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	Podcast:		Local Features by WXPR
	Episode:		Botanizing by Bike
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:04:44
	Publish Date:		2021-03-16 10:08:01
	Description:		As we move from winter toward spring, (a little sooner than I would have liked) I am getting excited to start biking around the Northwoods. I spend quite a bit of time road biking, which is not always compatible with one of my other favorite pastimes, looking for flowering plants. By early summer, my bike group and I will be logging 50 or more miles at a time, and there is plenty of Northwoods plant life to appreciate from a bike. We mostly ride on county and town roads out of town, so we aren’t likely to see the showy Forsythia, lilac or crab apples favored by homeowners. But there is still plenty to see and enjoy. The first shrub to catch my eye is leatherwood, or Dirca palustris . This short, branchy shrub has a distinctive shape as well as yellow-brown bark that makes it easy to identify. It only grows in rich woods and is not very common but is one of the first plants to flower in the Northwoods. It has clusters of two or three small lemon-yellow flowers, and though they are not
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