Battelle Darby Metro Park has two main plant communities (at least, that we visited): wet prairie and woods. The wet prairie area has an interesting land use history that makes the lengths to which they have come all the more impressive. That area of land was used for agriculture before it was donated to Battelle Darby Metro Park and a lot of work needed to be done. Since then, many projects have gone underway and the land has been returned to a wet prairie!
Wet prairie landscape
The wet prairie landscape was beautiful. It was dominated by grasses and sedges taller than me with a few trees sprinkled here and there. True to its name, the prairie was very wet and flat. The trees found in the overstory like the moisture; American sycamore and eastern cottonwood. There weren’t many shrubs but the tallest grasses found were big blue stem and indian grass. There were many low-lying plants found in the Asteraceae family like sneezeweed and pylewort.
Battelle Darby woods landscape
The woods at Battelle Darby had a healthy canopy, understory, and change in topography. The trees were very tall and only let a portion of light filter to the ground. There were sections where the understory was so dense that I couldn’t have walked through them. The further we traveled into the forest, the steeper the path got. The main overstory trees were shagbark hickory, sugar maple, hackberry, and eastern hophornbeam. The shrub layer had a lot of blue ash and fragrant sumac. We saw sanacle and blue-stemmed goldenrod on the ground layer.
The two trees found in the wet prairie are American sycamore and eastern cottonwood.
Eastern cottonwood and American sycamore
The American sycamore is the largest tree in North America in girth, not by height. It’s distinctive features are the camouflage bark and very big alternate leaves that kind of look like a maple. This tree has stipules that wrap all the way around the twig, and the bud is found under the leaf stalk. The bud is unique in that it only has one scale that folds over the bud (Petrides Field Guide).
The eastern cottonwood has toothed, triangular, alternate leaves that sit upon a flattened leaf stalk. This lets it flutter in the wind. The bark of this tree has deep furrows that are broken into irregular blocks. When this tree gets old, its bark is very distinctive (Petrides Field Guide).
Sedge (left) and grass (right)
Graminoids (grasses and sedges) both have narrow leaves and are wind pollinated, and both dominate the ground layer of Battelle Darby’s wet prairie. To tell them apart, one only need remember “sedges have edges.” This clever phrase refers to the slightly triangular “edges” of sedges. Grasses are just round.
Another way to tell them apart is by the leaf sheath. Sedges have a closed leaf sheath and grasses have an open leaf sheath. This means that when you pull a leaf off of a sedge, it will break. But when you pull a leaf off of a grass, it will open like a suit jacket and come off of the entire length of grass.
Chinquapin oak leaf
Chinquapin oak is a limestone loving plant and can be found in glaciated areas. It is ‘toothed’ rather than ‘lobed’ like most oaks, and if you look closely enough (you might have to get out your field lenses) you can see calluses on the tips of the teeth. The bark is white/gray and broken into flaky plates (Petrides Field Guide).
Young hackberry with leaves and bark
This hackberry sapling is displaying its toothed, oblique leaves that are arranged in a flattened spray of foliage. Hackberry leaves are very fuzzy and sometimes have galls. When this sapling gets bigger, it can be identified by its bark. Hackberry bark is very distinctive. It is smooth and gray but has raised ridges that look like a topographic map (Petrides Field Guide).
Blue ash foliage and twig
The specific epithet of blue ash is quadrangulata so it’s very fitting that the twigs of this tree are square and have four sides. This is the most distinctive thing about this plant, other than it is also a calciphile and has a pale bud (Petrides Field Guide).
Eastern hophornbeam bark and leaves
This is a very fun tree. The leaves are doubly serrated and alternate. The most fun thing about this tree is that the leaves are the most like Velcro I have ever felt! The bark is brown and shredded like a cat used it for a scratching post and the fruit looks like hops (Petrides Field Guide).
Narrowleaf cattail
This plant isn’t quite invasive but it is definitely aggressive. It is native to America but not to this area and it is too aggressive in wet prairies. It is a monocot and flowers in dense spikes. The flowers are the brown part that is really distinctive and unique (Newcomb’s Flower Guide).
Honeysuckle
Honeysuckle is an invasive found everywhere in Ohio. It’s an opposite, simple, entire shrub that has red berries. The berries are found at the base of the leaves in pairs (Petrides Field Guide).
Poison ivy leaves and drupes
There are three phrases to use to identify poison ivy. The first is “leaflets 3, let it be.” Poison ivy is trifoliolate so rather than having leaves, it has leaflets. The second is “aerial roots, use your boots.” Poison ivy is a vine and has adventitious roots rather than disc tipped tendrils. The third is “berries white, run in fright,” although they aren’t berries, they are drupes. Poison ivy has white drupes which are rather distinctive. Most drupes are blue/purple.
The vine most commonly confused with poison ivy is Virginia creeper. In contrast to poison ivy, it is palmately compound and grows with disc-tipped tendrils (Petrides Field Guide).
Common prickly-ash
Common prickly-ash’s leaves look like an ash and it has prickles like a black locust. It has bright orange circular buds. The natural history note for this plant is that it is the host plant of the giant swallowtail butterfly (Petrides Field Guide).
Geobotany
Ohio’s geology can be divided into two parts, a western and eastern part. The western part is underlain by limestone which isn’t really resistant to erosion. Over the millions of years it has been worn down to be relatively flat. The eastern part of Ohio is underlain by sandstone which is comparatively resistant to erosion because the water drains through easily before it gets a chance to take much of the rock with it. As a result, eastern Ohio has deep valleys.
There were three types of sedimentary rock strata in Ohio, starting with limestone on the bottom, covered by shale, then overlain by sandstone. The layers of rock were tilted to form an arch underground long before erosion began, so that when the rock was weathered away, different layers of rock were exposed. The tip of the arch ran north-south in the western parts of Ohio, and the toe-slopes were in the east. There is a famous stream called Teays River that has been around for over 200 million years and it is what first exposed the different layers of rock. It was only stopped by the advance of the glaciers.
The sandstone hills of eastern Ohio slowed the glacier down enough to prevent it from going south of Canton, Ohio, while it zoomed along the flat limestone of western Ohio.
Sketch of glaciated vs unglaciated Ohio
Glacial till is a mixture of sand, silt, clay, and boulders that were pushed by the glacier. In western Ohio, till is continuous and contains a lot of lime and clay. But in eastern Ohio, there is very little lime and clay since the underlying rock there isn’t limestone, but sandstone.
The basic substrate in western Ohio is of course till that is high in clay and lime. This makes for impermeable soil that is poorly drained and inadequately aerated. There are a lot of nutrients available in this soil that make for good agriculture. The substrate in east Ohio is very-acid and low in nutrients. Where the soil is underlain by sandstone, it is very permeable to water and has good aeration. But there are sections that are covered in shale which are impermeable to water and has poor aeration.
A few trees and shrubs that grow in limestone or limey substrates like we saw at Battelle Darby are:
- Redbud
- This understory tree has heart shaped alternate, entire leaves. Its buds are purple/pinkish and can appear anywhere on the plant (Petrides Field Guide).
- Red-cedar
- This tree has spikey scales when it’s young and the leaves relax into scales when it’s older (Petrides Field Guide).
- Fragrant sumac
- Fragrant sumac is a low shrub that has trifoliolate leaves and, true to its name, is very fragrant when crushed (Petrides Field Guide).
- Blue ash
- This tree is distinguished by it’s square twig (Petrides Field Guide).
- Hawthorn
- This small tree has 3-lobed leaves that are toothed and long thorns. The fruits are small but bright and can be yellow to red depending on the plant (Petrides Field Guide).
Some trees/shrubs found on high-lime, clay-rich substrates made from glacial till in western Ohio are:
- sugar maple
- American beech
- red oak
- shagbark hickory
- white oak
A couple trees/shrubs found on the acidic hills of eastern Ohio are:
- chestnut oak
- sourwood
- scrub pine
- pitch pine
- hemlock
Sweet buckeye is found in unglaciated areas of Ohio. It’s not really known why it is so restricted to those areas other than it may have problems with repopulation or the climate. In contrast with this, the hemlock is also found in unglaciated areas of Ohio but also expands to areas in the northeast. It isn’t limited by problems of distribution, but rather its classification as a habitat specialist; limited to cool, moist ravines found in southeast Ohio. Rhododendron has a close relationship with the Teays river system. Its distribution is determined by the flow of the river system.