Sunday, February 19, 2012

Green in Winter: Running Ground Pine

Lycopodium clavatum has an affinity for thinly wooded sandy acid flats in northern LaPorte County in Indiana. It is occasional in Porter and Starke Counties, and has been discovered in a few northeastern counties as well. It sometimes occurs in red maple swamp forests that are not too wet.
Interestingly, Charles Deam excluded it from his Flora of Indiana (1940) because he had not seen it, and while a few others had reported it, no specimen had been preserved. Though rare, this plant was already somewhat frequent when I began botanizing in the 1980's, so it expanded its range in a mere 40 years. Photographed in LaPorte County, Indiana on December 31, 2011.

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