Mountain Times - Vol. 49, No. 53 - Dec. 30, 2020 - Jan 2, 2021

Columns
36 • The Mountain Times • Dec. 30, 2020 - Jan. 5, 2021
Hair ice and frost flowers,
ephemeral frozen forms abound
If you are out walking on an early winter morning, you
might be lucky enough to see some of nature’s most beautiful
and ephemeral sights: hair ice and frost flowers, both
snow-white and delicate against
the dull forest floor.
Recently, a friend sent me
a photo of hair ice, seemingly
sprouting from a rotten log in
the woods. She guessed she was
seeing tufts of deer or rabbit fur
The Outside
Story
By Laurie D.
Morrissey
curled around a branch – until she
touched one and it melted. Hair ice
forms on dead wood, aided by the
presence of the Exidiopsis effusa
fungus. Scientists believe that as
the fungus breaks down the wood
of a broad-leafed tree species, it
produces complex molecules that mix with the water in the
stem. Moisture near the surface of the dead branch or log is
extruded from the pores of the wood and freezes into thin
hairs of ice, which build up overnight into what looks like a
tuft of wool or a white, shiny beard.
Frost flowers are similar, but occur on the stems of certain
plants. They may resemble white ribbon candy, flowing
curtains, swanlike sculptures, serpentine swirls, silky spirals,
or glossy fans. Despite the name, they’re neither flowers,
nor frost. While true frost occurs when moisture in the
air condenses on a cold surface, these fanciful shapes result
when sap, augmented by water drawn up from the roots,
slowly pushes through the stem of an herbaceous plant and
freezes on contact with the cold. They form most often near
the base of the stem, but may extend further up.
Frost flowers occur so infrequently that many woods
walkers never see them. Their rarity is largely due to the
limited circumstances that create them. The ground must
be warm enough for the plant’s root system to be active
and the air must be cold enough to freeze the water flowing
up its conductive tissues. However, it’s not uncommon for
them to form in the same area night after night, to the delight
of those early morning perambulators lucky enough to
spot them.
New Hampshire’s state botanist, William Nichols, knows
of only a few northeastern United States plant species that
form frost flowers: the native Canada frostweed, which
occasionally occurs in central and southern New England
in dry, open fields and woodlands; the non-native wingstem
crownbeard, which has naturalized in Massachusetts;
and the rare sweet-scented camphorweed. Of these, only
Canada frostweed creeps into central and northern New
England, he said. Frost flowers also have been observed on
certain garden plants, such as vinca and salvia.
Frost flowers have appeared in the botanic literature
since at least the early 19th century and, surprisingly, are
not strictly northern phenomena; they occur as far south
as Georgia. They are the subject of much scholarly research
and even have a scientific name. The late Robert Harms of
the University of Texas, Austin (a linguist, not a botanist),
coined the term “crystallofolia” in the 1960s because he
Looking
Back
By Mary Ellen Shaw
believed the forms resembled leaves (Latin folia).
James Carter, an Illinois State University geologist,
became fascinated by frost flowers when he spotted them
while hiking in Tennessee in 2003. He described four
products of ice segregation in nature: ice flowers on plant
stems, hair ice on dead wood, needle ice in soil, and pebble
ice on small rocks on the ground surface. He refers to ice
that extrudes from linear cracks on plant stems as ice flowers
and ice ribbons rather than frost flowers, but notes that
there is no widely accepted term. (I’ve come across such
labels as ice fringes, frost freaks, and rabbit ice to describe
frost flowers.)
Carter writes that he knows of about 40 species worldwide
that support the growth of ice flowers. He is, perhaps,
the world’s only ice flower farmer; the professor has planted
white crownbeard and salvia in buckets and flower beds in
his yard and photographed the formations that appeared.
Now that we’re well into winter, the opportunity to see
frost flowers or hair ice is most likely past for the time being.
I may have to wait until next November to spot these fleeting,
frozen forms, but I plan to be on the lookout.
Laurie D. Morrissey is a writer who lives in Hopkinton,
New Hampshire. Illustration by Adelaide Tyrol. The Outside
Story is assigned and edited by Northern Woodlands magazine
and sponsored by the Wellborn Ecology Fund of the New
Hampshire Charitable Foundation: nhcf.org.
Dating is often a time when you try to be good at something…even
when you are not!
With ski season just beginning I am reminded of my diehard attempts to
strap on skis and get from the top to the bottom of Pico. It’s not that I had never
skied before, it’s just that I was never any good at it!
I had skied with my female friends since the 50s and will admit that the
rope tow at the Rutland Country Club was about my speed. A lot of us learned
to ski there and our only goal was getting from the top to the bottom in an
upright position. We were especially glad when we stopped at the foot of the
By Gary Salmon
French and Indian War blockhouse recreation in New York.
transparency
This headline is not related
to politics. The term is the goal
of people who make windows
for homes and businesses and
the clearer the better for those
of us looking through a pane of
glass. Early glass windows were
limited in size and had “waves”
Tree Talk
By Gary Salmon
Seeking
in them due to the primitive glass
making process. As time progressed
so did clarity and in more
recent years the focus has been
on a window’s thermal qualities
as related to overall house heat savings. Now I may be
condensing time here since glass has been around as
a popular item since the bronze age but glass has been
a part of our lives for centuries as that item that allows
light into the insides of our houses and workplaces.
Glass has always been created using silica (sand),
soda ash, and limestone as the basic ingredients combined
with some high heat to transform these materials
into something to see through. This float glass
process makes sheets of glass. But make way for a new
“glass on the block” with wood as the basic property,
according to researcher Junyong Zhu from the Forests
Products Lab November 2020 issue of “The Forestry
Souce.” Zhu in collaboration with fellow researchers
at both the Universities of Maryland and Colorado
have “developed a transparent wood material” that
could “outperform glass.”
According to The Forestry Source “The researchers
created transparent wood by treating balsa wood in
an oxidizing bath that bleaches it of nearly all visibility.
A synthetic polymer called polyvinyl alcohol is then
Attempts at becoming a skier!
Tree talk > 38
hill because if you didn’t you would end up in East Creek!
Then in 1974 along came Peter, my future husband. Skiing was one of his
passions so I knew my life was about to get interesting. When he picked me
up for our first date I noticed that his license plate said “QASI.” I immediately
thought of the Latin word, “quasi,” meaning “what if.” I had been a Latin
major in college so that’s where my mind went! But where was the “u?” I asked
about the plate and found out that those letters stood for “Qualified Amateur
Ski Instructor.” It’s a program that certifies a skier to teach on an amateur level.
Looking back > 39