The left side view from my spot.

The right side view from my sit spot.

I did my sit spot at around 3:30pm on October 7th, 2020. It was around  80 degrees outside, and there was not much of a breeze, even at the top of the hill.

The front view from my sit spot. Some of the trees are starting to turn.

When I was thinking about the organisms in my sit spot that I didn’t know, my thoughts went directly to that purple flower I found at the base of one of the trees at my sit spot. I planned on doing my species summary about this flower, because I would have liked to know more about it. But sadly, when I arrived, there was no more purple flower. Someone must have gone through and picked it, or it must have been caught in the lawn mower and taken away when the grass was cut. So sadly, I went along my way to try and find another species to discover more about.

I looked up at the second tree and saw that the leaves around the trunk seemed to be spreading more and more across the tree. This tree is directly to the right of my sit spot, when i am facing North West, towards the mountains across the highway. The leaves on the trees are starting to change, but this tree has not began to change any of it’s colors yet. I am looking forward to seeing if this tree’s vines will change colors and fall off as the winter seasons come soon.

The left side, bottom of the tree, covered in the English Ivy.

The top of the left side of the tree, notice the ivy growing down the branches.

I wanted to know what type of tree it was, and why it had leaves growing all down it’s trunk. I did some research and compared my images to the images i found on the internet, and I think this tree is covered in English ivy. The leaves have a singular, waxy look to them, which match all the descriptions of English Ivy on other images that I have seen. The ivy just branches off the leaves on the left side of the tree trunk, wrapping around the trunk to the ground below, there are very few vines of ivy on the right side of the tree. This leads me to believe that the ivy hasn’t spread to the full tree yet, and only the left side of the tree has been invaded by this ivy. Since ivy is an invasive organism I am wondering how it managed to get to this tree, especially since this tree is connected to another similar tree, and is farther away from other trees in the area. Did the little ivy seeds float through the air and land in the branches only to start growing later in the summer? Did someone track them in on their shoes? There are so many possibilities of what could have happened for this tree to have grown this ivy.

 

This species summery was somewhat boring for me, as leaves are not that fun to look at. I would have much preferred to look ay my purple flower, but I can only hope that it grows back soon. While observing at my trees, I found a new patch of daisies that had grown at the base of the first tree (the one with the strange white fungi that I mentioned in previous blogs), which was nice to see, especially since there are no other flowers around because they had been destroyed by the lawnmower. Identifying this was slightly easier. I knew already that these leaves were not from the tree itself, so it must be slightly invasive. Therefore I looked up some invasive leaf species and came across ivy. Noticing the similarities, I compared different types of Ivy’s to the species that I had found until I came across something that matched most correctly.

While I like biology, I have never found the greatest love for the outdoors and researching different types of plants and different species. The assignment puts me out of my comfort zone a lot and I have not quite grown to fully enjoy it yet. I do like sitting outside and enjoying the world around me, but my ADD doesn’t allow me to completely tune everything out and concentrate on one thing for such a long time.