Liverwort--Hello students. You are standing at the gate of the greenhouse. The greenhouse is generally open to the public, but don't all come to visit this week. For right now, step through the gate and turn immediately to your right. You will see a terrarium full of liverwort. Liverworts are a diverse group, including ones that are leafy and ones that are thallose. The terrarium is dominated by the thallose liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. This is a complex thallose liverwort. The complex thallose liverworts a branch on the tree of life. We have a lot of them in California. They are complex in that they have a thicker thallus and air pores in the top surface to allow CO2 in and O2 out. Sometimes on these Marchantia you can see cups on the surface that are filled with little green disks. Those little green disks function as asexual propagules. Less commonly, our greenhouse Marchantia get all sexual and send up little umbrella-like structures that make eggs or sperm. And that's all that I have to say about that.

Moss--Hello students. Where to see mosses on campus? The best places in Spring semester are where there is bare ground and NO watering. Watering in the summer kills the mosses. Places without watering have mosses present that are dormant during the dry season. We also have a few other places where mosses live, some of which are better in fall semester than the bare ground. The ground along the edge of the buildings on the north sides often has some mosses. Also, you can find mosses around many of the trees where the gardeners have made recessed grassless areas. The thing is these arid-land mosses are mostly pretty small. The bare ground is not really bare. It is covered with microbes and tiny plants. You'll have to get on your knees to worship the mosses.

Fern--Hello students. You are just south of the B5 parking structure and just north of the Transit cul-de-sac. Planted in the shade here are a number of the fern Rumorha. This is a fern with a very thick waxy surface that keeps it from drying out even during Southern California's dry season. Take a look at the bottom of a bunch of leaves and probably you'll eventually find one that is or recently was fertile, making spores. Ferns make large numbers of tough spores that can live for quite some time and be blown all around. Ferns tend to have larger geographic ranges than seed plants. Southern California has some nice ferns that live in moist places or that let their leaves dry up during the summer. However, the ferns you'll see in this class are ones that are cultivated. We have a very fine fern collection in the greenhouse, so someday when you're between classes see if one of the staff will let you into the fern room. And that's all that I have to say about that.

Scouring Rush--Hello students. You are standing on the east side of the the Student Recreation Center looking at long planter filled with scouring rush. Scouring rushes are so named because they secrete silica crystals in their skin. This makes them rough to the touch, and you could scour pots with scouring rushes if you found yourself in a world without plastics. The scouring rushes make spores, sort of like ferns, but unlike most ferns the spores of scouring rushes are green and do not live for very long. The spores are made in cones at the tips of some shoots that you will probably see if you look around. There are only about 18 species of scouring rushes on earth today, all pretty small. Back in the Carboniferous, though, there were relatives that grew to the size of trees. And that's all that I have to say about that.

Cycad--Hello students. You are standing in the so-called tropical forest. This patch of land is watered by waste from the fuel cell plant. Also, the CO2 is dumped here, which presumably makes the bamboos happy. We have a number of Cycads here and in the Botanic Garden. They are tough plants with huge compound leaves. Don’t mistake palms for cycads. They also have huge compound leaves that are only a little less tough. The leaf base of a palm, though, is pretty different from the way that cycads attach to their trunks. And the reproductive structures are different. Cycads generally have pretty dense cones. Palms have rather loosely inflorescences. Cycads are an ancient group with only about 150 species left. People once thought they were wind pollinated, but in many cases it seems that beetles aid in pollination, by a mess-and-soil movement between male and female cones. Cycads have separate sexes, and generally we don’t have enough of any one species for seeds to set to much of an extent. That's all that I have to say for now on Cycads.

Gingko--Hello students. You are standing just north of University Hall. In this little lawn are planted a number of trees of Gingko biloba. Some of the trees are males, and we also have some female individual trees. People usually cut down females, so this is a treat for biologists. The female seed has an outer coat that looks like dried apricot but it smells considerably worse to humans. Presumably, the fleshy outer seed coat attracted animals that dispersed the seeds, maybe dinosaurs, but those animals are long since extinct. Gingko is the last species of a group that was abundant and widespread during the time of the dinosaurs. It is a memory of a different evolutionary time. This last species was almost extinct and had a small geographic range in China, but buddhist monks planted Ginkgo biloba in monasteries in China and Japan, and then westerners got hold of it and planted it in cities all over. It does very well in cities. It doesn’t mind the pollution. Dispersal is really its problem. Look around on the ground and up in trees for seeds. In late March and early April, look for the male structures that shed pollen. The come out just before the leaves. This is a deciduous plant; it loses its leaves in fall and regrows new ones in spring, a pretty stupid thing to do in Southern California, but of course, it evolved far away and long ago. And that's all that I have to say about that.

Conifer--Hello students. You are standing with your back to the Library lawn looking at a slope that is planted mainly with conifers. The trees that are propped up diagonally are pines. Many conifers are very important ecologically, dominating many vegetation types, especially in cold places and places with poor soils. The conifers as a whole are not very rich in species, with about 700 species. Within the conifers, however, the genus Pinus is the largest with over 100 species. Pines make resin. Resin is not the 'sap' that moves sugar from leaves to roots. It is a defensive system of pines that wards off insects and pathogens. Biologists think that such defensive systems allows groups with them to become diverse. Pine resin is what turpentine was originally made from. Pine trees are also a very important source of soft lumber and of paper products. That's all that I have to say about that.

Angiosperm--Hello students. You are standing just north of the Experimental Theater of the Performing Arts Center. Come back here to see great plays. The trees you are standing under are Coast Live Oak. We will use Coast Live Oak as our first representative of the angiosperms (or "flowering plants"). The vast majority of plants are flowering plants. Coast Live Oak is native to this area, and some of these trees were naturally growing here before CSUN existed. Coast Live Oak and a number of other California Live Oak species have super tough leaves, called sclerophyllous leaves. Many sclerophyllous leaves are toothed like these are, and are about the size of a Coast Live Oak leaf. Some of the most common woody plants in our area have sclerophyllous leaves. It is an anatomy that works really well in our climate. Those leaves are super good at holding in water. Such tough leaves are also a big investment, and they are held on the plant for more than one year. The plant never drops its leaves as a whole; in other words, it is not deciduous, unlike many oaks in the north eastern U.S. Coast Live Oak flowers in the spring, and you might notice a dusting of yellow pollen on a car parked near some coast live oaks. At that time of year, look carefully on the oaks for dangling strings of male flowers. The same individuals have female flowers that are pretty obscure. By fall the female flowers have turned into acorns. In summer and early fall look for the acorns. The squirrels will be looking too. That's all that I have to say about that.