Bristly Sarsaparilla

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

On our recent trip to northern Michigan, we visited an amazing site known as Wetmore Pond. It's a spectacular natural area near Marquette, in the Upper Peninsula. A fairly short hike takes one back to the wetlands, which is a glacial kettle lake ringed with a wonderful fen. The hike passes through some interesting upland habitats such as the rock outcrops pictured above that overlook the fen.

And who could not notice the showy plant eking out a living in the rocky crevasses? I was quite pleased to see this one, especially in full flower. It is Bristly Sarsaparilla (Aralia hispida), a plant that I had never seen in flower.

The wetlands below, sarsaparilla above. What an incredible site to botanize and anyone with an interest in plants who finds themselves near Marquette would do well to visit Wetmore Pond.

The sarsaparilla is a northern plant, most frequent in a wide east-west belt ranging from about Winnipeg in Manitoba to the east coast, and from the Great Lakes north to the latitude of James Bay. It ranges south sparingly, primarily in the Appalachian Mountains but also in the interior to extreme northern Ohio.

However, Bristly Sarsaparilla has disappeared from some of its southernmost haunts, including Ohio. It has been collected from eight counties in extreme north-central and northeast Ohio but is now known from but one Geauga County locale. I know the Geauga County site, and it is ecologically quite similar to the Michigan locality where my observations were made.

While the flowers and inflorescences strongly suggest a parsley family member (Apiaceae), sarsaparilla belongs to a closely related group, the ginseng family (Araliaceae). 

There is absolutely no question that many southern species are rapidly expanding northward, and perhaps even more are retreating northward from their southern limits. We have lost a number of plant species that barely nipped into Ohio from the north, such as the protagonist of this blog. Long-term natural shifts in mean temperatures have always occurred and have always influenced the migration of plants.

The million-dollar question is how much human alterations and the resultant climate shifts are accelerating plant (and animal) movements. And I wonder how long the sole remaining Bristly Sarsaparilla population in Ohio will survive.