I was walking around the property yesterday and found this mayapple with a flower forming on a single leaf stem
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Thanks, that is really interesting! I have read that with the new techniques for DNA analysis whole suites of species can sometimes be identified from a sample taken in any given environment. This has been used to look at the bottom sediments in water bodies to see what species were historically present. It’s not likely that anyone could afford to do this randomly, but someday we could possibly map out the history of species going through that period of time.
The P.hexandrum , the fruit is red and held up on a taller plant than our native species. I should have tried one way back when I was growing it, but that was before the internet and access to folks like the ones here,
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This is great information. The woods that I grew up in as a kid had a large area of mayapples.
The wife and I are just planning out the landscape design for our sideyard, we live in town and would like to make it rustic and natural looking with ditch-dug native flowers and bushes. Pretty sure a few mayapples planted in there would look real nice too.
Perhaps I’m just not up to date on the latest technology, but it sounds like you’re conflating two different techniques. Researchers can check something like a a few drops of water from a pond for “environmental DNA” (as is done for Chytrid), & they can also look at pond sediments under a microscope to identify ancient pollen. The latter has confirmed that a species resembling “Florida Torreya” was present in the mountains of North Carolina, but (I’m told) adequate natural bodies of water are hard to come by in much of the U.S. north of there.
Sorry to derail the thread, y’all 
Slightly more on topic, the genus Torreya is similar to Podophylum in that they both have American/Asian counterparts. In China they eat the nuts, but I haven’t had the nerve to try eating those of it’s endangered cousin.
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The fossil record allows for a decent picture of what used to grow where. I don’t know about Franklinia, but Torreya, for example, has a recent fossil record in Ga and NC.
As for why some things got stranded, there’s a few different explanations.
One is the extinction of seed dispersing animals. It’s generally accepted, for example, that kentucky coffeetree, osage orange, and avocado, which were all very rare in the wild before they entered cultivation, all formerly were spread by mega fauna. The extinction of those mega fauna right at the end of the last ice age meant that any plants which depended on them were more or less doomed to extinction. It’s possible Torreya and Franklinia were spread by some now-extinct animals.
Another is just that everything in evolution and population distributions is a game of numbers. Picea critchfieldii was common in the South, but it went extinct in the most recent warming period a mere 15 thousand years ago. It’s entirely possible that the population just didn’t quite manage to shift northwards fast enough and didn’t manage to hold onto any higher elevation locations and so went extinct. It shouldn’t be surprising that species fail to migrate when climatic conditions change rapidly. After all, many, many species went extinct during the glaciation. Same problem, just in reverse, they failed to migrate southward fast enough and got wiped out. That’s exactly what happened to Canada’s native Dawn Redwoods. Fortunately for that species, a small population did manage to migrate south on the Asian side of the Bering Straights even if the North American population was wiped out.
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so maypops aren’t a vine like other passionfruit?
Mayapples and maypops are totally different
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Maypop is the native passion fruit. Mayapple is a completely unrelated plant in a different family.
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ok. thanks for clarifying folks.
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Yes, this is increasingly diverging from fruit ( But, DNA testing seems to be finding new applications all the time.)
What we might be considering is the fact that the warming which ended the ice age is continuing and accelerating, so the question of species being lost in the process is quite relevant. For instance, Coffea arabica is rapidly losing the cooler conditions it needs in higher elevations in the tropics, and Mangos are having similar problems even though they need a tropical environment.
As far as the ability of plants to move, I think an overlooked factor for some is the simultaneous loss of pollinators, not just dispersal opportunities. If no viable seeds are made dispersal is beside the point.
And, to use another way explaining it , Mayapple is Podiphyllum, and Maypop is Passiflora.
Mayday is a cry for help, Maypole is something you dance around. 
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Mayhap we’re a bit fruity, but it’s dawned on me why April is the cruelest month with no aprilpops and aprilapples even though we’ve juneberries aplenty. April disdains fruit.
March showers bring April flowers but we’re still hungry, dear May come quickly!
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i just ordered 10 rhizomes of maypop from Etsy for $15. going to plant them in my shade garden with my fiddlehead ferns, golden seal and ramps. they will get mostly dappled shade under my big Norway and black spruces.
Do you mean mayapples?
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I think he may
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yes. i got maypop growing also and keep confusing the 2.
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