants like this is one of the hydrangeas this is Summersweet native Clefthera it's Piaris another relative of Rhododendrons and perennials too wildflowers like goat's beard this is a wildest still bee they germinate in these moss kind of conditions this was a stump in my yard and you can see in this picture how the moss is growing all over that stump and why is it growing there? because the moss the stump it decayed so it holds moisture which the moss needs but also it's up above all that leaf litter because those leaves just smother the moss and then it dies very quickly in fact if you want to have a moss garden in your backyard of Maine all you got to do is keep the leaves and stuff cleared away from it and the moss will grow and germinate you don't have to really do anything else if there's some moss already growing there but if you look really carefully at this picture you can see this is wintergreen here but all these little guys down here these are those are rhododendron seedlings and they're germinating in that little moss bed and so when you when you leave those logs in your forest you're providing a seed bed for all these and ferns too, ferns well to grow on old mossy logs and without them they wouldn't have anywhere to germinate you just have your nice clean woodlands and there's a name for this two people called these foresters called these nurse logs because they know that it's great for recruitment of all kinds of species things like the mountain laurels too here's another shot of the little guys growing this is actually me, I got some rhododendron seeds and just sprinkled them into the moss and they popped right up after a year you could do this artificially too you can simulate the environment of the moss this is what we did in the nursery where you fill a flat with some for these acid loving plants like rhododendrons I would use peat moss or what's even better is just to get if you know what stagna moss looks like in the woods is what peat moss comes from but the green stuff and you put some of that in a pot and you sprinkle rhododendron seeds on there and zip it up in a ziplock bag and just keep it in the window and after a month or so you'll start to see these little seeds starting to sprout and then after a while they grow up in the little plants like that so you're simulating those kind of conditions and then eventually transplant them out so we do a lot with these I'm gonna go back to this slide what this is showing are plugs here and this is a great from a nursery nursery growers point of view plugs are great they're just trays of little pots so you're used to buying annual bedding plants and tomatoes and things like this but we use these a lot because they don't take up a lot of space and you can get there's 72 seedlings on that one tray and actually at Coastal Mane Botanical Gardens we plant a lot of the gardens this way this is on the Haney Hillside Garden there just after planting you can see all the little ferns and sedges and things like that that we put out as plugs and the reason we do this is because it's really cost effective those ferns wholesale cost us like a $1.20 maybe even less than that versus buying a $5 or $10 big pot but you can kind of do this in the woods too I took a tray of those azaleas the native azaleas and just went out in my woods and found any place where there was sort of a rotten stump or anything like that and stuck all these old things out in the woods and just forgot about it and lo and behold a couple years later they're all growing and got little seedlings all over the place in the woods and without really having to do anything at all but just understanding a little bit about their ecology and what they like to grow in really made it sort of possible so again like not to beat a dead log but just kind of let those things rot and you can see here after time how everything starts to grow on those nurse logs and eventually it just sort of decomposes you can barely see it anymore Gary Smith who is working with us he's a landscape architect who's doing some work with us now and he gave a lecture for us a few years ago he does great things with logs like instead of just sort of leaving them randomly this is a installation did where he just aggregated them into this sort of serpentine shape going up through the woodland I thought it was really pretty it's a way of creating kind of an artistic statement but still leaving the material there and maybe in a hundred years we'll come back and there'll be a serpentine in a row of ferns going up through that for the woods so we all thank you if you leave your logs another thing that this rotting wood is doing though is putting material back into the system when you think about it like plants need to digest their dead parts and reincorporate those nutrients back into the living system again they don't have stomachs the way that we do so all the digestion of that organic material that's deposed on the ground happens with the aid of other organisms fungi and bacteria and plants have figured out ways to team up with these things to extract those nutrients out of the dead organic material so they can take those nutrients back up you probably heard about mycorrhizal fungi this is what you know this is the root so to speak of the fungus the fungal hyphae or mycelium it just spreads through organic material and digests as it goes along but many species of fungi and most species of plants have formed this mutualistic relationship where if those mycelium of the right species come in contact with the right species of tree or wildflower or whatever it is they fuse together and form this hybrid organism so what we're seeing here is a pine root coming down white pine right there here's the branches of the white pine root and here's a piece of wood, rotten wood and all this white is those fungal mycelium and they're diffused with the pine root and so what's happening is this the fungus is breaking down this wood getting nutrients out sending it into the root so the plant can take it up to grow and the plant is sending down sugars from photosynthesis and feeding the fungus and this is not my slide but it's a famous slide here showing a pine seedling and the pine roots are just these little roots in the middle if this is all fungal mycelium here so it gives a huge advantage to the plant by increasing the root area of its root system so to speak by now exponential and but the fungus this mutualistic relationship wouldn't happen if there wasn't that organic material for that fungus to digest and the plant wouldn't get those nutrients and so when you take all that stuff off and don't put anything back just like in your vegetable garden over time the soil starts to decline there are some species that have taken this to the next level from mutualistic relationship to parasitic relationship where it started out as like a good thing for everybody but now one side is winning and there are a group of plants called mycoheterotrophs in that they need to parasitize fungi for a portion of their life and one of them is this shin leaf it's a pyrola that you see out in the woods in Maine distantly related to rhododendrons and what happens with these is the seeds are tiny they're almost like a spore they have no resources to grow in order to germinate they fall down the ground and the fungus wraps around them and starts growing inside and then the seed digest the fungus and then uses that as energy to grow you know you've probably seen some of these you know oriboshis maybe in the woods you've probably seen indian pipes in the woods these are mycoheterotrophs and in this case they have no green tissue at all they completely live off parasitizing fungi they're even ferns this is a trichium fern that falls into this category you may be familiar with princess pine and different lycopodiums they are mycoheterotrophs so one of the things that kills me is when I go out into the holidays and you see people making reeds out of these things and not a lot of research has been done on the lycopodiums, the club mosses but the little research that's out there suggests that it could take 10 or 20 years for the seeds to even germinate and feed off the fungus on it before they actually grow into something meaningful and then another 75 years they get big enough to make a wreath so don't buy those cute little princess pine wreaths you know it's completely unsustainable now if we were harvesting anything in the oceans that took 100 years to mature you know they figured it out a long time ago but people don't really understand the biology of these and they seem very common but they take a long time to come back once they're eliminated probably the most famous microheterotrophs fungal parasites are the orchids orchids are reliant fungi to germinate and grow this is a pod of a lady slipper orchid and there's about 10,000 or so seeds in this pod and each one is just, that's been stained so you can see it but there's a little tiny embryo with a papery wing and that is released into the air just like dust just like the spores I was talking about floats around it lands down in the ground in the fall gets covered over by the fallen leaves and then it gets attacked by a specific species of fungus that wraps around the seed and grows inside the staining as all the fungal mycelia growing into the seed here but it's trapped in these special cells within the seed and digested and that tiny seed then extracts all the nutrients and energy it needs to over, in the case of the lady slipper about three years grow roots and grow a little bud and then finally come up above ground as a plant so when you see a pink lady slipper in the woods you never really see little tiny seedlings you usually see them like they're not there and then all of a sudden, whoop, they're there because they could be underground for five years maybe even 10 years before they come up and if something bad happens it's been dry or something like that they can go underground for a few years and then come back against it they're very interesting plants but an experiment we've been doing at the tail gardens is we've been going and hand pollinating lady slippers in our woodlands to increase the seed recruitment of the plants because this is actually kind of a disturbance like slight disturbance likes to come in on the edges of the roads and that sort of thing it's native soils that are there and so we go out in the spring we have volunteers that go out and this is where the pollen is here and you just pop this little thing off here you can see there's the pollen I've got that on the stick and then underneath this little structure here this is the female part of the flower so this is looking up from inside the flower and I've dabbed that pollen on there and then it'll grow into a new pod and if you're successful it grows into a pod like that and then this time of year usually a little earlier like mid-October so it cracks open and all those tiny little seeds flitter off into the breeze and hopefully after five years or so three to five years to see the seedlings coming up and this is a different species so that species can't grow if it doesn't have the right soils it doesn't have the right fungus if it hasn't been pollinated by queen bumblebees that depend on all these other flowers to survive too so there's a lot interplay there for that one species to be able to survive so when you're looking at plants that are more vulnerable to extinction as these species with these complex interrelationships to survive like the orchids now there are many species that move across the landscape of seeds by enticing something else to eat them and then poop them out somewhere else so there's a lot of berry producing fruits and many of the trees, especially shrubs and some herbaceous species produce these fleshy fruits that are colored in the fall typically to attract birds and mammals to eat them and then that animal moves across the landscape a certain distance and poops them out and then the plant grown a new spot and so there's quite a few this is sassafras which is one of those species like the persimmon that was moving north because it gets warmer, these beautiful fruits many viburnums, we've got lots of viburnums in Maine this is another south-easter species, Chee and Anfis the magnolias are great this time of year you really see the winterberry hollies they tend to hang on longer and the birds the robbers and things tend to eat them in the spring many of the shrub dog was and that sort of thing and I had this idea, I think when I was younger that the birds would come in and nibble on these and then they would fly 300 miles away and then poop them out kind of like interstate travelers on the highway system here's this robin, he's just passing by on his way south and he just eats a few berries and then moves far north but the reality if you know about birds and you've watched them is if the robins are the cedar wax wings or the other berry eating birds find a food source in the fall they flock and they stay there till it's gone they gorge themselves and then they fly a little ways and then they poop and then they fly back again and they eat a lot more and they keep doing it so an interesting thing you can see is if you have a seed source and then you go like 200 feet, 300 feet into the woods and you start looking around reasonable amount of way, you'll see the seedlings of that coming up, these are sassafras seedlings it's native Aurelia, that's a black gum that are all coming up in my yard and I know where the parent plants are because they're not that common unfortunately this is the best way that these invasive species move around to most of the really problem invasive plant species would have a bird disperse people plant them in their yards and here it is, here's the burning bush growing in somebody's foundation growing in perfect conditions getting watered, lots of sun setting tons of fruits and then the birds come in and they feed on this and then they fly out into the woods in the back and this is what happens and they just seed it all over the woods and so one of the things that I think is really interesting is that you can plant native burying trees and shrubs in your yard and then the birds will do the same thing so instead of becoming a problem you're actually helping foster that diversity so I like to plant things like the dog was and I burn them in my landscape and let the birds go and plant them and recolonize the woods with greater diversity so be careful what you buy in the nursery most of these things like winged uonimus and Japanese barberry that are such a problem for others out are just getting into Maine and they're getting into Maine because we're buying them at Home Depot or another, you know, at a nursery and planting them in our yards and then spreading them around in the woods and dispersal have you seen these giant killer ants that are coming in now? This is a great, this is a guy that does this exhibit called Big Bugs that we're hoping to get to in a few years he does these huge sculptures of bugs but one of the most fascinating methods of seed dispersal is ant dispersal many of the woodland wildflowers like the blood root here are dispersed by ants and certain species of ants you can see that white tissue on that seed it's called an oleosome it's a fat rich tissue and the ants are attracted to that and here you can see I've scattered some seeds on the ground and within five minutes there's an ant coming and picking the seed up and carrying that seed back you know, I'm not a good sports photographer so sorry it's not very blurry it's sort of blurry but you know she's pulling that seed up pulling it through the leaves and finally goes down to the burrow and feeds that tissue to the young and then discards the seed on its compost box so this is an ant compost box you can see all the bits of dead ants and things like that in there and then that seedling sprouts up and grows into a new plant so many of these woodland wildflowers especially things like violets too sometimes but most of these showy woodland wildflowers are ant dispersed and they're very ancient plants ant dispersal is one of the early forms of seed dispersal because ants have been around so long and they're very reliable and diligent in if they find a food source and moving it around and protecting that seed and its nest and that sort of thing they're very vulnerable to forest fragmentation whether it's this kind or this kind and so these are the species that typically you see coming back last, if at all, when there's been disturbance in forest fragmentation and things like the little Dutchman's Bridges and the trout lilies and hepatocas or crested irises this is the little French beligula Selendine poppy green and gold the twin leaf there's lots of these different really showy wildflowers one of the other challenges is the seeds don't store so you can't buy seeds from burpee of these things and plant them and then they're going to grow they need to be basically sown right away when they're ripe the embryo just has no ability to store dry so I've turned this kind of seed hydrophilic seed or water loving seed and there are many of these native species that are what I call hydrophilic that you can't just buy the seeds in a seed pack and expect they're going to be a lot things like the trilliums here and so you have to either just find them in the wild and transplant them or have them in your garden and move them around what I typically do with trilliums is plant seeds right down among the parents and then they come up after a year or two like that so there's a lot of these wildflowers, woodland wildflowers especially and even sedges that fall into this category and these are really the plants that they're not all ant dispersed but most of them are and they're the most kind of vulnerable to this kind of fragmentation and habitat loss some of the nut trees too like oaks and this is one of the buckeyes plants like leather leaf one of the shrubs are the same thing too where the seeds can't dry out and they need to be just they're made to disperse and germinate right away further complicating this is that many of these species not only can't dry out but they take two or even three years to germinate one of the most frustrating plants I've ever worked with is blue covosh a native wildflower it takes blue covosh typically three years to germinate you know when you're running a nursery and you've got you know you're trying like three years for this to come up it requires a lot of patience and planning believe me to get crops of this but it does because the embryo it's kind of like if you remember the story of kangaroo when the baby Joey is born it's a tiny little thing it falls out and into the pouch of the mother and then it latches on and then it matures so the most of the gestation so to speak of the Joey is outside the mother's womb not in the mother's womb and with these marsupials and a lot of these plants are the same way this is the you can see after you know year two they grow and then this is all just its food reserve so it takes a few years for that to even grow and get big enough where it can come up trillions are the same way they just take a lot of time and that's one of the problems with these wooden wildflowers is that most nurseries don't bother trying to produce them so where do you find plants like this if you're interested in trying to propagate them unfortunately there are ready sources of selected woodland wildflowers especially because it's cheap to go out into the woods and dig all these things up and sell them rather than trying to propagate them in the cells but there are with the internet and if you do a little searching you can find native plant society sales especially nurseries that deal with native plants where you can get nursery produced seedlings to transplant out another thing that you're meant to be aware of with this if you're talking about getting plants with nursery is this idea of genotype this is a picture I took down in Naples, Florida of a red maple and this is a picture I took in western Massachusetts of a red maple it grows from Florida all the way up to Canada but that's flowering in February whereas our native ones here in Maine don't flower till April and you can't plant a red maple from Naples, Florida and expect it to grow in Naples, Maine it won't survive so there are sort of genetic previous positions to a certain climate that plants have and the nursery industry has become completely blind to this fact that you can't just call a plant a broiled plant of a species and expect it's going to grow everywhere I did this interesting experiment where I collected seed of a native viburnum and we grew two populations of it one from Brunswick and then one that we collected down in Connecticut and we were growing this out in western Massachusetts and in the spring they all looked the same but it started getting hot in the summertime and all the ones from Brunswick, Maine died and the ones from Connecticut survived and so trying to collect seed from local sources is really important and learning to maybe try to collect your own seed I really encourage people to go out there and learn a little bit about collecting seed I'm not going to go into a long detail thing about collecting seed but basically in a nutshell if you want to collect wild seed you have to collect when it's ripe that's sort of obvious and what are the cues that you can use to collect it basically whatever it's in has turned if it's a fruit it's turned color if it's a capsule it's sort of drawn it out if you look at the seed itself you can see it even with a magnifying glass that that seed coat has turned from it's unripe which is usually white and green to like a brown or a tan or black or something like that and then you can actually with a big enough seed cut it open and look inside and of course it kills that one seed but if the endosperm a tissue has filled you basically want to wait until that seed feels hard and has turned a dark brown color and that depends from species to species but typically it's at least a month after the flowers fade sometimes 2 months sometimes 3 months in my books that I've written on native plants I give charts and tables to tell how long it takes for these seeds to ripen out but here's the pods going seed shedding you know it's kind of fun to and empowering I think to go out and collect these seeds in the wild and grow them yourself it's very much the same as like you know if you know a kid who grew up next to you like with your kids and you watch them grow up and you form this relationship with them and then you see them being successful in life and everything it's very different than if you just meet somebody for the first time in certain adult you know you have that deep relationship with plants when you've grown them up from seed you know something like this I remember as a kid the first time I saw this cardinal flower growing in the wild it was just amazing I'll never forget it's just a spectacular thing like where did that come from but it came from this tiny little seed that had gotten there and you can see here that you know the difference between the cardinal flower seed that's unripe there that white seed that's mature there that's dark brown so learning you know believe me as my eyes get your eyes of course you don't get stronger as you get older so I find that magnifying glasses are great it helps me to see all these things and you know we're really looking for those sort of hues for there's the flowers and after a month or so look where the flowers were and you look for that darkening of the seeds and the parts that are left after the flowers fade you know some seeds are really really tiny like mint seed you can't hardly even see them some are in big pods like this that are very obvious but just give it a try and see what you can do it's important a little memory that if you do collect these berries you sort of have to wash your fruits typically what we do with seeds when we collect them is just let them dry the air for a while indoors and if it's like most seeds what I do is just run them through a screen or something like that and then collect them but if it's a fruit that is like this jack and pulp but that's a berry you have to you know clean that out I have this little blender that I use and I put them in there and you get you know here's the seed the clean seeds or you can let them soak and water for a little bit wash that pulp off so they germinate better again if you're growing something like the trilliums make sure that you do those fresh for the most part whether it's tomato seeds sunflower seeds or any other kind of seeds other than those things you've got to sew right away you really want to keep them refrigerated after you collect them like you can if you buy seeds you know when you buy vegetable seeds and you never if you plant your own vegetables you always have leftovers seed companies want you to believe that they're not going to be good the next year but if you just then put them in on the refrigerator door and leave them in there they'll be good for 2, 3, 4, 5 years if you leave them in there so you know there are some seeds like I said that don't last very long but most seeds if you keep them refrigerated will last for a really long time and then you kind of sew them and then another trick that is you know important to understand if you're new to seeds that aren't things like tomatoes and marigolds and things like that most seeds from a cold winter environment need to go through winter before they come up and so I typically sew my seeds of the wildflowers and trees and things like that this time of year and then they go through winter and then they come up in the spring if you just went out and sewed them in the springtime they don't have that winter chilling that they need to come up and so really you either want to do that where you can sew them in a pot put them in a bag or something in the refrigerator for a couple months and that sort of simulates it so it's a little more challenging than something like a tomato but in general plants from these winter environments they need to have a way of telling that the climate is warmed up enough so they can germinate so there we go the end