Nature Study: Dogwood Tree

This week, our nature study focus was our Dogwood Tree.

The bark of a Dogwood tree is quite distinctive.


We noticed that the leaves came in pairs, with one directly opposite another.


Except this one. It had three leaves.


Here's what the white blossoms look like.


Here's the center of the dogwood blossom.




Is this the fella that's eating the blossoms?


He reminds me a little of a lightning bug.

Cattails in the Springtime

This week our nature study focus was on cattails. We began our study of cattails on Monday by going to a park where I remembered having seen cattails before. Yet, once we were there, we couldn't find any.

Due to rain, we didn't get outside to look again until Friday. This time we found cattails in several places. There were some on a vacant lot at the end of our street. (For those who have read my Squidoo article about 10 Things Kids Can Do On A Vacant Lot - this was a different vacant lot than that one. The one I wrote about on Squidoo is one my son plays on all the time, so he knows pretty well what's on it and what isn't. It's up high on a hill, so it's very dry there. The vacant lot where we found cattails is at the bottom of a different hill, so I can imagine it'd have more water...although we didn't see any water there yesterday.)

When we headed over to a nearby creek to photograph a beaver dam, we found cattails there too! We also found cattails a couple of streets away near the road. Due to a fair amount of standing water (from the recent rains), it was hard to get close to these cattails.

Cattails look quite different in the spring than they do in the summer. If you don't see any of last year's stalks in the area, you might not even recognize the spring cattails! In fact, I am now wondering if some of the plants that we saw at the first park on Monday really were cattails after all! If so, someone had cleaned up all of last year's cattails, so all that was left was this year's new green shoots coming up.

This photo was taken on the vacant lot. All we saw here was stalks from last year. There didn't seem to be any new cattail growth popping up. To our surprise, we also didn't see any water in the area, so perhaps that's why cattails aren't growing there this spring. We did get to examine and touch one of these cotton like balls of seeds left over from last year. They were a little similar to rough cotton filled with seeds.





We broke a couple of the dry, brittle leaves in half and examined them too. It reminded me very much of the onion cells we looked at under the microscope a few years ago!




We spend some time studying the leaves and how they were attached to the stalk too.



Near the creek, we saw a few of last year's stalks, and made our way over for a closer look. Once we got there, we realized that those green shoots coming up from the ground near last year's cattails are this year's cattails! Notice that there was plenty of water at this location! Much of this was probably from our recent rains.






This was the group of cattails located near the road. They had standing water all around them too, and we couldn't get very close.


This was a photo we took at the park on Monday. The pond has lilly pads in it. Could those be cattails in the water, and also on the right side of the photo? At the time we were at the park, we didn't know what young spring cattail growth looked like, so perhaps there were cattails here and we just didn't recognize them!


This photo was also taken at the park. Don't you love the beautiful weeping willow branches dangling over the water? What are the plants in the front? Could they be cattails?

Now I want to go back to the park again and take a closer look!


Behind the rainbow, the mist, and the fountain,
I think there might be some cattail plants.


These aren't cattails, but we thought they were interesting. Anyone know what they are? They were located in several places in the pond.


Here's another one, along with some gold fish. The stalks of the plants went way down into the water. They reminded me a little of lilly pads, but why would lilly pads grow taller than the water?


Here's another plant we thought was interesting.


At the top of the page, I told you about going to take photos of the beaver dam. When we got to the creek, we discovered that someone had removed the dam! The water was now flowly freely, and many of the logs that the beavers had carefully carried there had been thrown onto the banks of the creek.




This is the location where the beaver dam used to be. Poor beavers. I know they worked hard!