6/26/11 A PARASITE, A LEGUME, AND IRON MINING

PARASITIC PLANT...

...CANCER ROOT

BLACK LOCUST TREE...

...FRAGRANT FLOWERS

Sunday, 7:30 AM.  58 degrees, wind NNE, calm.  The sky is mostly blue with some haze.  It warmed up nicely yesterday afternoon and it will do so again today.  Trees and shrubs have put on so much new gowth that I have a lot of pruning to do everywhere, it seems.
    An unusual and fairly uncommon flower is growing under the birch and maple trees in the front yard.  It is cancer root, Orobanche uniflora, in the Orobanchaceae, the broom rape family.  All plants in this family are parasitic, growing on the roots of other plants, and have no chloropyll, so have no green leaves or other plant parts.  I can fnd no herbal medicine or ethnobotanical references to the use of this plant, so I do not know the derivation of the common name.  If anybody does, please leave a comment.  Anyway, it is an interesting and even rather attractive plant.  It is found sporadically throughout much of the US and Canada, and in Wisconsin in the southeast, southwest and far north.
    The black locust trees, Robinia pseudoacacia, are in flower, their perfumed scent very attractive to bees.  This is quite a handsome and useful tree (its wood is very rot resistant), and is a nitrogen-fixing legume, but it suckers profusely and is therefore the bane of farmers, as it invades their fields and is thorny and difficult to eradicate.. Traveling to southern Wisconsin last week, groves of these trees were flowering profusely.
    GTEC, the Michigan mining company that has been interested in mining iron ore in the Penoke iron range in Ashland and Iron Counties appears to be getting cold feet because of the very vociferous  local opposition to taconite mining, and says it needs more specific state legislation to spell out the permitting, exploration and mining rules and regulations before it is willing to commit an initial billion plus dollars to the project.  Can’t say as I blame them, and this major economic opportunity may well now wither and die, along with a projected 29 billion dollars in state and local tax revenue and thousands of jobs over the next thirty years or more.  It seems to me we are almost morally obligated to accept the challenge of renewed iron mining in the region (mining ceased in the 1960's when it became unprofitable), with the intent of showing the rest of the world how to do it responsibly, with the very best environmental protection; for if we do not mine our own plentiful iron ore, the Chinese or Russians will simply hack it out of the earth on some other part of the globe, with absolutely no regard for the environment or local cultures, and sell it at a premium to our own industries, snickering all the while at our foolishness.  The same logic also applies to drilling for oil in the arctic or the Gulf, or to coal and natural gas extraction.