#marah macrocarpa

[crudlynaturephotos]

[crudlynaturephotos]

[teffnaturalist-blog]

DAY 3 @ MILLARD - Marah macrocarpa

Date: 10/10/19

Time: 10:30 AM

Location: Brown Mountain Truck Trail @ Millard Canyon, past campsite

Route: @ Millard Campside, cross the stream and turn left, following the trail up past the oak forest.  You’ll reach a fork in the road - go right.  Follow the trail about 20 - 30 yards and you’ll see a coast live oak to your left.  Next to the spanish broom.

Weather: about 65 F; sunny with clouds clearing

Habitat:  sage scrub community with 2 coast live oaks (not very tall) and lots of laurel sumac.

MARAH MACROCARPA - Wild Cucumber

I know a thing or two about wild cucumber.  People love to pick it up and bring it to us at the Audubon Center.  I was looking at a chamise in this community and saw that a bunch of dried up leaves were draped all over it.  The chamise was drying up too, but it did still have some signs of life.  When I went to look closer, I could see these dry leaves were attached to a dry vine.  I followed the vine and BINGO, a dried up, spiky ball.

The “fruit” of a wild cucumber is normally a green spiky ball.  When it dries up, it resembles a loofah sponge with long spikes coming out of it.  These spikes weren’t long enough that they could poke you, but it does look like it would be hard to get through these spikes if you were any larger than an ant.  

The seed pod was pourous - it had a lot of holes around it, like someone had wrapped this in Halloween cobweb materials (thematic). In past observations of wild cucumber, I’ve noticed that if you cut the dried ball in half, you’ll see 4 empty chambers where the seeds once were.

I found out that after a fire, wild cucumber is one of the first plants to reseed - so it’s pretty interesting that it’s wrapped around the super-flammable chamise!