How to Acquire Hieracium Angst in Ten Easy Steps

[Andrea B.]

How to Acquire Hieracium Angst in Ten Easy Steps

1. Study the Hieracium and Pilosella keys over and over and over again.
    
   
2. Gather flower samples, dissect the parts and measure the lengths of rays and involucres.
    
   
3. Look at all the parts under a magnifying glass.
    
   
4. Wait for the cypsela to form and gather some.
    
   
5. Note the cypsela shape, measure its length and the length of its pappi.
    
   
6. Photograph every part of the flower with a close-up lens.
    
   
7. View the photos at 200% looking for stipitate glands and stellate hairs.
    
   
8. Try to learn the difference between piloso-hirsute, strigose and merely pubescent.
    
   
9. Count the leaves on the stems of several samples to get an average.
    
   
10. Go to #1.
    

Hieracium Angst - just one of the trials of being an Amateur Botanist.

 

Note to Beginners: If a particular flower fits the key perfectly, then you did something wrong.

[nfoto]

Most professional botanists avoid the problem entirely by never trying to identify any member of the Hieracium/Pilosella. The collective genus is a breeze to single out, and the only truly identifiable species, Hieracium umbellatum, has a normal sexual behaviour and is easy to get to grips with. Everything else, stay away.

[Andrea B.]

Pilosella aurantica is easy 'cause it is orange. :D

 

I just looked up H. umbellatum on New England Wildflower Society site.

And, of course, this easy one is not found where I currently am.

Oh well.

 

"Narrow-leaved hawkweed is a circumboreal species, widely distributed but very rare in New England,

being represented by one or a few populations in New Hampshire and possibly Vermont."

 

Maybe I should pack up and trundle over to New Hampshire where the Hieracium are ezee pickins.

Too, too tough around here. :lol:

[nfoto]

Were the world that easy ... Lots of red, orange, or red/orange Pilosella versions over here. Some, like P. aurantica, may be garden escapes, others are obviously native and you can find them in upland forests.

[DaveO]

I'm sorry to have to inform you that Orange hawkweed is one of our new invasive pests http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/pestsweeds/OrangeHawkweed.htm currently subject to major eradication campaigns in National Parks in NSW and Victoria.

 

Dave

[Andrea B.]

And sometimes one country's invasive pest is another's rarity.

 

Ranunculus bulbosus can scarcely be found Norway. Here we level it carelessly in our weekly lawn mowing and weed whacking sessions.

[DaveO]

I also gather that your Monterey pine Pinus radiata may be endangered in its native habitat. Here it is the basis of our pine forestry plantations and becomes an invasive weed given half a chance. Then of course there was our really bright idea to use your cane toads to eat our sugar cane beetles

[Bill De Jager]

I also gather that your Monterey pine Pinus radiata may be endangered in its native habitat. Here it is the basis of our pine forestry plantations and becomes an invasive weed given half a chance. Then of course there was our really bright idea to use your cane toads to eat our sugar cane beetles

 

Pinus radiata is threatened by a non-native pathogen Fusarium circinatum. Over the last 20 years we've gradually been losing the cultivated ones in the urban area I live in, and the native populations are also suffering attrition. P. muricata, a closely related species also occurring along the central and northern California coast, is also starting to die off. However, the die-offs for both species are irregular and there is some resistance to the disease. I don't expect the disease to wipe out either species, but the ecological effects will probably be quite significant in affected areas due to reduction in forest density. If it were not for this disease, Pinus radiata would still be facing some adversity due to two of its three native stands in California having been largely converted to 'homes in the woods' due to the attractive appearance of native stands https://www.flickr.c...ity/6266831176/; the trees are still there but their long-term future would be uncertain even without the disease.

 

Most professional botanists avoid the problem entirely by never trying to identify any member of the Hieracium/Pilosella. The collective genus is a breeze to single out, and the only truly identifiable species, Hieracium umbellatum, has a normal sexual behaviour and is easy to get to grips with. Everything else, stay away.

 

As is often the case, this may depend on where you are. When I was doing botanical work in the mountains of California for the U.S. Forest Service many years ago, I had no problem with Hieraceum albiflorum or H. horridum, the only two Hieraceum species I found out of seven I could have encountered in that area. But then, H. albiflorum is our only white-flowered species and H. horridum is extremely hairy, attributes where were very helpful in their identification. On the other hand, I didn't and don't try to key out Carex!

[nfoto]

In Norway, there are 104 species of Carex. I never had any significant problem identifying them.

 

Hieracium are not species in the Linnaean sense and how to treat them remains contentious. Even if the taxonomy issues were to be solved, the morass of valid nomenclature might take centuries to resolve.

[Andrea B.]

In Norway, there are 104 species of Carex. I never had any significant problem identifying them.

 

Well of course not. You are you and the rest of us who are not you quail at the thought of Carex.

[nfoto]

Currently I'm fascinated by the burdocks (Arctium spp.). They are big, ugly, prickly and annoying, and very attractive to bees, butterflies, and bumblebees. Also pretty tricky to identify. There are 4 indigenous species and all make hybrids. A lovely challenge.

 

However, I must admit my fascination does *not* extend to the very English soft drink 'Dandelion & Burdock'.

[Andrea B.]

I've about given up on the Hieracium. I might have to relabel my existing posts. What a crazy bunch of flowers. Absolutely impossible.

 

The Pilosella we have here locally are nice though. No problems with their IDs.

 

Burdocks have those huge, huge leaves yes? And a kind of thistle-like flower? There is one here in town which I shall keep an eye on for blooming and try to catch for you.

[nfoto]

Your stance on the Hieracium oddities seems to be a return to sanity. Good on you.

 

According to Wikipedia, only three species of Arctium (burdocks) occur in Northern America. The genus is European so all three are introduced. No wonder as the burrs cling to anything. In fact, they lead to the invention of Velcro

 

The species apparently not present in the New World is A. nemorosum. It is the least common of the 4 burdocks in Europe and apparently is a poorly understood taxon.

[Andrea B.]

Our Flora Novae Angliae gives A. lappa (Great), A. minus (Common) and A. tomentosum (Wooly)

where A. minus has a raceme-like capitulescence and sessile capitula

while the other two have a corymbiform capitulescence with peduncles.

 

Of course there are other characteristics in the key.

For example: A. tomentosum, as per its name, can be distinguished from the other Budocks by the abundant cobwebby hairs that cover the floral bracts below their hooked tips.

 

So I'll let you know what's here soon. "-)

[Andrea B.]

Bill De. J. -- Sad to hear about the Monterey Pines in Cali. Hope they survive. I suppose they can be replanted?

[Andrea B.]

Running the following by again I find that I'm a little scared that I know what it means:

 

A. minus has a raceme-like capitulescence and sessile capitula while the other two have a corymbiform capitulescence with peduncles.

 

What a marvelous botanical sentence.

[Bill De Jager]

In Norway, there are 104 species of Carex. I never had any significant problem identifying them.

 

Most of us are not professional botanists. ;-) Yes, I'm sure there are dedicated amateurs who key out Carex quite confidently. I'm not one of them, though I have a few Carex species in my back yard which were supposedly identified by others before being sold to me. One of those is C. divulsa, a European species which for many years was sold under the name C. tumilicola, a native species. Eventually people decided to check and found out what it really was.

 

We have 140 species of Carex growing in the wild in California!

 

Hieracium are not species in the Linnaean sense and how to treat them remains contentious. Even if the taxonomy issues were to be solved, the morass of valid nomenclature might take centuries to resolve.

 

I hadn't known that. I had no experience with the genus until I had my seasonal job with the Forest Service, at which point I had to ramp up my botany skills quite a bit and learn some new plants.

 

So, off to Goggle and what do I find?

 

"Most plants referable to Hieracium are apomictic (reproducing from asexually produced seeds). Apomictic reproduction often results in perpetuation of morphologic variants at populational and regional levels. Temptation to name such variants as species has proven irresistible to some botanists; upward of 9,000 species names have been published in Hieracium"

 

http://www.efloras.o...taxon_id=115448

 

Aha! Now I get it. Now that quote does not mean that this is true of every Hieracium 'species', or that such behavior is dominant within the genus in every geographic locale, but it does suggest that the burden of proof is that a supposed species in this genus really is a species. I can't say with confidence that the H. albiflorum and H. horridum I keyed out really were representatives of true species though that could be possible. However, at least these plants seemed to be superficially fairly consistent. More careful examination of morphological details might have shown otherwise.

 

Bill De. J. -- Sad to hear about the Monterey Pines in Cali. Hope they survive. I suppose they can be replanted?

 

In theory, yes. In practice one has to be very careful with maintaining genetic diversity. Coming up with a single resistant genotype, which might seem to be 'the solution', could just result in new forests that are too lacking in genetic diversity to cope well with new diseases and pests, let alone climate change. We really have to assume that our resident native species will be subjected to new waves of exotic pathogens and pests in coming decades and centuries, so maintenance of genetic diversity is paramount. Perhaps it will be best in this case, given that many trees survive even though infected, to let what biologists call "strong selection" do its work in each natural stand.

 

BTW, while the abominable nickname "Cali" seems to be gaining steam elsewhere, nobody here calls it that unless they're a recent arrival.

 

Running the following by again I find that I'm a little scared that I know what it means:

 

A. minus has a raceme-like capitulescence and sessile capitula while the other two have a corymbiform capitulescence with peduncles.

 

What a marvelous botanical sentence.

 

I still prefer the description of Galium in Philip A. Munz' A California Flora as having "retrorsely scabrid" stems. What a great way of saying that the hairs point back along the stem, which allows this plant to clamber over others.

[nfoto]

Running the following by again I find that I'm a little scared that I know what it means:

 

A. minus has a raceme-like capitulescence and sessile capitula while the other two have a corymbiform capitulescence with peduncles.

 

What a marvelous botanical sentence.

 

Marvellous it may be, but inaccurate. No Arctium I ever saw had truly sessile capitula. Not even A. minus.

 

The difference in flower head structure between A. lappa/A. tomentosum (corymbs) and A. nemorosum/A. minus (racemes) is clearer in writing than in nature, unfortunately.

[Andrea B.]

...clearer in writing than in nature, unfortunately

 

Indeed !!

Like I joked somewhere, if your flower hits all the points on the key, then you've done something wrong !!

I will make some fotos today of our local Burdock example. It's not yet blooming, but soon.

 

*******

 

.....retrorsely scabrid stems

 

I love this one !!! It could be used as an insult. "You retorsely scabrid so-and-so, stop doing that !!!"

 

Oops, sorry about the 'Cali'. I was simply being lazy about typing.

I did live in California for awhile in Davis. Loved it.

 

*******

 

It does seem possible here in this particular locale (Mount Desert Island) to make high-level IDs of the Hieracium based on gross characteristics. But I'm going to have to make some qualifying statements in my existing posts to indicate the general problem and how I have approached it. I suppose if one really needed to classify Hieracium, the only recourse would be lots of DNA analysis and subsequent statistical analysis. Someone could probably get a PhD out of that. Although how meaningful such a study would be, I'm not sure. Do we really need to analyze Hieracium DNA? All science is good I suppose, but still.

[Bill De Jager]

.....retrorsely scabrid stems

 

I love this one !!! It could be used as an insult. "You retorsely scabrid so-and-so, stop doing that !!!"

 

 

Glad you enjoyed it, Andrea, but it's very important to get *all* the Rs which add to the effect. R-e-t-r-o-r-s-e-l-y. Greater difficulty in actually saying it out loud (let alone some poor person actually trying to repeat what you just said) makes it that much more impressive. :P