This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we find a variegated vine that twines along shadowed wood lines, Yellow Passionflower (Passiflora lutea).
Yellow Passionflower is found throughout the Southeast and all of South Carolina. It’s the more subdued and subtle sibling to the bold Purple Passionflower (P. incarnata) that blazes its brilliance in the sun baked pastures, prairies, and pineywoods around the State. Yellow Passionflower instead offers an air of restrained elegance within the verdant shadows of forests across the region. Yellow Passionflower is most often encountered on roadsides, trails, hedgerows, and river bluffs where there is ample shade from the sun rays. It’s a thin and wiry vine that anchors itself with tendrils and climbs into and over low shrubs. Yellow Passionflower grows up to a little over head height and hangs a loose, scattered collection of leaves out in the air to intercept wayward rays of sunlight. Its leaves are a soft, deep, bluish green, occasionally with blotches of silvery wash variegating its veins. Each leaf is trilobed and can vary in shape from nearly round, to pointed and stringy, like the three-toed footprint of a bird. In early summer, Yellow Passionflower begins to bloom, bearing a roughly one-inch, pastel yellow-green blossom. Although small and monochrome in color, it is a flower no less complex and wondrous than its purplish kin.
Five petals support a stage of some fifty radiating coronal filaments. At their inward convergence stands a towering ovary crowned with five hanging anthers and five dangling stigmas. Like some strange alien streetlight or radio antennae, it radiates signals into the surrounding landscape to draw in pollinators. Pollinating insects land on the elongated filaments of the flower and crawl to the base to grab a sip of nectar. Those hanging anthers dust their backs with pollen as they pass beneath and the dangling stigmas take samples from others for cross pollination. Passionflowers are most attractive to bees, but well used by myriad other pollinators. These flowers, once pollinated, will mature into a miniscule blue-black berry, to be gobbled up by birds and carried further on down the road. The foliage of Yellow Passionflower also hosts the caterpillars of several butterflies, including the Variegated Fritillary, Gulf Fritillary, and is the preferred host plant for the Zebra Longwing here in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re watching the whirlings of a dashing little dragonfly, the Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis).
The Blue Dasher is a small dragonfly found across much of the continental United States, including all of South Carolina. It’s quite the adaptable generalist and does well in wide array of wetland habitats. They are ‘perchers’ or stationary, territorial hunters. They perch most often upright on the tip of a stick, stalk of vegetation, flower, or some other pointed structure and remain motionless except for the craning of their necks to and fro to follow potential prey. When they spot a suitable snack, or an unwelcome competitor, they launch from their perch to pursue, before returning to resume the watch. Blue Dashers also readily assume the ‘obelisk posture’ where they raise their abdomen straight up into the air. Males do this as a means of saying, “This spot’s mine bud, you wanna fight about it?” to other intruding males. Both sexes will also obelisk when its hot as blue blazes out, pointing their abdomen directly at the sun to reduce their surface area and keep from overheating.
Blue Dashers measure about an inch-and-a-quarter in length with a compact frame and broad wings. Blue Dasher males and females are sexually dimorphic, and have markedly different color patterns. Males are powder-blue on their abdomen which is capped with a black tip, have aquamarine eyes and a white face, a thorax either solid blue or alternating with vertical streaks of pastel-yellow on dark brown, and have clear wings with black stigma and a varying degree of distinct smoky-brown staining across the base and tip of each wing. Females have two-tone red and green eyes like a half-ripe apple, a white face, clear wings, translucent-beige stigma, and a black and yellow body of alternating stripes, including distinct black pinstripes down the length of her abdomen leading to a black tip. Both sexes emerge from their larva with feminine colors and patterns, but males turn blue as they mature. Changing color after final molting is fairly common in insects, as their new exoskeleton has yet to harden and be flushed fully with pigments. This state is called being “teneral” and can result in some oddly colored insects for a couple hours. However, many dragonflies, such as the Blue Dasher, do a much more complex, gradual color change in their males, which can take many days to set in.
Like all dragonflies, the Blue Dasher has an aquatic larvae called a naiad, which prowls around underwater catching and consuming unsuspecting little aquatic critters. Many dragonflies’ larvae are picky about water quality and need to be in a relatively narrow window of water quality parameters to successfully make it to adulthood. But Blue Dashers? They just plumb don’t care! Apart from saltwater and extreme pollution, they can make do with most any wetland. This is why you can find Blue Dashers perched, patrolling, or pouncing on prey proximate to the perimeter of practically any pond, pool, or permanent puddle and darting and dashing down dikes, dams, and ditches. This adaptability has allowed Blue Dashers to become our most common and abundant species of dragonfly in urban and suburban locales, where human activities have radically altered, reconfigured, and impaired natural wetlands to meet the needs of civilization. Here, Blue Dashers provide an invaluable ecosystem service by scarfing down mosquitoes and other insects, both in the air and below the water, to control their populations. Blue Dashers themselves become food for Purple Martins, Barn Swallows, Flycatchers, and many other nimble insectivorous birds, and the odd Bullfrog or Bass. They’re thus not only a critical form of pest biocontrol and a major node in urban food webs, but an important pathway for nutrient cycling from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems in your own backyard.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’ll behold a beautifully blooming briar of a bean, Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar (Mimosa microphylla).
Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar is one of three species of Mimosa native to the Southeast but the only species native to South Carolina. It’s a low growing, sprawling legume found on dry sandy soils throughout the state, being most abundant on open hill tops in the Upstate and Longleaf Pine savannas here in the Lowcountry. It often forms dense, flat, circular mats of foliage radiating out three to four feet from its roots. Its thin, wiry stems and leaf veins are lined with enumerable fine hooked prickles, much like a Blackberry. And let me tell you, it’s a joy to walk through barefoot! These prickles defend the plant from grazing herbivores. The leaves of Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar are predictably little. Each leaf, as a whole, is about palm-sized but is bipinnately lobed, bearing roughly five-hundred individual leaflets, each not much bigger than a grain of rice. Beginning in May and continuing through June, Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar produces a profusion of eye-catching blooms along its trailing stems. We’re talking one-inch hot-pink spherical pom-poms orbited by golden pinpricks of pollen-packed anthers. These flowers not only pull in unsuspecting naturalists but have an almost magnetic draw on native bees, who clamor all over these fluffy flowers, sweeping up as much pollen as they can muster. These flowers mature into a string bean looking seedpod thoroughly cloaked in a shield of fine prickles.
Now, let’s take a moment to think on this plant’s names and what they mean, starting with the genus Mimosa. Apart from being a legume and sharing a similar leaf and flower shape, Mimosa species are only distantly related to the invasive Mimosa-Tree (Albizia julibrissin), which bears a similar common name. Mimosa is a name often applied commonly to members of the Mimosoid clade of legumes, which all have similar spherical flowers. (And, if you’re wondering, the mimosa cocktail is named after a different Mimosoid plant from Australia, which has bright yellow pom-pom flowers.) However, this unique but shared name belies another similarity. The term “Mimosa” boils down to meaning “to mime” or “mimic”. The leaves of Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar, as well as numerous other Mimosoids and other legumes with a similar finely divided leaves, can move! They are able to fold up their leaves when touched, ‘mimicking’ animal movement, at least as far as early botanists were concerned. They do this through the manipulation of osmotic pressure in specialized cells at the base of each leaflet. Running your finger down the midrib of a Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar leaf is all it takes for them to clam up.
Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar and its relatives fold their leaves for two reasons, to make it more difficult for things to eat their tiny leaves and to save water. When folded, the leaflets point upward. This improves its odds against all kinds of herbivores, even if just slightly. For big grazers like deer, this makes the plant look small and wilted, and assumedly less appetizing. For small browsers like mice, it points the leaflets away from their reaching paws and nibbling mouths, making it harder for them to avoid the numerous prickles along the bottom of each leaf stem. And for insects crawling on the leaf itself, pointing the leaflets upward forces them up into the blistering sun and the line of sight of any patrolling wasps and birds. Their leaves also fold up in the rain and strong wind, which helps protect the fragile leaflets from being battered against their surroundings. Apart from folding when touched, Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar also folds its leaves up based on environmental cues at night or during extreme heat, to help conserve water. A folded leaf has less surface area and thus transpires less water at night while idle. Similarly, a folded leaf points towards the sun and thus captures less sunlight when it is too hot or too droughty for the plant to keep up with the water demands of peak transpiration. In fact, the finely divided leaves and low growth form of Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar are both adaptations for heat, just different sorts. Finely divided leaves maximize the ratio of their perimeter to their surface area. This promotes air circulation around and through the leaf, helping it to avoid overheating under intense sunlight while it cranks out as much sugar as it can. The sprawling growth form of this plant is an adaptation to a different heat, fire specifically. Littleleaf Sensitive-Briar needs regular fire to keep the land open enough for it to persist. By staying short and low, it gets readily burnt up by fire. Yet, since it loses little resources in the fire, it can rapidly regenerate from its roots back to what it once was and continue on as normal.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, from beneath our feet and behind the fruits of spring appears an iridescent messenger of summer, the Green June Beetle (Cotinus nitida).
The Green June Beetle is a hard insect to miss, whether it’s buzzing past your head, shimmering from a fruit tree, or even a squirming grub beside your feet. Adult beetles are three-quarters of an inch long with broad shoulders sloping down to a small head and a squared-off rear. Their back is a matte yet metallic green with a fringe of coppery orange. Below is the same two shades, but shining to a high-gloss finish. In flight, this beetle makes a loud buzzing sound as it passes by or patrols a territory above a lawn. The Green June Beetle’s larval stage looks much like any other scarab beetle grub, a bone-white colored cylindrical body shaped like a corrugated drain pipe, with a gray rump and little orange legs up by its little orange head. Their grub is on the larger size, exceeding an inch in length. It also has a curious habit of crawling on the soil’s surface, even up onto pavement, on its back! Rather than dragging itself along its belly with its tiny feet, it instead goes belly up and undulates its body to skooch along the ground.
The Green June Beetle is native throughout the Eastern US, to include all of South Carolina. They are more abundant in the upstate than here in the Lowcountry. The Green June Beetle needs two things to make a home: rich earth in grassy areas and an abundance of fruit trees or other sumptuous vegetation. As a larva, the Green June Beetle grub tunnels beneath the ground feeding on decaying plant matter and other insect larvae it encounters, such as Cranefly and May Beetle larvae. Moist lawns with a thick carpet of turfgrass, compost piles, and dense fallow fields make good cradles for this beetle. They pupate beneath the ground and adult beetles emerge in late June into July, and fly throughout the summer.
Green June Beetles are a member of the Scarab Beetle family, Scarabaeidae, and further are in the Flower Chafer Beetle subfamily, Cetoniinae. Although not all taxonomic synapomorphies, Scarabs are most easily recognized by their broad and deep bodies, hard exoskeletons, and “leafed” antennae. Flower Chafer beetles also tend to be compact and rectangular in shape. Most Flower Chafers feed on plant sap, flower nectar, or ripe fruit. The Green June Beetle is no exception and, when not buzzing about, they will usually be found slurping sap from a tree trunk or buried neck deep in an over-ripe apple or fig. Although not a major threat to the health of fruit trees, Green June Beetles can be a pest on orchards where they can swarm, and subsequently heavily scar, fruits as they siphon off their vigor. Similarly, as a grub, they can cause minor damage to turfgrass and ornamental flowers. Yet, they more often provide benefits through soil aeration, nutrient cycling, and control of other soil insect larvae.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday is the Earth’s veil ennewed on each morning dew, the Southern Dawnflower (Stylisma humistrata).
Here in South Carolina we have four species of Dawnflower and, in the Lowcountry, two are abundant: Southern Dawnflower (S. humistrata) and Coastalplain Dawnflower (S. patens). These two local species are very similar in appearance and preferred habitats. However, Southern Dawnflower is what you’ll find on and around Edisto Island and thus our subject du jour. Coastalplain Dawnflower is more abundant in the Sandhills and up the coast from Charleston, and is distinctly more hairy on its sepals beneath the flower and has thinner leaves on average, if you care to hunt for it afield.
Southern Dawnflower is a low-growing vine found on dry, sandy soils throughout the Southeast. It is best adapted for sand barrens, dry roadsides, and Longleaf Pine Savannas where the sun is strong and hot and where frequent fire or other disturbance keeps soils open and light competition low. Southern Dawnflower’s specific epithet of “humistrata” deftly translates to “layered upon the earth”. This plant creeps as a groundcover across the open soil, intervening and overlapping the grasses and forbs sparsely eking out a living around it. Its vines are thin, wiry, and straight and may extend for several feet in multiple directions. Its leaves are alternate, oval-shaped, lightly crinkled with indented veins, and colored a gentle pastel green. Dawnflowers are easily overlooked, almost a hidden member of our local flora.
Yet come June through July, Southern Dawnflower bursts into view like the crack of dawn. White funnels of flowers fling open each sunrise in sheets across the scene. Each bloom blinding in its purity, reflecting and refracting the sharp morning rays hand in hand with the thick wash of dew drops settled upon and smothering the Sea Islands. Dawnflowers are members of the Morning-Glory family, Convolvulaceae, and share many of their common traits. Like other Morning-Glories, Dawnflower’s flowers have fused petals forming a unified cone. These flowers are pure, solid white and about three-quarters of an inch in breadth and depth. These flowers are magnetic for pollinators and a wonderful source of pollen and nectar for native bees, wasps, and butterflies during the dawning dog days of summer. Southern Dawnflower makes an excellent alternative groundcover for sunny lawns on barren sandy soils. When and where it’s too tough for turf to tolerate, Dawnflower perseveres and greets the day at the end of May bright eyed and bushy tailed.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we stand before the monochrome majesty of the meadow hawk, the Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).
The Eastern Kingbird can be found throughout the Eastern United States from spring through summer and into fall. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, they reappear in April and depart on their winter migration come October. Eastern Kingbirds are simply colored, yet distinctly marked. Slate-black back and snow-white belly, a black cowl across the head and a white beard beneath, and a black tail with a white trailing edge. Their plumage is just two colors but is worn well, like a tailored tuxedo, to make them stand out with contrast among our eastern songbirds. Our Kingbird is a member of the Tyrant Flycatchers of family Tyrannidae. In fact, the Eastern Kingbird is the type species that sets the mold for their whole family. Our Flycatchers here in the Southeast share many similar traits: an upright posture, a slightly hooked bill, a large mouth, good eyesight, and agile wings. They use these common features to hawk, grabbing prey from the air.
Eastern Kingbirds love large open habitats including prairies, pastures, farm fields, meadows, marsh edges, clearcuts, open savannas, barrens, and beaches. Here they will post up on a post, hang on a wire, or cling to a limb to survey their kingdom. They’ll dart into their domain to snatch insects out of the air all throughout the day, only deviating to dash at intruders and trespassers. Not only do Eastern Kingbirds fiercely defend their territory from other Kingbirds, they also have a penchant for harassing Hawks who hover over their home. Crows, Owls, and Eagles oft aren’t spared from their wrath and will likewise get an earful if they loiter too long. Eastern Kingbirds, like other Flycatchers, have fairly simple vocalizations. Their call is a short, sharp, high-pitched, metallic buzzing, “T’Zee” and their song is a frantic jumble of high-pitched, crisp metallic notes, often bouncing up and down, ending with a buzzing scream.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the venerable Bog Cheeto: Orange Milkwort (Senega lutea) [Syn. Polygala lutea].
All told, we have about 15 species of Milkwort in the Lowcountry, some of them quite rare. Orange Milkwort, however, is one of those inescapable, hard to miss, can’t mistake it wildflowers found throughout the coastal plain of South Carolina. It is a regular sight in bogs, Carolina Bays, pocosins, roadside ditches, pine flatwoods, and the like and grows in most all of our saturated, sandy, acidic soils throughout the coastal plain of the Southeast. The foliage of Orange Milkwort is an almost sickly lime-green, simple, opposite, with entire margins, and possessing a distinct succulent quality. When broken, the leaves exude a toxic, milk-white sap used to repel herbivores. That sap gives it the common name of “Milkwort”. The leaves of Orange Milkwort are hard to spot early in the year, existing as a small ground-level rosette just a few inches across. All told, the plant will barely crest a foot high in bloom.
Orange Milkwort blooms from late April into September. Its bloom is neon-orange in color and composed of many small, densely packed flowers that overlap with each other like scales. These compound flower clusters first emerge in a near spherical arrangement but elongate with time into a bottlebrush-shaped cylinder, eventually growing to resemble a stubby “Cheeto puff” in size, shape, color, and texture. There’s just nothing like it! Orange Milkwort isn’t a stellar pollinator plant. It’s often self-pollinated and most frequently visited by small bees. Orange Milkwort, along with many other Milkworts, have ant dispersed seeds. Their seeds each possess a structure called an elaiosome. This is a fat and protein packed nugget used to bribe ants into carrying the seeds back to their nest. Once the ants pick the seed clean of tasty bits, they’ll discard it just outside their nest in the colony’s waste bin. Here an Orange Milkwort seed can germinate in a nutrient rich pocket of ant refuse, giving it a better head start. Even that small edge is a distinct advantage in wet, sandy, acidic soils where soil nutrients are usually greatly limited by weathered dirt and adverse soil chemistry.
This week for Floral and Fauna Friday it’s the doubloon of the dunes, the Isometric Sand Dollar (Mellita isometra).
Combing the beach, roaming the shore, surveying land’s end for castaways galore. There’s something universally satisfying in beachcombing for the human psyche. The curiosity, the hunt, the discovery of something strange and something new, a captivating sight just for you. For me, my favored find has long been those tokens cached in by the currents, the Sand Dollars.
Sand Dollars belong to the order Echinolampadacea. All are echinoderms within the same phylum as starfish and sea urchins. Like other echinoderms, Sand Dollars have a single digestive orifice located at the center of their underside, an internal shell-like skeleton called a test, and they move around the sea floor slowly and methodically using hydraulicly actuated tube-feet. Their round, flat body resembles an oversized coin in shape, hence the Sand Dollar name.
In the center of a Sand Dollar’s back is a flower pattern with five petals called the petalloid. This structure is a string of pores permitting the passage of specialized tube feet that act as the Sand Dollar’s gills. At the center of their upper surface, between the petals, is a small, delicate five-pointed star called the madreporite, which functions like a pressure valve to help equalize the hydraulic pressures of their circulatory system. Some Sand Dollar species have rounded slots, called lunules, punched through their bodies. The largest lunule is called the anal lunule and is located towards the rear of the body. The others are smaller ambulacral lunules. The purpose of Sand Dollar lunules isn’t fully understood, but it is believed that the larger lunule helps establish one-way flow to expel waste and water while the Sand Dollar is buried. The smaller lunules help the Sand Dollar transport and funnel food from the top of its body down to its central mouth down below. Underneath, you’ll find another flower-like pattern of radial grooves extending from the mouth to the edges of the body. These are ambulacral grooves, or food groves, which hold specialized tube feet and cilia for conveying food to the central mouth.
Here along the shores of South Carolina we have one principal species of Sand Dollar, the Isometric Sand Dollar (Mellita isometra). You may know it instead as the Keyhole Sand Dollar (M. quinquiesperforata), but recent genetic work determined what once was one species is really three, with the latter having residence in the tropical Caribbean, a third species (M. tenuis) occupying the Gulf Coast, and the Isometric Sand Dollar depositing here on the Carolinas’ coasts. These three species all look very much the same. So just know that my description for the Isometric Sand Dollar applies to the other two as well. Isometric Sand Dollars are circular in shape, about three to four inches across, are flat as a pancake but with a slight dome, and have five rounded rectangular lunules, with the anal lunule being larger. Live Isometric Sand Dollars are greenish-brown and covered in fine “hairs”. When Sand Dollars die and decompose, their calcareous internal test is left behind. This smooth, bone-white skeleton is what one most often finds while combing the beach. If you happen to find a live Sand Dollar, do appreciate the wondrous beauty of this archaic invertebrate life form. Then promptly return it to Davey Jones’ locker. It’s illegal to collect or harm living Sand Dollars in South Carolina.
Isometric Sand Dollars live their lives in the shallow waters along the beachfront of the East Coast. They bury themselves just beneath the sand below any tumultuous tides above. Here in the ever-churning sand, they methodically riffle through each grain in search of morsels to make their meals. Feeding below the sand not only anchors them against rogue currents and hides them from patrolling predators, but also allows them to scavenge for food using both sides of their body.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, it’s a pair of woodland vines on which Monarchs dine, the Milkvines (Matelea spp.).
Here in the Lowcountry we have two species of Milkvine: Carolina Milkvine (Matelea carolinensis) and Yellow Milkvine (Matelea flavidula). Both of our Milkvines are rather uncommon sights and they are both denizens of the understories of hardwood forests. Carolina Milkvine is most common along swamps and freshwater rivers, just above the floodplain. It’s a species that is more abundant in the piedmont of South Carolina and much of the Southeast. Yellow Milkvine is a rarer plant overall, being found from just a smattering of locales in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and north Florida. It’s well adapted to the sandy, rich soils of the Lowcountry and our Sea Islands and is found most often along wetland margins underneath hardwood forests, where those habitats punctuate the sand ridges and limestone outcrops of the Lowcountry landscape. The Lowcountry of South Carolina is the stronghold of Yellow Milkvine’s global range.
Both of our Milkvines are perennial, herbaceous, twining vines and, when not in flower, look very similar to each other. Both have large, rounded, dark-green, opposite, palm-sized leaves with a smooth margin, cleft base, and either a round or slightly-pointed tip. Their vine grows atop vegetation most often to waist height, is thin and pliable, and often covered, along with their leaves, in a light fuzz. When damaged, Milkvines ooze a white latex sap full of toxic compounds to help ward off insects and other would-be herbivores. The flowers of our two Milkvines are similar in shape but differ markedly in color. Both have a five-petalled star-like flower with uniformly colored, rounded and lightly wrinkled petals that merge towards their base around a raised cylindrical center. In Carolina Milkvine, this flower is most-often a dark-maroon with a black-purple center ringed in a variable but paler color. In Yellow Milkvine, the flower is a pale yellow-green with green net-like veins across the petals and a golden center. Both of our Milkvines bloom in late-April and May. After their flowers bloom, if pollinated, they mature into an elongated, inverted teardrop-shaped seedpod covered in short spiny bumps. As the seedpod dries, it splits open to reveal many rows of fluff tethered seeds to be swept away to lands unknown by any passing breeze.
Milkvines are most easily confused with a third, far more abundant and closely related vine, Anglepod (Gonolobus suberosus). Anglepod leaves and vines look extremely similar to Milkvines, with only subtle differences, which takes an experienced eye to differentiate. Anglepod leaves tend to be darker green, slightly shiny, a little wrinkled, and with a deeper cleft on their base, but there is much overlap between the two clades. Anglepod also prefers to grow in the understory of hardwood forests, just like Milkvines, but is more attuned to life in wetlands, floodplains, and the occasional shaded roadside. Anglepod is found throughout all of South Carolina. Yet thankfully, Anglepod is readily differentiated by its flowers and seedpods. Anglepod flowers are very similar in structure to Milkvines but have pointed petals, no net-like veins, and are usually maroon at their center and pale-green towards their tip. The seedpods of Anglepod are angled, hence the common name, having a mostly smooth, inverted teardrop-shaped seedpod with five pronounced longitudinal ridges.
Both Milkvines and Anglepod are relatives of Milkweeds (Asclepias spp.) and all three can serve as a host plant for the caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Although not seemingly a preferred host here in the Lowcountry, Milkvine and Anglepod plants scattered throughout our hardwood forests can help bolster and buffer our local non-migratory Monarch population from year to year against environmental anomalies.
On May 8th, 2026 the Edisto Island Open Land Trust’s Environmental Committee made a presentation on the benefits, limitations, and practical pointers for residential solar implementation on Edisto Island and other Sea Island and Lowcountry locales. EIOLT hosted a similar presentation the spring prior on March 6th, 2025.
Both presentations had a full house! Due to limited seating, not everyone could attend who wanted to. So by popular demand, we’ve made the slides for the 2026 presentation available here. Although now somewhat outdated, the slides and recording of the 2025 presentation are also available.
