We’re finally off! We didn’t get much of a head start, since we only started driving at 10:40am. Yet, we did have a change to explore and identify some plants, mainly at Mirror Lake SP. There were many white pine trees there along the Northwest Trail, as well as red and white oak trees. Personally, it was quite interesting and very hard to identify some other plants. I’m still not quite sure even what poison ivy looks like, which is not an ideal state, so it’s definitely something to improve on.
Some plants Dr. Gulezian identified for us, and I believe I would be able to identify them by myself now. One plant we’ve found was a Mirror Lake Strawberry, or Fragaria species, from the Rosaceae family. We were maybe 1 mile into the Northwest Trail when we first spotted them. It was growing amidst many other plants, close to the ground as its stolon was spread out, and it was almost looking smothered in the middle. The location was quite shaded, as tall trees blocked the sunlight, and it was very moist, with insects flying or walking all around us. One of the insects (hymenoptera?) seemed to be pollinating the plant as it jumped from one flower to the next. Some of its flowers actually didn’t have petals anymore, so it was probably already pollinated and was getting pumped with sugars to be transformed into a fruit: strawberry!
I chose this plant actually because it was one of the only ones of its kind on the trail, or at least it seemed to be. Although spread out, it seemed kind of isolated and misplaced in a way. I also found quite beautiful the colors of its petals mixed with the assembly of stamens and carpels. The shape of the petals was also unique, being larger on the outside and funneling down as the petals reached the carpel, similar to a raindrop they would become so narrow as if, from the start, they were designed to fall off and form a fruit.
When I think about strawberries - and just angiosperms in general whose fruits are regularly used nowadays in society - I can’t help but to think about how they were domesticated. According to Dr. Gulezian, the industrial variety of strawberries is actually an octoploid hybrid, which seems very far from what it used to be - a wild species. Such differences make these aggregate fruits bigger than their wild alternate. However, like many other domesticated plants, they do require more care, with an increase in the soil nutrition and constant irrigation. In monocultures, that means more fertilizers and enough H2O to make their waste run away to nearby bodies of water, which can be extremely damaging to the ecosystem around, not to mention the probable deforestation that occurred to open space for these crops.
This reminds me of Rachel Carson’s arguments about how humans oftentimes exploit the land for economic gains. Such exploitation in this case comes through the domestication, the deforestation and the overuse of fertilizers and water. There’s a case here for the use of wild strawberries over domesticated ones: they don’t require as many nutrients, nor water or even warmth, plus they are considered sweeter than the domesticated kind, and some say that in proper conditions they can indeed grow a bit larger. All things considered, it seems essential to think about alternatives to these plants that need so much care, especially when this care may entail using means with future consequences. In this case, a plant that can work well in polycultures and can thrive in poorly nutritive soil and conditions seems like an optimal candidate.
Journal entry by Deborah Cesarini
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