John Nelson| For Bluffton Today/Jasper County Sun Times

Winter is still a long way off, but the leaves have been falling for several weeks now. Wont be long before sweaters and jackets will be part of the morning routine, along with a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Butter and brown sugar, please.

Autumn and the resultant winter seasons offer plenty of lessons from the world of botany. In general, plants respond to quite a number of environmental signalsthroughout the year.

During autumn, its the accumulated change of day length that has many effects of plants. And of course, it's cooling down, which is important in this way, too. Most plants have already begun a sort of slide into a quiescent period;not exactly hibernation, but similar. There are various ways of seeing these effects exhibited by the plants around us.

For example, many woody species (trees and shrubs) are deciduous everybody knows this and they lose all their leaves regularly. Evergreen species such as our Southern magnolia and American holly, of course, do not fall into this plan.

Botanists like to tell us that late in the growing season, the physiology of the leaves of deciduous species is much changed. Their leaves are, in a sense, dispensable, and dont need to be around any longer than one growing season.

Its sort of sad to see the leaves fizzle out in a colorful last fling and go away, but after they fall, there is something else for botanists to enjoy: twigs. By the way, even evergreentrees eventually lose their leaves, a process lasting two or more seasons.

This weeks mystery plant is a native species, easily familiar to Southerners, as it can be found commonly from Virginia to Oklahoma, then down to northern Florida. It grows in a variety of habitats, including floodplains and low woods, but is perhaps more well-known on high-ground sites, in forests, rocky places, roadsides and even in fields.

This is usually a small tree, but it is potentially quite large (the national champion is more than 100 feettall). They make good street trees, too.

The leaves are rather football-shaped, up to about 2 incheslong or so, with finely serrated margins. Small flowers, not much to look at, appear early in the spring. There will be female and male flowers on the same tree. Ripe fruits are flat and wafer-like, easily able to flutter around in the breeze, enabling dispersal.

The remarkable twigs, during the growing season, produce conspicuous flat bands or wingsof corky, bark-like material. The wings are not always produced to the same degree on every twig of a given tree, so there is much variability in the expression of these wings. The most extreme exhibitions of the wings are on young trees, or on sprouts from stumps.

Why would a plant go to the trouble of making such wings? We don't know. These wings have no known functional value for the plant, so there's an additional mystery. Questions beginning with the word "why" are often unanswerable, especially in the world of nature.

John Nelson is retired curator of the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. As a public service, the herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, go to http://www.herbarium.org or email johnbnelson@sc.rr.com.

Answer: Winged elm,Ulmus alata

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Do you recognize this mystery plant? - Bluffton Today