I’m pretty good at identifying western Pennsylvania’s deciduous trees because I live with them, but evergreens aren’t common here and they confuse me.

After I flunked the spruce-fir-hemlock test in Newfoundland in July I vowed to learn from that experience and do better last month in Maine.  I updated my conifer “cheat sheet” and memorized the difference between balsam firs and hemlocks.

Conifers are still confusing but I’m doing better.  I got a B- in Maine.

How do you tell the difference between pines, spruces, firs and hemlocks?
Learn from my conifer cheat sheet: In A Coniferous State.

 (photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)

There’s a cucumber in the woods but you won’t see it until it falls.

Native to the Appalachians, Allegheny and Cumberland Plateaus, the cucumber magnolia (Magnolia acuminata) produces an unusual fruit that starts out green, ripens to dark pink, then its red-orange seeds pop out. (The one on the right isn’t fully ripe yet.)

When the fruit falls in autumn it’s quickly gathered by squirrels and chipmunks.  You’ll find the ones they miss on the forest floor.

Learn what it looks like in this Throw Back Thursday article: Cucumber of The Woods.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons, click the links to see the originals: unripe green cucumbertree fruit and ripening fruit)

Have you ever eaten North America’s largest native fruit?  Chances are you haven’t.  In fact, most people don’t know what it is.

The pawpaw (Asimina triloba) grows on small mid-story trees from southern Pennsylvania to Alabama to eastern Kansas.

The fruit is sweet like mango with a creamy texture like ripe banana. Despite its sweet addictive flavor, pawpaws aren’t in widespread commercial production because the fruit is so ephemeral. Some would say it’s finicky.

• Pawpaws ripen only once a year — in September.
• They ripen only on the tree. They can’t be picked in advance.
  
• The fruit bruises so easily it has to be shipped in expensive padded packaging. 
  

In the old days, people would gather fallen pawpaws as they walked in the woods in September. This practice eventually disappeared and most people forgot about the fruit until a dedicated group of pawpaw enthusiasts and Andrew Moore’s 2015 book, Pawpaw, made it better known.

Want to taste a pawpaw?  The best place to do it is at a pawpaw festival.  Eat them raw or in ice cream, pies, popsicles, and even beer!

There are three pawpaw festivals within driving distance of Pittsburgh.

• The 20th Annual Ohio Pawpaw Festival in Albany, Ohio, September 14-16, 2018.  Three days! The biggest pawpaw bash you’ll ever see!
  
• Pawpaw Fest at Horn Farm Center in Hallam, York County, Pennsylvania, September 22-23, 2018.
• An afternoon Paw Paw Festival at Long Creek Homestead, Frederick, MD, September 22, 2018 12-5 p.m

Before you go, this 2014 video from Connecticut shows what pawpaws look like and how to eat them.

p.s. Don’t eat the seeds. They are emetic.

(photo credits: pawpaws on tree by Rebekah D. Wallace, University of Georgia, Bugwood.org. Range map and sliced fruit from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the captions to see the originals)

In late July, you may find nuts wrapped in papery green husks.

They’re American hazelnuts, Corylus americana, so closely related to the beaked hazel-nut Corylus cornuta that the two species can hybridize.  The nut wrappers tell them apart.

The husks on C. americana’s nuts are two leaf-like bracts with ragged tips. This photo by Paul Wray at forestryimages.org shows hairy leaf bracts and an unwrapped nut.

Beaked hazel-nut (C. cornuta) husks are so long and thin that they look like beaks, as seen in this photo from forestryimages.org.

The nuts I found in Schenley Park don’t have long beaks but they aren’t quite the same as the C. americana photo above.

I wonder if they’re hybrids.

(two photos by Kate St. John. photo number 5556599 by Caleb Slemmons, National Ecological Observatory Network, at Bugwood.org)