Trailing Arbutus

It's more or less peak season for spring ephemerals and woodland wildflowers here in southern New England. This clump of Epigea repens (Trailing Arbutus - family Ericaceae) was growing on a seep on an open slope on Wachusett Mountain in west-central Massachusetts. There was quite a bit of variation in flower color, with most being pure white, and this individual being about the darkest violet I could find. Trailing Arbutus flowers have a strong sweet smell, which is difficult to compare with other flowers. I think it's a little like rubber cement, but I haven't met anyone who agreed with that assessment with any real enthusiasm. It's pretty close to the fragrance of Conophytum hammeri flowers, not that that comparison is going to be of much use to most people.

Epigea is rare in my traditional stomping grounds in Connecticut and the NY metro area; I can think of maybe half a dozen spots where a few plants grew, and some of those have disappeared since the '80s. It still seems to be fairly common in woods up in the greater Worcester area, though.

San Diego Trip

Washingtonia filifera, Mountain Palm Springs, Anza Borrego State Park.

I'm back from Southern California, and mostly recovered from a long but exciting week of plant talks, desert walks and generally eating a lot of avocados and oranges. My presentations at the CSSA Conference went over pretty well, it seemed. The one on nomenclatural changes (the breakup of the portulaca family, the disappearance of the genus Monadenium etc.) got a bigger audience response than my Conophytum show, weirdly enough. I attended a lot of great talks, too, and was especially interested in the presentations by the two South African speakers, Gideon Smith and Andrew Hankey.

I went on one of the CSSA field trips to Anza Borrego State Park, which was spectacular, with thousands of barrel cacti (Ferocactus cylindraceus), ocotillos (Fouquieria splendens), and a walk out to a refreshingly cool palm oasis. I also spent some time at Balboa Park in San Diego, visiting with Steve Hammer in Vista, and exploring beautiful Torrey Pines State Reserve on the coast. I'll write more later, and maybe try to work some of my better photos together into some kind of slide show for the Connecticut CSS.

National Cactus Con '11

Conophytum maughanii (material from Smorenskadu, Northern Cape)

The Cactus and Succulent Society of America Convention is coming up next week in San Diego. I'll be flying out later this week to attend, and to spend a few days hanging out with plant people in Southern California. I hope to get out to the beach too, and maybe see some spring wildflowers at Anza-Borrego State Park.

I'll be giving two presentations at the Con. One will be more of a soft and squishy natural history and cultivation talk, about a generally soft and squishy genus of plants, Conophytum. The other will probably be a bit more of a hard slog, dealing with higher-level taxonomic changes in various succulent plant groups, and the new research results from evolutionary biology that have been forcing the changes. We'll see how well the talks go over with a national-level audience.

Maple Sugaring II

Homemade maple syrup (light early season and cloudy, unfiltered mid-season).

The maple sugaring operation has been fairly successful. Earlier on in the season, back in late February, the syrup was very light in color, with a delicate flavor, whereas more recent batches have been darker and stronger. This pattern is apparently caused by the fact that the earliest sap is richer in sugar, and needs less cooking and concentrating, and by increased microbial activity with warmer weather later on.

Record high temperatures at the end of last week could have put an end to the sap flow, but my trees started producing again after a refreeze on Saturday. The coming week looks like it might have some good sugaring conditions, with lows below freezing and highs in the low 40s (~7 C). We'll see what happens; I don't expect the season to last too much longer in any event.

The evaporation process produces a cloudy precipitate called "sugar sand," which has a slightly bitter taste. Mostly I've just been waiting for it to settle, then pouring off the clear syrup, but I've also salvaged some additional syrup by reheating the dregs and putting it through a coffee filter, which was an annoyingly slow, messy process. It would be great to have a home centrifuge, or at least a vacuum filtration system to speed things up!

My costs so far have been less than $10 for electricity for boiling, $7 for spiles (taps), and $2 for filters, which has yielded about 2 quarts of syrup. That works out to less than half the retail cost of local maple syrup, which is better than I had expected. The economics look a lot less favorable if I count the cost of my time (probably 10 minutes a day for four weeks collecting sap, and maybe 15-20 hours total for boiling, though that didn't need continuous supervision).

River's Edge Sugar House.

Last weekend I visited an actual commercial sugar shack, River's Edge Sugar House on Connecticut Route 89 in the wilds of Ashford. They have around 2000 taps, and use a reverse osmosis system and a large wood-fired evaporator to make syrup. The folks who run it were happy to chat about their setup, and I bought some really good maple candy and honey from them.

Commercial evaporator, with fresh sap starting at left, and the late stages to finished syrup in the lower divided pan.

Stop in at River's Edge if you're in the Quiet Corner of Connecticut; it was a fun and informative trip. You can also order syrup and other sweet stuff from them through the mail.

Maple Sugaring

My new late-winter entertainment is maple sugaring. I've got two good-sized Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) trees in back of my house, and bought a couple of taps for them the other week. Sap production has been pretty good, with half a dozen days over the past two weeks having just the right sort of weather (freezing at night, but sunny and warmish during the day).


The snow pack is still hanging in there. Today the temperatures have been too cold for anything to flow, but the sugaring weather outlook for the weekend is promising. I've been storing the collected sap in buckets in a hole in a snowbank.


On a good day, each tap produces more than a gallon of sap. The raw liquid is very slightly sweet (and makes an interesting basis for a cup of tea), but needs to be reduced about 40:1 to make syrup.


I've been boiling the sap down on my stove, which is probably the most inefficient and expensive possible way of making maple syrup. It makes the house warm and humidified, at least, and judicious exhaust fan use keeps moisture from building up to the point where the wallpaper peels. Maybe next year I'll set up a propane or wood-fired evaporating pan outdoors. It is useful to let the sap freeze outside, and discard the ice, before boiling: the ice is almost pure water, and the sugar is concentrated in the remaining liquid, at no cost.