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Exploring the Show-me State

Hi Folks,

Well, I've been in Missouri for nearly two months now and spending all my
weekends exploring the State's wilder places. It's not especially
Mediterranean, so I'm not sure if this is relevant to the group, but I
thought you might find it interesting anyway! The S. half of the State
(S. of the Missouri River) is pretty heavily forested; in fact about a
third of Missouri is forest, about 15 million acres of it in all. It's
mainly broadleaved deciduous, or of shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata), with
eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) in the glades and old fields.
The last of these species ought to have Mediterranean potential: woodland
glades occur where the bedrock outcrops so that the soil is too thin and
dry for forest to grow. These are rather open areas, incredibly hot, just
like your average hillslope in Greece in midsummer. The bedrock can be
limestone, dolomite, chert, sandstone, granite, or rhyolite, and this
determines the sorts of plants that grow there. Back in early June, one
of the dolomite glades had a wonderful show of Missouri evening promrose
(Oenothera macrocarpa, syn. O. missouriensis) and purple cone-flower
(Echinacea sp.).

Forgive me a deviation from Mediterranean isuues, but I was immensely
impressed by the place I went to yesterday. It's called the Allred Lake
Natural Area in the Bootheel of SE Missouri. It's almost the last of the
original Mississippi cypress swamps in the State, with a zone of swamp
surrounding a small lake. Here bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) grows
together with water tupelo (Nyssa aquatica, Nyssaceae, a Cornaceae or
dogwood relative) and both have swollen trunk-bases, although only the
Taxodium has the fluted buttresses and emergent cypress-knees. Some of
the cypresses are obviously very old, with trunk-bases 3m across, while
some of the tupelos are 2m across. They both grow in water that came
almost up to my neck (definitely the place to be on the hottest day so
far this year -- c. 95F), which begs the question how did they germinate
in the first place? July is the dry season, so the water ought now to be 
as low as it gets. Any ideas?

I saw mean-looking water snake in the shallows, but fortunately it swam
off fast when it saw me. Also many turtles, which jumped off their logs
in panic, as they always seem to do. More unpleasant were shin-cracking
submerged logs and cypress-knees that had yet to grow above the surface
(you can't see them through the brown murky water). Fortunately I didn't
tread on an alligator snapper (large, vicious turtle) having a bad shell 
day, but after several hours partly immersed in gloopy water I'll no 
doubt go down with some endemic swamp disease later this week.

Nick.

Nick Turland
Flora of China Project, Missouri Botanical Garden, 
P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166-0299, U.S.A.
Email: nturland@lehmann.mobot.org
Tel.: (314) 577-0269 (direct line, voice mail)
Fax: (314) 577-9438 (Flora of China fax)
MBG Web Site: http://www.mobot.org
Flora of China Web: http://flora.harvard.edu/china/
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