I’ve been gardening with Florida native plants for nearly fifteen years now, and every time I get out there and get my hands (or, in my advancing wisdom, my gloves) dirty, it seems I have more mysteries to solve. It’s early January right now, and today was a lovely 70-degree day after a brutal Saturday in the high 80s, so I was able to get out and see what’s what. Since it was so nice out, I decided to do a bit of weeding in the little corner of the house with my black ironwood and coonties (Zamia pumila; click here to see a post from way back in 2013 when I installed my “coontie courtyard”).
I planted these distinctive cycads because they are the host plant for the lovely Atala hairstreak butterfly (Eumaeus atala). And indeed, it worked. Within a few short months, these once-rare critters had become common, if irregular, visitors to the yard. Here’s one nectaring on the wonderfully named Cordia globosa:
Those things sure brighten up a garden, don’t they? Even a garden that could use a little weeding, which brings me back to today’s mystery. As I was giving coontie corner its long-overdue weeding and cleaning, I noticed a bunch of little brown pods beneath some of them. You might be able to see a few of them in this photo (ignore the few low-hanging leaves from the ironwood photobombing at top):
It’s not terribly clear from the image above, but down below the plant, along with a rather large buildup of dropped leaflets, you can see abundant evidence of today’s mystery: what on earth are all these gall-like husks beneath the coonties? And are they galls, or seeds?
They look a lot like galls, if I’m honest. even on close inspection:
But I’ve never heard of coontie galls (which doesn’t mean they don’t exist). The most parsimonious explanation for finding these objects under the coontie plants is that they’re coontie seeds. The problem with that explanation is that they don’t look like coontie seeds, which are bright reddish orange (aposematic coloring warning “don’t eat me”):
On these brown balloons, there’s no red anywhere to be seen. So I was finding it very hard to convince myself that they could be seeds.
However, as sometimes happens, nature put paid to this mystery fairly quickly–as I was attempting to clean up these loose “galls,” I found several of them to be rather stubbornly rooted, unwilling to be gathered up:
So yes, indeed, these coontie galls are in fact coontie seeds. Given a bit more time, I bet they’d look something like this:
Who knew?
PS: While I was weeding, I heard a couple of mockingbirds chikking up a storm. I assumed it was some kind of territorial dispute, but then they practically buzzed my head as they flew into the ironwood tree under which I was working. Turns out they were using me to intimidate the Cooper’s Hawk that was pursuing them into leaving them alone for a minute!