By Jessica Edwards
In a sunny muskeg near Chilkoot Lake Saturday, 17 curious residents and
visitors crowded onto a boardwalk and bent down to peer at a tiny carnivorous plant –
a round-leaved sundew.
Under a magnifying glass provided by state parks volunteer Marlena
Mooring, the sundew, hardly visible to the naked eye among the sphagnum moss and bog and
low bush cranberries, was a startling sight.
The plant’s succulent leaves were round and lime-colored. Numerous
red spines, each topped with a sticky gland that trapped and digested prey, protruded from
each leaf.
Mooring told the rapt group about the sundew, one of the few plants in
Southeast Alaska that makes its living not by photosynthesis but by digesting mosquitoes,
midges and gnats, the same insects that do the service of pollinating it.
The stunning plant was so tiny few in the group would have discovered
it had Mooring not pointed it out.
It would have been easy, too, to walk past two familiar-looking
evergreen trees standing side by side at the head of the boardwalk in the muskeg without
appreciating the different needle configurations of each.
The tree on the left, a western hemlock, had flat, hand-shaped branches
with soft, opposing needles arranged in a single plane. The other, a less common mountain
hemlock, had the same soft needles, but arranged like pipe-cleaner bristles around the
branch.
Behind the hemlocks stood a Sitka spruce and two varieties of what
Mooring named shore pine — a curled over, contorted version and its taller,
straighter neighbor.
Observing the shrub growth beside the boardwalk, each walker picked a
leathery oblong leaf with rusty hairs underneath and crushed it to smell the earthy
fragrance of Labrador tea. The leaves often used in days past as a calming tea, as the
name suggests.
Instructing the group to hold onto their Labrador tea leaves, Mooring
carefully pointed out the shiny green oblong leaf of the poisonous bog laurel to each
person, describing that ingestion of the dangerously similar leaf could result in a rapid
drop in blood pressure and death.
"If you aren’t sure, don’t eat it," Mooring said.
"That’s the first rule."
A member of the group asked about the grassy plant reaching tall above
its stunted neighbors on the bog floor.
"Those are sedges," Mooring said, apologizing in advance for
the corny memory aid she recited to remember the distinction: "Sedges have edges,
rushes are round, and grasses are hollow straight to the ground."
Leading the group down trail, Mooring pointed out a group of lichens,
an organism neither fungus nor algae, but a collaboration between the two.
The fungus provides a structure or home for the algae, which in turn
photosynthesizes nutrients that are useful to both organisms. As one popular guidebook
conceives of the relationship, "Think of lichens as fungi that have discovered
agriculture."
The lichens Mooring named along the trail – the old man’s
beard that hung on the branches of a small spruce in a muskeg, the white Christmas tree
lichen with its tiny ornament-like balls on a branch, the tubular gut lichen latched onto
tree bark, and the papery gray-green, black-spotted freckle pelt lichen growing on the
forest floor — were all beneficial to their hosts by fixing nitrogen in a usable
form.
Only one, the candy or spray paint lichen that grows in slime with pink
dots on mossy, decaying stumps, has a parasitic relationship with its host, Mooring said.
By this point in the walk, Mooring had to move the group gently
forward. Curiosity was piqued and senses had sharpened enough to pick out different
unknown plants along the trail and notice subtle differences.
Near the end of the trail, Mooring stopped near the base of a spruce
tree and picked up a four-foot long piece of running club moss. Used by early settlers as
Christmas greens, the yellow spores of running club moss were used as a flash agent in
early photography.
Native shamans knew throwing a handful of the yellow spore on a fire
would cause an impressive flash of light.
More recently, Mooring said, the same powdery spores are used to keep
pills from sticking together, and are the powdery substance on latex prophylactics.
Emerging into the bright sunlit parking lot near Chilkoot Lake, Mooring
fetched a thermos and a bag of plastic forks from her car, and offered each person a bite
of steamed nettles she had harvested alongside the lake.
She had pointed out and told the stories of more than 50 plants, trees
and lichens to this mixed group of locals and visitors.
"The plants here are so different than Idaho," said Karen
Broussard of Mackay, Idaho. "I’m encouraged to take a nature walk back
home."
