A Very Small Forest
Right on schedule this spring, a young deer ate the first blossoms off the columbine plant near my front door. I know it’s a deer, not a rabbit, because deer leave their calling card: a neatly angled cut. Only in the early spring, do young, inexperienced deer risk my dog, Kermit, to jump the fence, explore and graze.
Later in the year, with no deer around to snip it short, the dark purple flowers linger and are visited by bumblebees who, unlike honeybees, have tongues long enough to sip the nectar deep inside the flower’s fancy spurs.
If you’ve ever tried to dig up a columbine, you know to prepare for a battle. The roots are thick, like a stubby carrot, with additional underground guy wires in every direction holding it down. I imagine interesting things are happening down there at the soil level where I cannot see. Could I dig a hole? Set up an underground camera? Does such a thing exist?
It’s late in the season and the plant is covered with powdery mildew. We call the grayish coating on the leaves a “plant disease”, but it is really a community of fungi in the Erysiphales order. (Pronounced air-ih-SIGH-fulls.) Likewise, we, Homo sapiens, are a planet disease in the Primate order. Also like us, the fungi feast on plant nutrients.
Every plant species with powdery mildew has its own resident community of Erysiphales fungi; the powdery mildew population that lives on columbine plants, for example, isn’t the same cast of fungi characters that lives on the nearby Bald-hip roses. More amazing: the grayish coating we see on columbine plants is actually a lush forest canopy of fungi seen from overhead. At their level, they look like branching trees.
I read online about “treating” powdery mildew with fungicides: sprays of copper or maybe baking soda. But, the columbine seems to shrug off these annual picnickers. This plant already produced seeds, which will send up hundreds of seedlings next spring and the columbine will regrow from that robust root system because winter rarely kills them. Sure, this community of fungus can cause damage to plants we want to eat or look at, but they are also important to decomposition of dead plant material. Without fungi and other decomposers, we’d be drowning in plant waste.
Now that I know the powdery film is a microscopic forest, I cannot see it otherwise, and like Dr. Seuss’s Horton who hears a Who, I want everyone else to know.
